dance – Page 2 – Repeat Performances

September 21, 2019

Mark Morris meets Mozart

Mark Morris Dance Group, long loved by audiences in Berkeley, presented the choreographer’s Mozart Dances this past weekend at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall. The company premiered the work at the Lincoln Center in New York City in August 2006, and performances in Berkeley followed soon after. The dance is set to two piano concertos and a sonata for two pianos by Mozart. The formidable Inon Barnatan was the pianist, and the Berkeley Symphony was directed by long-time MMDG...

Categories: dance

August 3, 2019

Someone’s sneaking ’round the corner …

Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera has long been my favorite opera. By the time I was 12 I knew every word of every song in this darkly comic study of the cruelties of human nature revealed in the interlocking mechanisms of class and capitalism. Mess with my memories of Threepenny and you mess with my primal love of theater. Which is what happened last Saturday at the West Edge Opera’s production of Threepenny. When the lights went down...

Categories: dance, opera

July 20, 2019

Sketching out the new in ballet

At the end of Amy Seiwert’s new ballet, Verses, the woman sitting next to me in the audience said, “That was lovely. It made me want to be a dancer, and I have never felt that before.” What more can we ask of art, than it urge us to open our eyes and our desires to experience the world in as many different ways as possible? What more can a choreographer hope for, than to reach, ultimately, deep into our sense of empathy? Although choreographer Amy Seiwert has been the...

Categories: dance

May 27, 2019

Not so safe choreography at SAFEhouse

At a small gallery space in the Tenderloin on May 17, SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts presented three performances developed during its RAW (resident artist workshop) program. Several Bay Area choreographers created three dynamic pieces that overlapped in their consideration of intimacy, boundaries, and the creative process. The evening opened with Steven Horner’s Encountering, performed by himself in the round and hinging on heavy audience participation. Each seated spectator...

Categories: dance

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

February 23, 2019

The 7 Fingers flights of desire

The acrobatic love duet between Émilie and Julien Silliau is punctuated with the snap of a fan and the crack of a whip in Reversible, the latest creation by Les 7 Doigts, which enchanted audiences this weekend at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall. The sounds of whip and fan add rhythmic bite to the voice over of Ionesco’s absurdist play, The Bald Soprano. Like other productions by written, directed and choreographed by Gypsy Snider from her Montreal–based arts...

Categories: dance, theater