dance, theater and music by Mary Ellen Hunt.
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Labels: DV8, features, KALW, modern, performance_art, San_Francisco_Performances
Labels: features, SFChronicle, theater
Labels: features, museums, SFChronicle
Labels: dance_festival, features, SFChronicle
Labels: features, SFChronicle
The swans head for the studio's double doors, and soloist Anthony Spaulding, who's playing von Rothbart, helpfully warns, "They're coming out this way. I wouldn't want you to get trampled!"
Dancer after dancer streams out into the hallway, with de Avila - the associate director of the Ballet School - hot on the heels of the last one.
"Better!" she says warmly. "I'm still screaming, but that was much better."
Breathing hard, the dancers head back into the studio, where the artistic team is already in action, dispensing corrections. Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson is giving Spaulding notes on how to make his brooding Rothbart more owlish, ballet master Betsy Erickson is working with the little cygnets, and Bruce Sansom - a newly appointed assistant to the artistic director - is coaching more loft into Zahorian's jumps.
Labels: ballet, features, San_Francisco_Ballet, SFChronicle
Founded in February 1989, the then San Francisco Dance Center - which moved into the upper floors of the Odd Fellows Grand Lodge in 2002 - quickly became one of the busiest locations for dancers and choreographers on the West Coast.
A walk down the slightly grim, fluorescent-lit corridor takes you past an extended frieze of dancers stretching as the echoes of piano accompaniment drift through the halls. But step into any studio and you're suddenly drenched in natural light that pours into abundantly airy spaces from the high, arched windows.
Read more at the SF Chronicle site.Labels: Alonzo_King, ballet, features, modern, SFChronicle
Labels: features, SFChronicle, tango, world_dance
There's something about Kathileen Gallagher that immediately makes even a new acquaintance feel like an old friend.Labels: dance_education, features, profiles, SFChronicle
Afternoon sunlight pours through the windows of ODC's Shotwell studios as Ian Enriquez's clogging class thunders away in the first-floor studio.
Sweating and intently focused, the dozen or so dancers track his moves and repeat them. Any misstep will be plainly heard, but the class - which is peppered with students from all age groups - pounds gamely away at the wooden floor to the not-exactly bluegrass strains of 'Let's Hear It for the Boy.'
Labels: features, SFChronicle
Although Alvin Ailey died in 1989, people who work at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater tend to speak about the company's founder in the present tense: 'The most important thing to Mr. Ailey is that we be grounded human beings'; 'Alvin has always been a man of big dreams.'
That he remains a living presence to the people of the Alvin Ailey company is not only striking, but it also seems to be the singular reason for the extraordinary growth and longevity of the organization that he founded, which celebrates its 50th anniversary with three Cal Performances programs this week at UC Berkeley.
Labels: Ailey, ballet, Ballet_San_Jose, features, Lines_Ballet, modern, SFChronicle
A decade ago, the word 'foxtrot' might have brought to mind only a newspaper cartoon, and 'tango' conjured up an image of stalking about like Groucho Marx with a rose in his teeth. But when Australian choreographer Jason Gilkison first worked on 'Burn the Floor,' he hoped to evolve the foxtrot and the tango for the 21st century, while getting back to the heart of what moves dance audiences.Labels: ballroom, features, profiles, SFChronicle
Labels: features, profiles, SFChronicle, world_dance
This weekend and for the next few months, you can get more than a glimpse of one of the most unusual animals in California wildlife just off Highway 1, an hour and a half south of San Francisco. Each year, thousands of elephant seals come back to the beaches of Año Nuevo State Reserve, where hundreds of new pups will be born, and the adult males will duke it out with each other and find a female to mate with before returning to the ocean.Labels: 96_Hours, features, SFChronicle
Explore four of the city's liveliest museums - the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora, Zeum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - as they and the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival offer activities, performances and free admission as part of Target's Family Day on Sunday.Labels: 96_Hours, features, SFChronicle
From bottles, cans and cigarette butts to old tires and oil drums, the tons of trash that litter our beaches and waterways also chokes the marine ecosystem and endangers wildlife. But on Saturday, tens of thousands of Californians will join in what the Guinness Book of World Records has deemed the world's largest trash collection effort: Coastal Cleanup Day.It's the perfect project for families, school groups, scout troops or community organizations, says the Marine Mammal Center's Ann Bauer.
In 2007, more than 60,000 volunteer cleaners removed 900,000 pounds of trash and recyclable materials from California's shores. In the Bay Area, you can come out between 9 a.m. and noon to one of dozens of sites, grab a trash bag and a check-off sheet and join in the pickup.
Read more on the SF Chronicle site.Labels: 96_Hours, features, SFChronicle
Officially speaking, San Mateo doesn't have a town square, but surely Central Park qualifies as the heart of the city.Planted in downtown San Mateo, and only a few minutes' walk from the Caltrain station, Central Park has become the go-to place for the community for everything from music and theater festivals that draw thousands to impromptu family picnics on a hot Sunday.
On a balmy Thursday night in July, the lawn was jammed with dancers and picnickers taking in the Central Park Music Series, an annual summer tradition. The lawn was carpeted with blankets and lawn chairs, and dancers from ages 6 to 60 were grooving away at this year's closing concert, featuring San Francisco reggae band Native Elements.
Labels: features, SFChronicle
Nothing tastes better on a hot summer day than fresh berries and cream, and in the Bay Area, we're lucky enough to be able to get our hands on some of the best organic strawberries and olallieberries in the country. You could pick your fruit at the local Whole Foods, but why not pick it right from the plant?Just off Highway 1 north of Santa Cruz, Swanton Berry Farm offers berry aficionados the chance to roam their fields and collect a perfect basket of fruit while enjoying the sun, breezes and spectacular views over the Pacific. With warm days in the sun and cool nights wrapped in ocean fog, conditions on these coast-side acres are ripe for growing sweet, flavorful berries. One bite of a succulent Swanton strawberry and you'll see why they're so prized by connoisseurs like local jammaker June Taylor, who uses strawberries from the farm in her renowned preserves.
Read more on the SF Chronicle site.
Labels: 96_Hours, features, SFChronicle
Multiculturalism is the watchword at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which runs Wednesday through June 8 at a dozen venues around the city and will feature artists from China, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Israel, Spain, Germany and Croatia, side by side with such mainstays of the local arts scene as Joe Goode, Axis Dance Company, John Santos and Earplay. But while the out-of-town visitors are an appealing part of the 5-year-old festival, the brainchild of director Andrew Wood, it also, perhaps even more important, serves as a proving ground for international collaborations and a way of encouraging Bay Area artists to seek out inspirations abroad and bring back fresh ideas to their home base.
Whether through an existing project, like Kim Epifano's collaboration with Shanghai artists on "Speaking Chinese," or an outgrowth of an existing relationship, such as Mark Jackson and Beth Wilmurt's work with Berlin choreographer Sommer Ulrickson on "Yes, Yes to Moscow," or even a reason to fulfill a commission, like Erling Wold's one-man opera for John Duykers, the festival gives performers a venue and springboard for exploring outside their comfort zones.
Read more on the SFChronicle site.Labels: Art_Street_Theater, features, Kim_Epifano, modern, music, profiles, SFChronicle, theater
There's a well-kept multistory building in Pacific Heights that could easily be mistaken for one of the many comfortable family homes that loom along the blocks overlooking the bay. But Jackson Manor, as the house has been fondly dubbed, isn't your average Pac Heights mansion. Once owned as part of an off-campus, urban program for Westmont College, it's now in its fifth year as an official residence for dancers in the San Francisco Ballet School's trainee program, as well as advanced students. As any artist knows, the road to professional success isn't easy. For many of the youngsters who win the opportunity to train at San Francisco Ballet's School, the pursuit of a career in the notoriously competitive world of ballet means sacrificing, not only time and energy, but family life as well. Students come from across the country and around the world to study at the school, but for a young dancer of perhaps 16 or 17, the task of finding a place to live in San Francisco is no trivial matter.
Labels: ballet, features, profiles, San_Francisco_Ballet, SFChronicle
It's a 'snare guitar,' " one little girl says quite matter-of-factly. Four girls from Julianne Eng's fourth- and fifth-grade class explain the ins and outs of their newest creation, pointing out main features of the design on their drawing, "It's got a button for turning on the snare drum at the top and an amp built in at the bottom - and it's solar-powered." Eng puts on a CD and Saint-Saëns' Algerian Suite thumps mildly in the background amid the chatter of young voices. While the girls continue embellishing the neck of their snare guitar with flames that would make Ted Nugent proud, the other kids in the comfortably cluttered room at Argonne Alternative Elementary in the Richmond District of San Francisco are working on their own fascinating menagerie of instruments - a "viano," a "clarolin," "drymbals" and other exotic inventions, which they describe with varying degrees of technical detail. One pair of girls is carefully copyrighting their instrument's description, and they casually, but deftly, turn the paper over when I come closer to have a look.
As the kids themselves are quick to explain, it's all part of the San Francisco Symphony's Adventures in Music, one of the most ambitious music education outreach programs in the nation, and one that aims to integrate music into the lives of every first- through fifth-grade kid in the San Francisco Unified School District.
Labels: features, music, San_Francisco_Symphony, SFChronicle
Labels: features, music, musicals, profiles, SFChronicle
Labels: features, music, musicals, SFChronicle
As San Francisco Ballet celebrates its 75th season, we look at some of the dancers who shaped the company's rich history. The company will celebrate its alumni with a reunion weekend Friday through March 16.Labels: ballet, features, profiles, San_Francisco_Ballet, SFChronicle
At San Francisco Ballet's recent gala opening in January, rounds of polite applause greeted the introduction of many of the company's illustrious patrons and leaders, but when a trim, elegant little woman dressed impeccably in an evening gown made her way onto the stage of the War Memorial Opera House, there was a ripple through the room as the audience recognized America's first Snow Queen and rose to their feet in tribute.
"It's Jocelyn," went the whisper. "Get up! it's Jocelyn!"
Perhaps no figure in San Francisco Ballet's 75-year history is more beloved than Jocelyn Vollmar, who joined the company when it was 5 years old, and whose career traces nearly seven decades as dancer and then teacher for the Ballet.
Read more on the SF Chronicle site.Labels: Balanchine, ballet, features, profiles, San_Francisco_Ballet, SFChronicle
From the exhilarated smile on Yayoi Kambara's face as she flies through the air at her partner, Jeremy Smith, or floats on his extended arms, you can almost feel the thrill she takes in sheer movement. Rehearsing KT Nelson's "Walk Before Talk" for ODC/Dance's forthcoming season at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Kambara holds nothing back. If there's a sense that she's embracing the instant, that every second she gets to dance is one to savor, perhaps it's because for this new mother every moment - onstage or off, at home or in the studio - is precious.
Regular watchers of ODC/Dance's Downtown seasons might remember Kambara from last year in Nelson's "Water Project," in which she danced what might be thought of as the Earth Mother role while 37 weeks pregnant. Her daughter, Hanae - whose name means "flowering branch" - was born two weeks later, on April 11. Nelson says it was a major editorial shift in the ballet to include a pregnant dancer, but with three mothers leading the ODC organization - Artistic Director Brenda Way has five children, Nelson has a son and the school's director, Kimi Okada, is also a parent - incorporating Kambara's real-life experience into the piece was only natural.
Labels: features, modern, ODC-SF, profiles, SFChronicle
She is the public face of one of the most popular and successful dance companies in the world - an articulate and warmly generous spirit who has led the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for just over 18 years, handpicked by Ailey as his successor.Labels: Ailey, Cal_Performances, features, modern, profiles, SFChronicle
Labels: ballet, features, profiles, San_Francisco_Ballet, San_Francisco_Performances, SFChronicle
Labels: features, SFChronicle
At first, the dancers step gingerly around the taut golden strings that crisscross the floor of ODC's theater space in the Mission. There's a low bubbling thrum in the air from musician and composer Albert Mathias' panoply of electronic instruments that gives the sense of a percolating atmosphere as Cherise Richards, Suzanne Lappas and Shannon Stewart experimentally twang and gather up various strands, nimbly threading their way through the web of bright yellow twine.
When choreographer Kathleen Hermesdorf gives the signal for the rehearsal to begin, however, the three lift fistfuls of string into a three-dimensional cat's cradle and begin marking out the twisting, vibrating phrases of Hermesdorf's latest work, "Fate + Longing =," a work that Motionlab will perform this week at ODC.
Read more on the Chronicle site.Labels: features, modern, SFChronicle
There are those kinds of artists that impress, those whose work sticks in your brain and those who can change the way you think -- and then there are those that haunt your dreams. It is into the last category that Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal falls.
'TEN CHI'
Labels: Cal_Performances, Contra_Costa_Times, features, modern
Labels: features, music, opera, profiles, SFChronicle
Labels: Balanchine, ballet, Contra_Costa_Times, features, Footnotes_Column, profiles
Labels: ballet, Contra_Costa_Times, features, profiles, San_Francisco_Ballet, Smuin_Ballet
Labels: features, modern, SFChronicle, tango
Labels: Antony_Tudor, ballet, Company_C, Contra_Costa_Times, features, Footnotes_Column, profiles
Labels: ballet, features, In_Dance, profiles, San_Francisco_Ballet, Words_on_Dance
Labels: ballet, Ballet_San_Jose, Contra_Costa_Times, features, modern, ODC-SF, profiles, San_Francisco_Ballet
Labels: ballet, Contra_Costa_Times, features, modern, ODC-SF, profiles, San_Francisco_Ballet
Copyright © 2004 Mary Ellen Hunt. For permission to reprint any material, please contact me.
