2 posts tagged “dance”
Talk about your "mixed" programs. I tend to like SF Ballet's lineups of short pieces better than its full-length ballets, but sometimes a mixed program makes me wonder who the hell put those works together. That was true Tuesday night when I went to Program 4, which included:
- Paul Taylor's "Spring Rounds," a charming trifle appropriate to the season. His works look more substantial with his own company, though, and if you're in SF, you can see the group at Yerba Buena the last week of March.
- Helgi Tomasson's "Chi-Lin," based on Chinese mythical animals (the "chi-lin" is a unicorn) and apparently intended as an homage to the excellent ballerina Yuan-Yuan Tan. I'm not a big fan of Helgi's choreography; it tends to look like uninspired filler, and he has yet to create anything that moves me. I give him points for doing something different in this piece...but have to take those points away again for the cheesy "Oriental" theme and the totally superfluous fireworks at the end. Even Yuan-Yuan Tan can't elevate this material, and you have to wonder what she thought of the present. Oh, a gift for me, and you made it? How nice, and it's...a unicorn sweatshirt made with puffy paint and a Bedazzler...uh, thanks, I think?
- Wayne McGregor's "Eden/Eden," the piece I actually came to see.
McGregor is a resident choreographer at London's Royal Ballet, and has the resident company, Random Dance, at Sadler's Wells. He never had any ballet training, yet he's now an in-demand choreographer for ballet companies. "Eden/Eden," originally created for the Stuttgart Ballet (SF Ballet is the second company to perform it), is about a most unconventional dance topic: human cloning. It begins with a video installation about Dolly the sheep and genetic modification, and the music for the piece is by Steve Reich, with various voices talking about cloning.
Now, I have great respect for dance as a medium; it can beautifully express the emotional and the abstract, including things that are hard to convey in other art forms. Dance can show you longing or despair or ambivalence in one or a few gestures, where it would take a novel paragraphs or pages. But dance is not necessarily the best genre for making an argument about a scientific or political issue--as they say, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," or in this case, "dancing about cloning is like painting about flavor." When I saw the ballet's Web site note that the piece "boldly confronts the issue of cloning," I thought, Confronts? Is someone being served? Is an angry dance-off about to go down? Is W going to change his mind about stem cell research if he sees this dance?
Well, conceptual shakiness aside, the dancing is most interesting. "Eden/Eden" opens with one dancer rising through a trap door in the floor. Gradually the dancers multiply to nine, all of them in flesh-colored costumes and bald caps, so that they're androgynous and hard to distinguish. Midway, costumes descend from above, and the dancers pull the caps off--it appears they're becoming more human or at least learning to look the part.
It's a brave new world in "Eden/Eden," but it's not clear how to interpret that. You could view the situation as the clones taking over the world. Or you could view it as the clones becoming human, which is what I thought, perhaps because art itself tends to argue against a Borg view of humanity--no matter how much you struggle for uniformity, individuality keeps poking through the proverbial bald cap.
Likewise, the movement is a weird hybrid that could be multiply interpreted: it's kind of alien, kind of technical, kind of Dionysian--as if the dancers are android Stretch Armstrongs, hyperextended, arms and legs flailing, fast, but always in control (in other words, right up Muriel Maffre's alley). Besides Maffre, the men are really strong, with some of the most interesting lifts and steps.
"Eden/Eden" is definitely an original. I don't think it "confronts" the question "What is human?" more effectively or emotionally than, say, Blade Runner (and I mean that as a compliment to the movie), but if the argument isn't art, the movement is.
Saturday, Ericka and I went to SF Ballet's program 1, including the amazing "Artifact Suite" by William Forsythe. It's thrilling choreography: fast, fiendishly difficult, and adventurous (instead of your typical blackout scene changes, the weighted curtain cracks down on the stage at several points, lifting seconds later on a new configuration of dancers already in motion). The dance looks like it could whirl out of control at any moment, yet it's anything but sloppy and is a true work of art, as mesmerizing as a ritual. Long, tall Muriel Maffre--sadly, in her last season before retirement--is perfect for the choreography, her limbs cutting through the air like windmill blades on overdrive.
There aren't any more productions this year, but keep an eye on next season--SFB usually keeps pieces in repertory for two or three years. Or, to see more of Forsythe's work, catch his company at Cal Performances 2/22 and 2/23.
And if that wasn't fun enough, after the ballet we hit Tartine bakery in the mission, which, shockingly, neither of us had visited before. I heartily recommend the grilled cheese with a different, excellent cheese in each of its three sections. My devil's food cake was yummy, but I think Ericka's Scharffenberger pudding beat it hands-down.
