Big-time dance around here begins its San Francisco year not at Civic Center (since the SF Ballet can't get into the Opera House until Christmas), but across the Bay in Berkeley at Zellerbach Hall, where the deranged and possibly mind-warping premiere of a Berzerkeley ballet by Mark Morris seemed well-timed and appropriate.
The show opened Thursday night; the new ballet Empire Garden left me stunned. I did not know what had hit me, and about all I could remember about it was that the dancers looked like they came from interplanetary marching bands from many planets, got up in chrome yellow, apple green. They often stood or lay about in postures you might adopt if you were outdoors in a park watching a concert: leaning back on their elbows, feet stretched out, and then, creepily, they would start to stir their hands and feet, and scuttle about in these positions like a crab turning around. Before the dance was over, one dancer would sit in another's lap in this position, making an "x," and both would rotate.
I went back to the concert Saturday to see it again; I remain in awe of the piece. It is set to the Piano Trio (1908) by the eccentric New England composer Charles Ives. At one point, there are 10 melodies going at once. I could not help thinking of the Free Speech movement, the bazaar of interest groups in UC's Sproul Plaza. The competition for your attention and your allegiance is dizzying, seductive and deranging. In the music, quotes from "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Rock of Ages" play off other tunes once popular (some of them still familiar), but all of them are dependent on sentimental harmonic structures that are calculated to make you cry – which Ives is subverting and turning inside out with his polytonal ingenuity. Indeed, Ives' main effect seems to be to create irony and doubt, where the motifs he uses are all clearly designed to evoke piety, loyalty, patriotism, and get you to join the army or come down to the altar and be saved, or fight fiercely, Harvard.
This concert was fantastic, and though it was not sold out should go down as a propitious beginning of his career for the new head of Cal Performances, Matthias Tarnopolsky. Ives was never popular. His music was so far ahead of its time that this trio, which was written before World War I, did not have a major performance until after World War II. But it is totally prophetic of the music that was to come, of John Cage, of the music of noise. What Ives did was almost like quantum mechanics, he integrated music into a field of cacophony that you can stand but you can't understand. It seems mathematically a prodigious feat of integration, something in which an actuary might find bliss.
And the ballet totally supports that. It's a mysterious but very clear spectacle: the costumes are hella fun, superhero-ish, but mostly like the marching-band uniform I wore in high school, but in the most wonderful colors. The movements are mostly sculptural, but with some Holy Rollerisms and snatches of social dance, and a lot of posturing, like a faith-healer, or a veteran of the Grand Army of the Potomac haranguing the crowd. Mysterious, wonderful. The finale is definitely "Rock of Ages," but with the weirdest harmonizations I've ever heard. It's not the sort of thing to inspire faith, but it is other-worldly.
The evening began with a beautiful little piece to Beethoven's 4th Cello Sonata, and ended with a very satisfying and relatively easy-to-grasp setting of a Schumann piano quintet.
Morris is not only one of the great talents making dances today, he is also perhaps the highest-profile LGBTQ artist in the country. In other gay-friendly dance news, the Koenig of San Francisco (aka Joseph Copley) makes a serious appearance with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company this weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. Jenkins is the Mother of Modern Dance in this city, one of the great teachers, the mentor of Joe Goode and many other choreographers who've graduated from her company and gone on to do great things on their own. Her company is, as ever, fierce and formidable, and performs not often enough on its home turf. This is a major event.
It's also great to report that a new star has shown up in gay performance art. Jorge de Hoyos is a talent like Bert Lahr or Zero Mostel, a sad clown who can sustain your attention looking bewildered, with large, sad eyes that seem to be able to register the randomness and indifference of experience and carry on without hope. His appearance in Total Facts Known at Mama Calizo's Voice Factory, the hole-in-the-wall gay performing space at Mission and 11th, follows a shattering performance in Stick some months back. If you hear that he's doing something, check it out.