There was too much intriguing dance happening around here this past weekend for one person to see it all. Very big deals were the re-opening of the ODC Theater, with free performances all day and night Saturday to celebrate, which, alas, I couldn't make. ODC is without a doubt the single strongest force for putting a roof over the independent dance-makers of San Francisco. Mind you, this is the largest community of dancers in the whole country outside New York. ODC's director Brenda Way has made way for her own dancers and her own company, but is likewise a great community-builder who has brought everybody else along with her. ODC's reopening festival JumpstART bookends their Wrecking Ball, the hilarious ceremony with which they officially closed the building a couple of years ago, and brings a major performance space back into being. Hooray, congratulations, and thank you.
But even bigger news was the first San Francisco showing of Alonzo King's Scheherazade (at the Novellus Theater, YBCA), which was commissioned last year by the Monaco Dance Forum to inaugurate the centenary of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, and first performed in the opera house that sheltered Diaghilev's epoch-making company after the outbreak of the first World War. The first Scheherazade ballet was a fleshpot blockbuster set to a mishmash of Rimsky-Korsakov's famous score: it starred Vaslav Nijinsky, "the God of the Dance," in a feline role that got him slain at the end for being so sexy, and that launched 1,000 sheikh movies; is seminal to the careers of Douglas Fairbanks (The Thief of Baghdad), Rudolf Valentino and Victor Mature �" may I mention Debra Paget?; and featured a sensational decor of peacock blue and green silks that inspired the couturiers of Paris �" but as a ballet, it has not stood the test of time.
King has actually made a better ballet than Fokine's original; King's collaborator, the composer/tablaist Zakir Hussein, saves Rimsky's famous, sinuous melody, full of filigree, and has composed new music around it that evokes more of the 1,001 Nights �" the variety of the tales, the enchanting moods and sudden eruptions of violence, the mysterious creatures with which our heroine beguiled the sultan whom she enthralled with her tales �" than Fokine did in the first version. King evokes apparitions of the magic birds, the sultan, the princesses, the beggars and saints and assassins, by making them come to life and move with their own characteristic energy �" stalking, darting, perching, slithering, hovering, struggling �" without getting mired in details of "what happened next." The central duet for the sultan and Scheherazade, danced Friday night by the towering Corey Scott Gilbert literally tied at one point with a rope to the ballerina Laurel Keen, worked the dialectic of his fear and violence against her love and imagination to terrific effect.
The first half of the show was more formal, a beautiful series of duets (mostly) to adagios by Corelli; the stately baroque dance-music tends to sumptuous grandeur, the rhythms evoke public rhetoric. You hear such cadences as "Hear ye, O my people" in the choirs of trumpets and strings, and the dancers bring majesty to a series of movement studies that cover a wide range of interactions, nothing ever literal, but sometimes tender, sometimes push-me/pull you. The movement is full of surprises; at the end of one duet, a man lay face down, whereupon she sat on his feet, and his body jackknifed at the knees, pulling him bolt upright; they looked like a pair of bookends, back to back, center-stage. I could not tell you what it means or why they did it, but I'll never forget the event.
LINES Ballet performs again this weekend at the Novellus Theater, as does the other very big deal, the Hula show at the Palace of Fine Arts commemorating the 25th anniversary of Na Lei Hulu I ka Wekiu 's foundation as an exemplar of Hawaiian dance arts in our city. What's great about this company is that they are showing how to bring traditional material into the present and the future. They have one of the truly great corps de ballets to be seen anywhere, and Patrick Makuakane can use them polyphonically or in unison in a manner that challenges comparison with Doris Humphrey or Mark Morris, two of the most symphonic choreographers in the modern dance tradition. At one point in Saturday night's show, I found myself following three lines of counterpoint in the dance, and the thought flashed in my mind that Balanchine would have delighted in this.
The show opened with a tribute to King David Kalakaua, who resurrected the hula after it had been suppressed by the American missionaries who came to the island and treated the dance as the work of the devil. Perhaps the most impressive choreography of the evening was an austere movement-choir piece about the missionaries that brought Doris Humphrey's great piece about the Shakers to mind �" it had a similar architectural magnificence, relying on geometry, lines of force, contrapuntal intricacies, with some dancers verging on ecstatic possession, and others fighting with them �" and set, with massive irreverence, to a disco beat.
Makuakane is a master teacher, a star performer, and also a community organizer of formidable talents. He looks like Michelangelo's Adam in a grass skirt, dances like a god, sings like a cantor, and works the crowd like Bill Clinton. His speaking gifts are of the first rank. He's not only keeping Hawaiian culture alive, he's a populist making the case for it. Though he's serious, he is in no way grindingly earnest. In fact, his sense of humor can get riotous. The first act ends with a hilarious celebration of the Honolulu gay bar Hulas, complete with drag artist Matthew Martin doing his impersonation of Shirley Bassey.
Two hours of wonderful dancing in a variety of moods, from the sacred to the profane. It's wonderful to see a whole dance done kneeling down. The most wonderful thing of all is the way the movement seems to come from the dancers' hearts. The arms open up and reach with such strength and delicacy, and offer the dance to us with a generosity you have to see to believe. Their version of Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," with arms opening out to suggest "the moon and stars rose in your eyes," is alone worth the price of admission. Their show runs through this weekend at the Palace of Fine Arts.