Jaime Robles – Page 13 – Repeat Performances

March 21, 2018

Love’s Uncertainty Principle

Heisenberg’s principle provides a mathematical equation for the impossibility of predicting both the position and momentum of a particle precisely. It’s a concept that, with its discovery, immediately splashed over into everyday parlance. As a metaphor, what could more accurately describe life? Or, as Simon Stephen’s play asserts, love? Heisenberg, now at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater, is the British playwright’s complex tribute to love. Complex because neither the two characters...

Categories: theater

March 20, 2018

My heart belongs to Jerry

True confession: I love Jerome Robbins’ choreography. As much as I admire and respect Balanchine’s choreography and his establishment of one of the most prominent and innovative ballet companies in the world, I love Robbins more. So it was with anticipation that I attended San Francisco Ballet’s Program 5: Robbins: Ballet and Broadway. Robbins’ choreography is ideal for SF Ballet: it combines the purity of neoclassical ballet with warmth, inventiveness and wit. All this was most...

Categories: dance

March 15, 2018

“A Number” counts as many

British playwright Caryl Churchill’s A Number opened at the Aurora Theater’s upstairs black box, Harry’s UpStage, this past week in a fast moving production. A short thought-provoking play of five scenes with two actors, A Number calls on a wide spectrum of emotions to be put forth succinctly and powerfully. Intriguingly, Michael Gambon played Salter and Daniel Craig played the three sons in the 2002 London premier. A Number premiered a mere six years after...

Categories: theater

March 9, 2018

Company Wayne McGregor on the edge

Set to the electronic music of Jlin, who won the “Best Difficult Second Album” award at the 2017 AIM Music Awards, Company Wayne McGregor’s newest work Autobiography returned this company of formidable dancers and choreographers to San Francisco. Presented by SF Performances at the Yerba Buena Center for the Art Theater, the company’s sleek and endlessly compelling dance reveals that the demanding, for both dancers and audience, can be breathlessly wondrous. Notes to...

Categories: dance

March 8, 2018

Qui Nguyen’s “Vietgone” at The Strand

Vietgone, the 2015 play by Qui Nguyen, recently opened at A.C.T,’s Strand Theater. Like many of the productions given at this intimate house with its ultra-contemporary feel, the play is edgy and transformative, attempting to showcase a wider perspective on the community in all its dazzling diversity. And like many of the performances presented, Vietgone is intriguing and entertaining, even as it steps outside the strictures of classical theater. Vietgone is a...

Categories: theater

February 20, 2018

Program 3 is Distinctly SF Ballet

San Francisco Ballet’s Program 3: Distinctly SF Ballet presented three pieces by choreographers involved directly with the company: Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson, Val Caniparoli, who joined the company in 1973 and continues as principal character dancer and choreographer, and Myles Thatcher, who joined the company in 2010 as a dancer. That each of these choreographers is a product of his times is clear in the pieces chosen for the...

Categories: dance