Jaime Robles – Page 55 – Repeat Performances

April 25, 2009

Big Art Group at Yerba Buena

Sending Out a Stylish SOS The stage was filled with screens; downstage center, three cameras faced upstage into the screens. Wires, cables and the stark trees of tripods clustered downstage. From the ceiling a grid of pipes suspended projectors over the no-man’s-land between stage and audience. It was all part of the act as the New York–based Big Art Group performed its own techno Big Top at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this past weekend, in its most...

Categories: theater

April 7, 2009

San Francisco Performances presents Compagnie Marie Chouinard

The mysterious, the sexual “At the root of each new work there is always what I call the ‘mystery’—an unknown wavelength that calls out to me ... My work consists of capturing this primordial wavelength, of ‘tuning’ it in a sense, and of arranging it in space and time with a structure and form proper to it.” So writes Marie Chouinard about her work as a choreographer. No description could be more exact for the works that her dance group, Compagnie Marie...

Categories: dance

March 22, 2009

Chora Nova at First Congregational in Berkeley

Hungarian rapture The Berkeley-based Chora Nova presented a concert of choral works primarily by Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály on Sunday, March 22. The second half of the concert, titled “Hungarian Rhapsodies,” presented several of Kodály’s compositions based on Hungarian folk melodies. In his program notes, Artistic Director Paul Flight quotes Kodály on the nature of folk music: “To write a folksong is as much beyond the bounds of possibility as to write a...

Categories: music

February 22, 2009

Cecilia Bartoli at Cal Performances

Satin and sparkle The dress said it all. Acres of iridescent midnight blue satin embellished with glittering, silvery rococo decorations, a bodice with no visual support above which lay fields of feminine pulchritude, and an ornament-bordered train that went on for some yards. Dazzling touches of light on that smooth skin: necklace and flashing ring. When Cecilia Bartoli walked on the Zellerbach Auditorium stage in an outfit that could have been the physical manifestation...

Categories: opera

February 21, 2009

Pappa Tarahumara at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Sailing into the Past Out of 12 dancers in Japan’s Pappa Tarahumara dance-theater group, seven danced in Ship in a View when the work debuted in 1997 in Tokyo. Director Hiroshi Kioke has worked with one of his dancers...

Categories: dance

February 6, 2009

‘Monsters and Prodigies’ at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Hybrid life The partially open curtain reveals a man naked from the waist up. He has clattered to the front of the stage, and he reveals in words what he disguises behind a waist-high screen inscribed with a white circle—that he is a centaur: a half-man, half-horse monster. After telling a series of histories about deformed children caused by an “excess” of sperm, he draws a parallel between himself and a manmade phenomenon of Baroque opera: the castrato. The...

Categories: opera