1913 was an infamous year in the history of music and dance, the year that Stravinsky and Nijinsky unleashed Le Sacre du Printemps on an unsuspecting Parisian audience, provoking a riot. But it was also the year that the world went tango mad. All of Europe was dancing it, although …
Give a Woman a Lift takes flight at the Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco
Last week, Jo Kreiter’s company of six female dancers were climbing the walls and swinging from the rafters of the interior of the former premises of the American Can factory, a lofty industrial space now repurposed for dance and theatre.
Their repeated scrambling and failure to reach higher ground recalls …
An American Ballet Theatre Marathon
At the theatre formerly known as the New York State Theater:
Day One: Les Sylphides, The Moor’s Pavane and Gong
Ballet to the People had the pleasure of sitting next to a courtly gentleman who opened the conversation with “I saw Limón dance the Moor.”
Detonated by a …
Shanghai Ballet’s The Butterfly Lovers: the pleasures and perils of cross-cultural ballet
The Butterfly Lovers – one of those hybrid East-meets-West story ballets meant to showcase Chinese command of classical Western technique while celebrating a traditional Chinese theme – blew into Berkeley on a cloud of garishly colored butterfly tutus, courtesy of Shanghai Ballet at Cal Performances. This conventional tale of …
Layla Means Night: Rosanna Gamson seduces audiences at San Francisco’s ODC Theater
Rosanna Gamson’s Layla Means Night, a riff on the Persian fable of Scheherazade, draws audiences into what program notes describe as “an immersive tour through a world of ritual violence and exquisite pleasure.”
The audience of approximately 70 is split into three groups – men, women and a co-ed …