March 2019 – Repeat Performances

March 22, 2019

Quote Unquote Collective’s “Mouthpiece”

This past weekend, Cal Performances presented Mouthpiece, a 65-minute performance piece developed by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava of the Toronto–based theater group Quote Unquote Collective. Mouthpiece won the Stage Award for Performance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017, and the Berkeley performance was the last stage presentation of the piece, which took three years to develop. Mouthpiece has gone on to other manifestations, as a book by Canadian...

Categories: theater

March 16, 2019

The comedy of inappropriate misappropriation

“Is there a special place in hell for people who appropriate their own culture?” So asks Raj in Dipika Guha’s The Yoga Play, which recently opened at San Francisco Playhouse. The line gets a laugh, as did many lines in this hilarious look at how and why Americans misappropriate other cultures in our voracious curiosity to inhabit the world in all its wild and beautiful diversity. The play opens with Joan (Susi Damilano) talking out at the audience while behind her is the...

Categories: theater

March 9, 2019

Love en pointe: San Francisco Ballet’s “Sleeping Beauty”

The Sleeping Beauty is one of the cornerstones of classical ballet. With luscious music by Tchaikovsky and exquisite and imperishable choreography by Marius Petipa, the ballet was first performed at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1890. Even today, the ballet is a loved ornament in the repertoire of the Mariiinsky Ballet, or Kirov Ballet, remaining so through the company’s many transformations. It’s one of those ballets that any classically trained choreographer...

Categories: dance