Looking back on 2010 is a queasy-making process. I'm kinda doing it with hands over my eyes, looking through my fingers. The state of things in general is precarious. The stock market has recovered, but companies have returned to profitability by getting rid of all the workers. Everybody who still has a job is working harder, and more anxious rather than less. Economic news is the news, and "the marketplace" threatens to become the only arbiter of value.
On the other hand, disaster hasn't actually struck, and many are successfully whistling past the graveyard. It's alarming when a raft of Republican loonies win elections, and Sarah Palin's daughter nearly wins the title on Dancing with the Stars, and alarming indeed when a major university abolishes its Philosophy, Classics, French, Italian, and Russian departments, but still the situation is desperate but not serious. And some good things happened in the midst of all that.
Great news it was when the ODC Theater re-opened after retrofitting; the realm of contemporary dance now has a roof over its head, thanks to Brenda Way, director of ODC/SF, who has had the vision to get out and fund-raise and make the case that San Francisco is a dance town, and that the whole range of dancing �" tap, jazz, flamenco, contact improv, aerobics, all kinds of ethnic dance, as well as brainy modern dance �" need warm, clean, dry spaces to practice in, and dignified, comfortable stages to perform on. The house re-opened to month-long celebrations, involving most of the dance community here, which is the largest and most diverse in the whole country outside New York. Bravo to them, and hooray for us all.
And there was a thrilling new classical ballet, the first in my experience to feel totally contemporary since the death of Balanchine, at our internationally famous San Francisco Ballet. It's by a Russian emigre, Yuri Possokhov, who's danced here now for decades and made this piece in memory of his teacher at the Bolshoi, who "threw boots at us and made us go to museums," and dedicated himself to making artists out of his students, whom he took charge of as children. The dancers are doing all the hardest steps in the book as if they were kids on skateboards, flying through the air like swallows, weaving around each other as they leap and spin, with the fearlessness of youth. Classical Symphony was thrilling when first seen, and held up well to repeat visits, so maybe it really is going to be a classic.
Young love made a heroic appearance, again at the ballet, with a performance in Romeo and Juliet by Sarah van Patten that the whole world could have made a pilgrimage to see. Van Patten has a wide range and excels in the kind of dance in which tough steps are set to weird music, but also in comedy, and especially in lyric dance. Juliet is a natural for her, and in the potentially great moments in the story she gives a grandeur that could not have been exceeded by Fonteyn or Ulanova. It is to be hoped that she'll dance Giselle in the upcoming season.
Kind of a downer was Black Swan �" not that it's not a great portrait of delusional pathology, but because it really only used dancing as decor. As a Sacramento Ballet dancer was quoted as saying, "That movie is to ballet as Psycho is to the motel business." Burlesque, on the other hand, is a modest "star is born" movie that uses all the conventions of the backstage movie in ways that never rang false to me. "Diamonds are a girl's best friend" is only one of the many dance numbers given exquisite treatment; Christina Aguilera (channeling Etta James, a very good idea) deserves the many reaction shots that are necessary to tell a success-story like this; the Adolf Menjou role from Stage Door gets revivified in all its snake-in-the-grass glory by a hunky LA real-estate mogul; and darling Cher triumphs over him as Katharine Hepburn did in the original Stage Door. Cher has become like Fred Astaire, the model for contemporary manners �" from here on out, when I don't know what to say, I'm just going to ask myself, "What would Cher do in this situation?"
The worst news is that the superb world-dance choreographer Wan-Chao Chan has been denied a green card, and is likely to be deported. She is foremost among the Ethnic Dance community in refashioning traditional materials, and has the admiration of all her peers; her craft is superb, and her intentions are no less than to introduce feminism and liberal values in to the Chinese traditional dance forms, which value harmony and submission to authority; it's revolutionary, but the polish is so great, the tensions are so beautifully contained, it's like a performance by a great classic actress, you have to know how they must feel. Evidently, to be at the top of her game in San Francisco is still considered by the INS to be merely of local importance.
Back to good news: It looks like the Oakland Ballet may come back to life. The Nutcracker, choreographed by their new director Graham Lustig, rehearsed in the dance studios of Mills College, and backed by Clorox, Chevron and the Oakland civic community, played to a packed house at the Paramount Theater and went over to huge success. The crowd included every race and creed, there were many children there, and the spectacle revealed tremendous stagecraft, wit, and charm. It certainly bodes well for their Spring season, with more experimental choreography that may very well be interesting.
On the larger stage, two books come in as very welcome. Jennifer Homans has written the first comprehensive, definitive history of ballet, Apollo's Angels, which places ballet in historical context. She makes it lively reading to find out how Louis XIV forced his nobility to dance attendance upon him and made the fear of the faux pas a literal thing �" if you couldn't dance, you did not have a chance in that society. She brings it forward from there, showing how from the beginning the form was popular �" thousands of ordinary people crowded in, trying to see the spectacles �" which allowed ballet to survive the violent revolutions that overthrew the aristocracies in France, later in Russia. She is probably at her best showing how Russian-emigre Balanchine took the natural attributes of American dance and turned ballet into a spectacle that reflected our lives. It's selling well, for a book that's about to become the standard text in college dance-history courses in the English-speaking world.
Last, let me welcome An Athlete in Tights, Bruce Weber's quasi-pornographic study of the danseur noble Roberto Bolle, who is the purest example of the matinee idol among currently active ballet dancers. As most queers know, Weber invented the Abercrombie look �" porn stars on elephants wearing the clothes all teenagers want to be seen in. And this book, which some might think a retreat from the edge, sneaked in at the end of last year with little notice, perhaps because no-one knew how to review it. I would love to know what John Karr will think of it �" Steven Underhill had not seen it, nor heard of it, when I asked him about it last month. Athlete inhabits the borderland between erotic art, soft porn, and the "physical-culture" study of a model like the immortal Tony Sansone. I think it might belong to the kind of documentary that finds its apogee in the movie Rivers and Tides, the sincere homage of an artist in one medium to a greater artist working in another.
Athlete in Tights is not the perfect marriage of the documentarist and the artist, but it is a fascinating and very welcome wad of gorgeous photographs. Spoiler: no cock shots. Weber's insistence on doing Bolle in gritty black-and-white may stand the test of time, and posed against Renaissance Italian marble sculptures �" the Trevi Fountain and the like �" that have endured centuries of wind and storms and sport the stains of car fumes and acid rain, may strike the exact balance between hard muscle under the surface and the perfect proportions Bolle has trained those muscles to develop, through daily ballet exercises and the adrenaline-pumping exactitudes of performance which bring certain forms into ideal prominence.
It's not new to think of dancers as athletes, it's always taken some doing not to think of the connection, and when the hierarchy of art over sport was up-ended, postmodern contact-improv dancers took to it gleefully, using gymnastics, wrestling and martial-arts moves, and by the 1970s the Joffrey Ballet were doing frankly athletic, bare-legged, bare-chested, all-male hunk-fests that were borderline pornographic.
Bolle is not like that �" he is not pushing anything except perfection. His movements are so beautifully schooled he never makes a mistake, the pirouettes are perfectly placed, the thigh completely rotated, the foot on which he turns is beautifully arched, the smile perfectly cordial, the pecs beautifully chiseled, the nipples just so �" he looks particularly good in a lion skin with maybe a small red cape, as Actaeon or Amynta or the nameless cavalier in Excelsior .
Bolle evokes in me the feelings Shakespeare expressed in his cryptic sonnet: "They that have power to hurt, and will do none." The very mildness and reserve and careful array of Bolle's perfections leads me and many to a kind of unrequited love, one that's somehow social �" everyone feels this way, nobody is entitled to complain; such people, as the Bard says, "who moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow, They are the lords and owners of their faces."
See for yourself. It is a kind of beauty that remains unplumbable, the art conceals itself. Some things really do abide.
The Izzies are announced
The Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee (the "Izzies") announced the 2009-10 performance season award nominees. The winners will be honored in an awards ceremony to be held on Mon., March 14, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, 701 Mission St., SF. The event, which is free and open to the public, will begin with a greeting reception in the lobby at 6 p.m., followed by the awards ceremony at 7 p.m. A full list of this year's nominees follows.
Outstanding Achievement in Choreography:
Wan-Chao Chang, Eurasia, Wan-Chao Dance, Ethnic Dance Festival, Weekend 4
Hsiang-Hsiu Lin, Mix & Match 2010, Lin HH Dance Theatre
Sara Shelton Mann, Tribes/Dominion, Sara Shelton Mann Dancers
Yuri Possokhov, Classical Symphony, San Francisco Ballet
Amy Seiwert, White Noise, Im'ij-re
Outstanding Achievement in Performance �" Individual:
Jenna McClintock, Coppelia, Diablo Ballet
Pascal Molat, for his entire year of performances, including the San Francisco Ballet and The Tosca Project, American Conservatory Theater
Luisa Lopez Saavedra, La Marinera Norte�a, El Tunante
Nol Simonse, for his entire year of performances, including The Tosca Project, American Conservatory Theater
Sofiane Sylve, in the middle, somewhat elevated, San Francisco Ballet
Yuan Yuan Tan, The Little Mermaid, San Francisco Ballet
Outstanding Achievement in Performance �" Ensemble:
Stephanie Bastos, Daniel Brevi, Guy De Chalus , Zkiya Harris, Eyla Moore, Veleda Roehl, Amara Tabor Smith , Adia Tamar Whitaker , and Sonia Whittle , Ampey!, a work-in-progress, 2009 CounterPULSE Performing Diaspora Festival
Jaime Garcia Castilla, Daniel Deivison-Oliviera, Victor Luiz, Gennadi Nedvigin , James Sofranko , and Hansuke Yamamoto , Classical Symphony, San Francisco Ballet
Heather Cooper and Brian Fisher, Another Time, Mark Foehringer Dance Project
Chad Dawson and Nol Simonse, Two Rooms, Stephen Pelton Dance Company
Andrea Faraci and Iveta Pauryte, a season of International Standard Ballroom Dancing
Private Freeman and Yukie Fujimoto, Lettre � Dos lang=FR from Je Me Souviens, lang=FR Sonya Delwaide at ODC
Outstanding Achievement in Performance �" Company:
American Conservatory Theater and various guest artists, The Tosca Project, American Conservatory Theater
Eszterl�nc Hungarian Folk Ensemble , Traditional Dance Cycle from the Village of Magyarszov�t, Ethnic Dance Festival, Weekend 3
Janice Garrett & Charles Moulton, The Illustrated Book of Invisible Stories, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum
Hui Tama Nui lang=FR , Pepe Hau, Ethnic Dance Festival, Weekend 3
Natyalaya, Parvathi, the Divine, Ethnic Dance Festival, Weekend 2
Scott Wells & Dancers, Ball-ist-ic, CounterPULSE
Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design:
Matthew Antaky, lighting design; Christine Darch, costume design; and Frieder Weiss, video design, White Noise, Im'ij-re
Patty-Ann Farrell, lighting design, and Aaron Sencil, costume and prop design, Pepe Hau, Hui Tama Nui
David Finn and Yuri Zhukov, visual design, Classical Symphony, San Francisco Ballet
Mary Louise Geiger, lighting design; Laura Jellinek, scenic design; and Mark Zappone, costume design, Ghosts, San Francisco Ballet
Krissy Keefer, costume design, The Great Liberation, Dance Brigade
Larry Reed, visual design, and ZeJie Zheng, calligraphy design, Good-for-Nothing-Lover, ShadowLight Productions
Outstanding Achievement in Music/Sound/Text:
Abhinaya Dance Company and San Jose Taiko, music, Synergy, Abhinaya Dance Company and San Jose Taiko
The Cultural Heritage Choir and Fua Dia Congo drummers, music, Nzobi, Fua Dia Congo
Hope Mohr and Brenda Hillman, text, Far from Perfect, Hope Mohr Dance
Stellamara, musical adaptation of Strumica/Azade, Eurasia, Wan Chao Dance
Kip Winger, music, Ghosts, San Francisco Ballet
Outstanding Achievement in Restaging/Revival/Reconstruction:
Roslyn Anderson, Petite Mort, lang=FR Smuin Ballet
Sonya Delwaide lang=FR , Lettre � Jos from Je Me Souviens, Sonya Delwaide at ODC
Isabelle Fokine, Petrouchka, San Francisco Ballet
Mythili Kumar and Rasika Kumar, Varsha �" The Rainy Season, Abhinaya Dance Company
Donald Mahler, Continuo, Ballet San Jose
Special Awards:
Brenda Way and ODC: For her vision, commitment, and perseverance to build a major dance center with a broad range of programs and resources for dance professionals, children, and the community.
YAK FILMS/Yoram Savion, Director: For documenting the turf dancing by Oakland youth, particularly those videos that feature the RIP dances recorded at the locations in the Bay Area where other youth have died, and for making them available on YouTube.
Sustained Achievement:
Denise Jourdaine, Stephan Kraeul, and Rex Lewis , co-owners of Imperial Ballroom: For their years of instruction and operation of the Imperial Ballroom in Redwood City, their training of professional ballroom competitors, and their continued management of internationally recognized ballroom competitions.
Mythili Kumar, Founder and Director of Abhinaya Dance Company: For three decades of teaching, directing, and creation in South Indian classical dance forms of Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi, and for providing Bay Area dance audiences with an understanding of the richness in these complex and historical dance forms.
Josefa Villanueva, Co-Founder and Artistic Director, Santa Clara Ballet: For establishing and directing a dance repertory company with her late husband Benjamin Reyes for over 37 years. For offering instruction and training in classical ballet, for creating choreography for the company, and for providing performance opportunities for children and Bay Area professional dancers.