SFDanceworks
Season 4
Cowell Theater, Fort
Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco
June 20th,
2019
A uniting theme, be it
narrative or structural, is by no means a necessity for a shared evening of
choreography. In fact, it can be quite refreshing when a throughline is more or
less absent. Then, as opposed to a program of comparisons and contrasts, each
piece can be experienced for its unique tone, choreographic tenor and formal
characteristics. This is exactly the idea that SFDanceworks, led by Artistic
Director James Sofranko and Associate Artistic Director Danielle Rowe, embodied
for their fourth home season – a varied quintuple bill of contemporary
performance that indeed impressed.
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| Babatunji Johnson in Brett Conway's The Bedroom Photo Valentina Reneff-Olson |
The program’s three
world premieres were strong, especially Brett Conway’s The Bedroom. Amidst deconstructed bedroom furniture (a mattress on
the floor, a steel bedframe and a lone chair), a quartet of equally
deconstructed, yet keenly visceral, memory unfolded. Memories of relationships,
memories of togetherness, memories of past love. A series of penetrating solos
and duets brought these remembrances to life; the emotional mosaic filling and
piercing the air. Each cast member contributed such an authenticity to Conway’s
diverse and captivating syntax: Katerina Eng’s stunning extensions and
exquisite articulation; Dennis Adams-Zivolich’s incomparable clarity of space
and shape; Laura O’Malley’s gripping, impassioned physicality; and Babatunji
Johnson’s incredible dynamic range and varied intonation, from the sharpest of
staccato movements to the most fluid legato.
As the lights went up on
O’Malley’s Room for Error,
charged-ness was evident. J.S. Bach’s Prelude in C Minor, with its pulsing,
unending patterns of sixteenth notes, sang through the dimly lit atmosphere. A protagonist,
danced by Nicholas Korkos, began to negotiate and navigate his personal journey
through space and time; one that included a partner (Katie Lake) and another
presence, presumably another aspect of himself (David Calhoun). A state of calm
and peace seemed unattainable; off-balancedness and uncertainty his status quo.
Shifts and changes in levels and direction spoke of his frantic existence, as
did haggard hands and breaks in the line of the arms, legs and spine. Ticking
clocks haunted the score, adding to the unrelenting tone. With Room for Error, O’Malley has painted a
nuanced portrait of an individual plagued by a tortured constancy.
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| Andrew Brader and Katie Lake in Andrea Schermoly's It's Uncle Photo Valentina Reneff-Olson |
With It’s Uncle, Andrea Schermoly astutely
captured the essence of unpredictability. As the dance began, it very much felt
like a Dance Theater work. An ensemble entered, dressed in black, to scratchy,
high-pitched electronic music (the score wasn’t my favorite). They cycled
through a hodgepodge of vocabulary and movement – from dance team calisthenics
to highly technical choreography to gesture to club moves. It was impossible to
anticipate what might happen from one minute to the next. Then Andrew Brader
joined the action and things got even more Dance Theater-odd. But true to that
compositional style, strangeness is always informed by powerful human themes,
which evolved here in the work’s second scene. Brader danced a heartwrenching
solo that eventually morphed into a potently vulnerable, raw pas de deux with
Lake. Postures were framed by desperate searching, mental anguish, frenetic
shaking and pained, dramatic falls to the ground.
Rounding out
SFDanceworks’ fourth home season were two pieces that, while not world
premieres, both had an element of premiere to them: the West Coast premiere of
Alejandro Cerrudo’s Cloudless (2013)
and the Bay Area premiere of Olivier Wevers’ Silent Scream (2018). I liked both and neither was too long in
terms of overall duration. At the same time, each had sections that lagged a
bit, which made them seem on the lengthier side.
I found the title of
Cerrudo’s work particularly intriguing because I saw the opposite – not a
cloudless landscape, but a cloud-filled one. Though the stage was again dimly
lit and Ana Lopez and O’Malley were costumed in dark burgundy, the choreography
was like clouds shifting, rolling and changing shape in the heavens. Throughout
the duet, Lopez and O’Malley formed and reformed an abstract series of
sculptural vignettes, postures and silhouettes, almost always in contact with
each other and with varying tempi and intensity. Several of these stood out as
particularly noteworthy, like when the pair touched foreheads in a deep second
position plié or when Lopez barely lifted O’Malley off the ground, allowing her
feet to gently tread through the air.
Wevers’ Silent Scream closed the evening, an ensemble
work that looks back to the era of silent movies, while simultaneously
contemplating what they and their themes may have to say in present day. First,
we meet a madcap group of silent movie characters, lit by footlights and
shin-busters. Stepping and hopping off balance, turning in their knees and
Charleston-ing about the stage, the group looked straight out of the 1920s. But
there was more to Silent Scream, more
than an exercise in nostalgia. Gender norms and assumptions were challenged
with several of the cast. And deep messages were afoot. Messages about being
ignored, no matter how loud the objection and messages about how visibility is
unequivocally linked with being heard.
