Arts dignitaries from New York have been spotted in town for the re-opening of the ODC Theater at 17th and Shotwell in the Mission District. It's a big deal. That space, known back in the 80s as the New Performance Gallery (when both Margaret Jenkins and ODC shared space in the building), served as a huge classroom by day, and was converted with bleachers into a place to watch performances by night. It got more and more comfortable but was always stuffy, and you just had to put up with that, since what you were seeing was so interesting.
Now the brick walls are still there, buttressed by handsome, brick-colored earthquake-proofing, but the building feels spacious and grand, and the two performances that opened the house kicked off the season with power and a new emotionalism that seemed somehow appropriate.
The bill was shared by Kunst-Stoff and Levydance, two companies that ODC Theater has fostered with residencies, and both these works were developed in ODC's Performance Diaspora program. Both shows used music based in the choreographers' ethnic origins, to better effect in the case of Kunst-Stoff.
Yannis Adoniou, the openly gay Greek former star of Lines Ballet, has been making Pina Bausch-like theater pieces about urban alienation for a good 10 years now, and this new work was a breakthrough for him into a landscape less Magritte-like, less ashen and alienated, less intellectual and bitter, more homesick, aching and poignant. It was anchored in the rhythms of the popular music of Greek tavernas, represented onstage by a nightclub singer; it's very like the blues, music that talks to the hips, and the most wonderful, ecstatic phrases of lifted, floating, back-arching modern dance kept rising almost out of nowhere in the social dreamscape Adoniou created. Julia Stiefel was outstanding in a bare-breasted solo that it's hard to believe I really saw, since the cantilevered back-bends she floated through looked like something from a martial-arts movie where computer graphics have done half the work.
The lighting was beautiful for both works. Kunst-Stoff's included a screen placed over a sheet of Mylar which reflected shifting, watery images onto it from the front, and also served to receive shadow-dances when lit from the back; these silhouettes were done in homage to a form of Greek theater from Adoniou's youth, and very effectively evoked the feeling of not loving a place the less for having suffered there.
Ben Levy's use of his mixed Persian and Jewish origins was harder to read. Again, the set was evocative of lampshades, borderline oppressive family comforts; and handsome old-world, beaten-leather trunks gave the effect of well-traveled furniture with a story to tell. His four young women dancers seemed lost in suburban-girl anxieties, and the deepest sense I got was of college students trying on roles, and not finding them very promising.
The show at ODC this coming weekend is going to be a very big deal, another collaboration that looks like it began as a grant-proposal but it truly could be haunting. AXIS dis/abled dance company, directed by openly lesbian Judy Smith, has been making gothic dances for 20 years that are superbly well-made. They're teaming up with the virtuoso cellist Joan Jeanrenaud to dance with Inkboat, whose work is based in the Japanese expressionist "dance of darkness" called Butoh; it grew up in the horror after Hiroshima, and emphasizes slow, agonized transitions, extremities of tension, grotesque emotions.
The dancers of AXIS have inspired major choreographers like Bill T. Jones and Stephen Petronio to work with them, and their disabilities have never compromised the integrity of the work, but have rather made the extraordinary things they can do seem like part of the natural flow of things. They have never been afraid to ask us to look at them, to see how they do things with the limbs they have, how like us and how different they are, and how human we all are, and as a result they have become internationally famous.
The press release says the collaboration was inspired by the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, the Scandinavian painter renowned for his emulation of Old Master techniques and textures, and his devotion to the depiction of flesh.