dance – Page 5 – Repeat Performances

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

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

February 9, 2018

“Rap on Race” redux: Spectrum Dance Theater takes on James Baldwin and Margaret Mead

In 1971 anthropologist Margaret Mead and writer James Baldwin met to talk about race. Their conversation took place over two and a half days and was released in audio only. Actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith has used the tapes of this conversation over the past 30-plus years, in the classroom and on stage, its text morphing into various theatrical forms. In a recent version, the choreographer Donald Byrd used Deavere Smith’s version of the text as part of an 85-minute dance–theater...

Categories: dance

February 4, 2018

Circa at Cal Performances

Defying genres and gravity Thirteen performers cast a spell of darkness and dislocation last Saturday at Zellerbach Hall, where Cal Performances invited a group to do what they called “blurring boundaries.” Defying the usual artistic genres, Circa, an Australian circus troupe, joined forces with two opera singers, director Yaron Lifschitz and composer Quincy Grant to reinvent Claudio Monteverdi’s early opera, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. Written in 1639, and based...

Categories: dance, opera

January 23, 2018

San Francisco Ballet’s reawakening of “The Sleeping Beauty”

San Francisco Ballet opened its season last week with performances of the classical masterpiece of Imperial Russian ballet, The Sleeping Beauty. The company, showcasing many of its young principal dancers during the run, which continues to February 7, showed that this quintessential classical ballet still ignites the imagination, presenting a soul-lifting mix of charm and grandeur. The ballet was choreographed by Marius Petipa to Tchaikovsky’s score in 1890, and SF Ballet’s...

Categories: dance

December 15, 2017

MMDG in their cracking good ‘Hard Nut’

The Mark Morris Dance Group sleighed into town this past weekend with their holiday masterpiece, A Hard Nut. Now in its 26th year, this holiday treat is as fresh as the day it first appeared, decorated in red and green and swaddled with svelte ’50s–’60s fashions. A satirical updating of the Christmas specialty ballet...

Categories: dance