February 2020 – Repeat Performances

February 13, 2020

San Francisco Ballet: the hunger for dance

On February 13, San Francisco Ballet premiered its latest collaboration with Trey McIntyre, The Big Hunger. In the program notes, McIntyre explains the concepts behind the ballet, which he set on the company this past summer. It’s based on the beliefs of the Kalahari Bushmen as described in the Korean film, Burning. The Bushmen claim there are two hungers in life: the small hungers that drive our everyday existence and the big hunger that is our longing for existential...

Categories: dance

February 9, 2020

Susan Graham and the beauty of the art song

The fabulous Susan Graham sang in recital this past Sunday afternoon at Hertz Hall as part of Cal Performances 2020 season. She was accompanied by the equally fabulous Malcolm Martineau, pianist to the diva stars. The house was packed and the venue provided its wonderful concert hall acoustics. The well-loved, and rightly so, America mezzo opened the program with five songs by Reynaldo Hahn. Her interpretation like her voice was warm, and her French graced with clarity, which enhanced the...

Categories: music, opera

February 2, 2020

Emailing compassion in “Tiny Beautiful Things”

Tops among those things the internet has changed is how we communicate with each other. Social media, blogs, even venerable papers with long histories of print have made their way to the digital realm. Users form a public with more democratic potential, and the public is no longer local. Even more, we can tell our stories and share our ideas and feelings without editorial constraints of time, space and propriety. We tell our stories as long as we want and about whatever we want and to whoever...

Categories: theater

February 1, 2020

The delightfully daft “Princess Ida”

Founded in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, Girton College was Britain’s first residential college for women offering a college degree. Its opening was followed two years later by Newnham College, and at the University of Oxford, Somerville College in 1879 and Lady Margaret Hall in 1878. The University of London opened its first women’s college in 1882. Women’s education was on the move in Victorian England. On January 5, 1884, the latest Gilbert and Sullivan comic...

Categories: opera, theater