Dasha Bulatova – Repeat Performances

June 21, 2019

Welcoming the summer in the Garden of Memory

Held each year on the summer solstice, the Garden of Memory at the Chapel of the Chimes is an experience that no Oakland resident should miss. As the sun sets, over fifty experimental musical performances congregate in the columbarium’s many magnificent rooms to commemorate the longest day of the year. This annual event, which began in 1996 and held into one of the Bay Area’s most exquisite places, has exploded in popularity over the last few years. This year, big names in the world of...

Categories: music

May 27, 2019

Not so safe choreography at SAFEhouse

At a small gallery space in the Tenderloin on May 17, SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts presented three performances developed during its RAW (resident artist workshop) program. Several Bay Area choreographers created three dynamic pieces that overlapped in their consideration of intimacy, boundaries, and the creative process. The evening opened with Steven Horner’s Encountering, performed by himself in the round and hinging on heavy audience participation. Each seated spectator...

Categories: dance

December 6, 2018

The comfort of being a face in the crowd in “Alone Together”

For its final production of the 2018 season, ODC Theater featured Of Iron and Diamonds V3: Alone Together, an entertaining piece full of self-conscious humor and dynamic reframing of what it means to perform and to watch. This reversal is built into the theater’s arrangement: the audience sits onstage, facing the tiered seating where much of the action happens. Performed on December 6, the piece opens with audience and performers peering at each other from the across the room,...

Categories: dance

October 11, 2018

“ECHO / riding the rapids” in a flurry of symbols

“Doesn’t he look like he’s trying to get into a body?” asks Sara Shelton Mann, director of ECHO / riding the rapids, leaving her seat in the audience to join one of her principal dancers on stage. The dancers’ responses, after she resumes her seated anonymity, range from graceful to violent, ultimately crystallizing in a symbolic reality where every decision reflects a previous one. Their performance on October 11 at ODC Theater built a world through solo and paired movement...

Categories: dance

October 4, 2018

Sappho’s body is breaking in “extreme lyric I”

Translating a translation highlights the fragility and multiplicity of meaning. A coproduction of Hope Mohr Dance and ODC Theater, extreme lyric I directly challenges the stability of gender and identity by embodying Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. Although Mohr intends to “shed postmodernism with this work and investigate the lyric,” a precise, definable sense of self, the self implied by the I of the title, remains just out of reach. Sappho’s poetry,...

Categories: dance