Jaime Robles – Page 12 – Repeat Performances

June 17, 2018

A glittering Ring

The lyrics and even the action of the Ring Cycle are a series of repeating stories in which different characters retell past and future moments, all of which move inexorably toward the culminating deaths in Götterdämerung, the cycle’s concluding opera. It’s almost as if Wagner was worried the audience might forget the storyline during the cycle’s 17 hours of high-octane emotion. More likely, he was just obsessed, a living paragon of Romantic excess. Of the many stories sung,...

Categories: opera

June 12, 2018

Grabbing the Ring at SF Opera

The opening music of Wagner’s Ring Cycle begins with a single note played by the lower strings. Low woodwinds join in and then horns, until slowly a chord is formed. Wagner believed this first low note was a primal sound, an aural indication of a first slouching-toward-creation. It’s hard to argue his interpretation, for the sound as it carried out from the orchestra on Tuesday’s opening night seemed saturated with the terror of newness and ominous birth. As quickly as the notes cohered...

Categories: opera

May 12, 2018

Berkeley Rep and the flight of angels

In the closing scenes of Angels in America: Perestroika, Roy Cohn rages that he is “the heart of modern conservatism.” It’s a chilling observation. Cohn as a young prosecutor pushed, unethically, for the death of Ethel Rosenberg and was chief counsel of Joe McCarthy’s HUA team. As a character in Berkeley Rep’s seven-and-a-half-hour revival of Kushner’s award-winning play, he is portrayed as crass, manipulative and despicably unethical; in the real world, his imprint can be...

Categories: theater

May 11, 2018

Each year a newer, more contemporary Smuin

“How can I describe you?” So starts the music by Nico Muhly and singer Teitur that is the inspiration for Val Caniparoli’s wry and sassy ballet, If I Were A Sushi Roll, which Smuin premiered in San Francisco on April 20. The ballet continued its run as the centerpiece of company’s Dance Series 2 this past week at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, before moving on to Mountain View and Carmel. The singer goes on as the Smuin ensemble, costumed as Men and Women in...

Categories: dance

April 21, 2018

SF Ballet’s Unbound dances on

The second program of San Francisco Ballet’s Unbound: A Festival of New Work presented work by choreographers Myles Thatcher, Cathy Marston and David Dawson. Marston and Dawson trained at the Royal Ballet, and Thatcher was trained at SF Ballet, where he currently dances with the company while developing his choreographic skills. Thatcher’s Otherness opened the evening, tackling the difficult question of how social roles affect and distort an individual’s identity, narrowing...

Categories: dance

April 9, 2018

Other Minds speaks out

In his lecture on sound poetry, Italian poet and artist Enzo Minarelli briefly described his practice, saying all his sound poems began with words. That may seem obvious and not much help as a definition, but in the context of the Other Minds festival that ran last week at ODC Theater in San Francisco it made startling and concise sense. For the sound, rather than the meaning, of words was essential to the pieces performed. How each performer broke words into sound units and reassembled those...

Categories: music