dance – Page 17 – Repeat Performances

May 1, 2009

San Francisco Performances presents the Paul Taylor Dance Company

In 1954 Paul Taylor formed the Paul Taylor Dance Company in New York City; today the 77-year-old Taylor continues to produce choreography for his two companies in the characteristic gymnastic cross between ballet and modern dance that is a hallmark of his own varied dance career—he danced for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet as well as for Merce Cunningham’s and Martha Graham’s companies. His remarks on his choreography reveal a potent mix of compulsion and artistic...

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April 7, 2009

San Francisco Performances presents Compagnie Marie Chouinard

The mysterious, the sexual “At the root of each new work there is always what I call the ‘mystery’—an unknown wavelength that calls out to me ... My work consists of capturing this primordial wavelength, of ‘tuning’ it in a sense, and of arranging it in space and time with a structure and form proper to it.” So writes Marie Chouinard about her work as a choreographer. No description could be more exact for the works that her dance group, Compagnie Marie...

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February 21, 2009

Pappa Tarahumara at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Sailing into the Past Out of 12 dancers in Japan’s Pappa Tarahumara dance-theater group, seven danced in Ship in a View when the work debuted in 1997 in Tokyo. Director Hiroshi Kioke has worked with one of his...

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January 30, 2009

Pascal Rioult at Cal Performances

Slow Dancing at the gym Pascal Rioult’s company opened its Saturday evening performance at Cal Performances with a contemporary interpretation of the Nijinska–Stravinsky ballet, Les Noces. Meant to portray a peasant village wedding, the ballet early manifests that it is both sexual and political. The marriage, according to Nijinska, was “an act of immolation”—neither bride nor groom chose the other but was simply part of a ritualized drive for procreation....

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January 27, 2009

San Francisco Ballet’s Program 1

Imaginings in mauve Lilacs with their heavy, mothlike blossoms, lavender colors and thick sweet fragrance. Lilacs, a cold weather flower: if you leave Moscow for San Francisco, you leave them behind. Lilacs can...

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November 12, 2008

Stanford Lively Arts presents Urban Bush Women and Compagnie Jant-Bi

Through worlds of dance Full of energetic movement executed by powerful dancers in the full flow of their bodies’ vigor, The Scales of Memory is an 80-minute collaboration by the men of the Senegalese dance company, Compagnie Jant-Bi, and the women of the American dance company, Urban Bush Women. Cross-cultural dance concerts are specialties of both these excellent companies. “Resistance,” the first of the work's three parts, began with all the dancers...

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