dance – Page 4 – Repeat Performances

November 15, 2018

High voltage Cirque du Soleil

The circus is in town! Hurrah! Last week the Cirque du Soleil set up its big top tent for its latest gloriously glitzy, jaw-dropping production, Volta. Presenting, as always, a ferociously paced but immensely enjoyable show, the company has changed since its first shuddery start in Canada in 1984. I saw the original US 1987 show at the Los Angeles Art Festival, the run that would vault the company into international success, and although the amount of shiny costumes has multiplied...

Categories: dance, theater

October 11, 2018

“ECHO / riding the rapids” in a flurry of symbols

“Doesn’t he look like he’s trying to get into a body?” asks Sara Shelton Mann, director of ECHO / riding the rapids, leaving her seat in the audience to join one of her principal dancers on stage. The dancers’ responses, after she resumes her seated anonymity, range from graceful to violent, ultimately crystallizing in a symbolic reality where every decision reflects a previous one. Their performance on October 11 at ODC Theater built a world through solo and paired movement...

Categories: dance

October 4, 2018

Sappho’s body is breaking in “extreme lyric I”

Translating a translation highlights the fragility and multiplicity of meaning. A coproduction of Hope Mohr Dance and ODC Theater, extreme lyric I directly challenges the stability of gender and identity by embodying Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. Although Mohr intends to “shed postmodernism with this work and investigate the lyric,” a precise, definable sense of self, the self implied by the I of the title, remains just out of reach. Sappho’s poetry,...

Categories: dance

May 11, 2018

Each year a newer, more contemporary Smuin

“How can I describe you?” So starts the music by Nico Muhly and singer Teitur that is the inspiration for Val Caniparoli’s wry and sassy ballet, If I Were A Sushi Roll, which Smuin premiered in San Francisco on April 20. The ballet continued its run as the centerpiece of company’s Dance Series 2 this past week at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, before moving on to Mountain View and Carmel. The singer goes on as the Smuin ensemble, costumed as Men and Women in...

Categories: dance

April 21, 2018

SF Ballet’s Unbound dances on

The second program of San Francisco Ballet’s Unbound: A Festival of New Work presented work by choreographers Myles Thatcher, Cathy Marston and David Dawson. Marston and Dawson trained at the Royal Ballet, and Thatcher was trained at SF Ballet, where he currently dances with the company while developing his choreographic skills. Thatcher’s Otherness opened the evening, tackling the difficult question of how social roles affect and distort an individual’s identity, narrowing...

Categories: dance

March 20, 2018

My heart belongs to Jerry

True confession: I love Jerome Robbins’ choreography. As much as I admire and respect Balanchine’s choreography and his establishment of one of the most prominent and innovative ballet companies in the world, I love Robbins more. So it was with anticipation that I attended San Francisco Ballet’s Program 5: Robbins: Ballet and Broadway. Robbins’ choreography is ideal for SF Ballet: it combines the purity of neoclassical ballet with warmth, inventiveness and wit. All this was most...

Categories: dance