The Bay Area continues its long history of hosting contemporary dance with a multicultural focus when Chinese-born Shen Wei comes to the Yerba Buena Center, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater visits UC Berkeley this week.
The Ailey company returns for their annual pilgrimage to Cal Performances, this year presenting three separate programs that include new works by Camille A. Brown, Frederick Earl Mosley, Robert Battle, Maurice B�jart and Talley Beatty.
Alvin Ailey (1931-89) founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958, when it was the first racially integrated dance company in the US. The company is probably one of America's most famous dance groups, and has a well-respected school in New York. Since Ailey's death, his prot�g� and dancer Judith Jameson has helmed the company, stewarding it into the 21st century by focusing both on Ailey's extensive choreography and commissioning new works.
Program A (March 5, 7) features B�jart's 1970 reworking of Michel Fokine's traditional 1910 Firebird. This production, set to Stravinsky's score, is the first complete ballet by B�jart to be staged by a US dance company. This program also has Elisa Monte's Treading, Brown's The Groove to Nobody's Business and Ailey's signature Revelations (1960).
Program B (March 6, 8) features Ailey's Night Creature (1974), Battle's Unfold (2005), Billy Wilson's Winter in Lisbon (1992) and Beatty's The Road of the Phoebe Snow (1959), which was recently restaged by Ailey's associate director Masazumi Chaya.
Program C (March 8, 9) features Mosley's Saddle Up!, a kitschy homage to Western movies, Hans van Manen's Solo (1997), which is actually a trio set on three men, plus The Groove to Nobody's Business and Revelations.
Shen Wei is a choreographer, painter and designer born in Hunan, China who studied both Chinese opera and contemporary dance extensively, eventually forming his own company. Wei's focus is on the multidisciplinary aspect of contemporary choreography. "I wasn't taught the arts separately, so I don't separate them in my work. Because I'm a painter, I want to see how dance movement relates to music, and how music and dance relate to visual art, to see how the three elements combine." The New York Times described his work as "painterly, mathematical and idiosyncratic. It's imagery and conceptualism with a difference."
Wei will be presenting two new works, Map and Re- (Part 1). Map outlines seven "movement" maps designed by Wei, and is set to Steve Reich's The Desert Music. It's described as building to a crescendo "rising with the pulse of the music and energy of the dancers to a whirlwind of movement." Re- (Part 1) is based on Shen Wei's travels through Tibet, and reflects his experiences with the country's people, land, religion and culture. Performed by four dancers, the work is set to the music of traditional Tibetan chants.
"Shen Wei's works are not only a popular and critical success, but they offer audiences the opportunity to transcend into a realm of inspired imagination," said YBCA associate performing arts curator Angela Mattox.
Shen Wei Dance Arts at YBCA, 700 Howard St., SF, March 6-8. Tickets: ($30-$45): (415) 978-ARTS or www.ybca.org.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, March 5-9. Tickets ($34-$60): (510) 642-9988.