Jaime Robles – Page 7 – Repeat Performances

March 16, 2019

The comedy of inappropriate misappropriation

“Is there a special place in hell for people who appropriate their own culture?” So asks Raj in Dipika Guha’s The Yoga Play, which recently opened at San Francisco Playhouse. The line gets a laugh, as did many lines in this hilarious look at how and why Americans misappropriate other cultures in our voracious curiosity to inhabit the world in all its wild and beautiful diversity. The play opens with Joan (Susi Damilano) talking out at the audience while behind her is the...

Categories: theater

March 9, 2019

Love en pointe: San Francisco Ballet’s “Sleeping Beauty”

The Sleeping Beauty is one of the cornerstones of classical ballet. With luscious music by Tchaikovsky and exquisite and imperishable choreography by Marius Petipa, the ballet was first performed at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1890. Even today, the ballet is a loved ornament in the repertoire of the Mariiinsky Ballet, or Kirov Ballet, remaining so through the company’s many transformations. It’s one of those ballets that any classically trained choreographer...

Categories: dance

February 23, 2019

The 7 Fingers flights of desire

The acrobatic love duet between Émilie and Julien Silliau is punctuated with the snap of a fan and the crack of a whip in Reversible, the latest creation by Les 7 Doigts, which enchanted audiences this weekend at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall. The sounds of whip and fan add rhythmic bite to the voice over of Ionesco’s absurdist play, The Bald Soprano. Like other productions by written, directed and choreographed by Gypsy Snider from her Montreal–based arts...

Categories: dance, theater

Howards End, America

The new opera by Bay Area team, librettist Claudia Stevens and composer Allen Shearer, ran this past weekend at Z Space in San Francisco as part of Earplay’s 2019 season. Howards End, America is based on the 1910 novel by E.M. Forster, and the opera is an ambitious endeavor, librettist and composer opting not only to set a complicated and subtle story but also to place it into a milieu that is easily read by contemporary Americans as familiar and pertinent to their lives. Set in...

Categories: opera

February 14, 2019

Inhabiting Space & Time: SF Ballet’s Program 3

Harald Lander’s ballet “Etudes” is like every ballet class ever taken all rolled into one 40-minute performance. It begins with one ballerina center front stage doing a small plié (knee bend to you civilians), and then running offstage after a quick and whimsical shrug, leaving behind 12 dancers standing at ballet barres on three sides of the stage. So opens this delightful – and wryly humorous – tribute to the life of the dancer, and the most lovable choreography of San Francisco...

Categories: dance

February 12, 2019

The wondrously shifting Kaleidoscope of SF Ballet

San Francisco Ballet Program 2: Kaleidoscope closes with Justin Peck’s gorgeously athletic “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming”, one of three short ballets that opened the program’s run on Tuesday. Dressed in shimmery athletic wear – shorts, T-shirts, tights and sneakers – the company dancers formed in circles and shifting lines on the darkened stage with curtains removed revealing the starkly black backstage. A line of small bright squares of fixtures pour light forward toward the audience...

Categories: dance