The plan for Ballet San Jose to link up with the American Ballet Theatre began last August, said BSJ Executive Director Stephanie Ziesel as “a very simple lamenting between sisters. I was saying, 'I don’t know what to do for this company.'”
Say this about Helgi Tomasson: He understands little girls. For proof, look at his Nutcracker, which opened Friday night at the War Memorial Opera House. It goes straight to a little girl’s dreams of visiting faraway places, having big adventures and meeting, yes, a handsome prince.
Back in 1984, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company premiered a work called Pictures at the City Center in New York. What struck me that night was its familial quality, unmistakable despite Cunningham’s uncompromising style and system.
“We’re inviting Rodin to be our teacher. What can we learn?” Muriel Maffre, ballerina turned curator, was asking her dance class in Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center auditorium.
Plenty, and a fair exchange. Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), after all, learned from dancers, beginning with the scarf-swirling Loie Fuller, but most notably from Isadora Duncan, the California iconoclast and mother of modern dance.
Resin, a stunning new ballet, will — no, I can’t help it — stick with you for a long time. Created for the Alonzo King LINES Ballet by its eponymous founder and set to an array of recorded Sephardic melodies, Resin, a cohesive suite of dance for solos, duos, and ensembles is over 40 minutes long and continuously spellbinding.
Mark Morris has said that one of the things he finds puzzling about Romeo and Juliet ballets is that when the couple awakens after their night of nuptial passion, Juliet's still wearing toe shoes. When modern choreographers snipe at toe shoes, they're drawing distinctions between ballet's contrivances and modern dance's lack thereof.
Were it not the brainchild of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson, a festival marking the San Francisco Ballet's 75th anniversary by presenting 10 new ballets in one week (three programs in all) would be regarded as a fool's errand. Some fool. Some errand.
It's a success. Not all the ballets are fabulous, but the music and dancing that propels them is unequivocally wonderful, permeating the air in the War Memorial Opera House with a sense of fizzy delight.
Like freelancers in other fields — journalism comes to mind — Laura Jackson, one of the six finalists in the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra’s search for a music director to succeed Kent Nagano, flies in, forges bonds, does her job, and moves on. What she’d like to do is find a place where she can stay.
From 2004 to 2007, Jackson, 40, was assistant conductor at the Atlanta Symphony, where she was also an American Conducting Fellow, the League of American Orchestra's program for promising young conductors.
At opposite sides of the Bay over the weekend, two productions of Giselle highlighted two ballerinas who are, in effect, at opposite ends of their careers. Nina Ananiashvili, artistic director of the State Ballet of Georgia and in her 40s, danced the title role Saturday night during the troupe's Cal Performances engagement at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall.
Virgil Thomson isn't the composer who pops automatically to mind when you think of dance, but he was a major presence at San Francisco Ballet over the weekend.
Predictably, the two versions of Merce Cunningham's eyeSpace seen on consecutive nights of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's engagement at Stanford University last weekend, presented by Stanford Lively Arts, looked so different from each other as to be separate creations. What was less predictable was the difference in their affect, their effect.
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, as has become widely known, does not dance to music, nor does the music play for the dancers. Both exist in the same time frame, but they're created separately, as are lighting and decor. When movements or sounds will occur are determined randomly, using chance methods that go back to the earliest collaborations between Cunningham and John Cage.
Cage's philosophies remain a singular influence, nowhere more so than for composers who work with the company, where Cunningham, 88, is still in charge, still making dances.
As we begin the new year, San Francisco Classical Voice takes a look back at the performances of 2007 that some of our reviewers most enjoyed. As with any such list, the choices are entirely subjective. Each of these critics attended a large number of performances in their areas of specialization throughout the year, and so was able to choose from a broad range of music (in some cases, listing events they attended but that another SFCV critic reviewed).
American Ballet Theatre, fresh from its fall season in New York City, brought two programs of mixed repertory to Zellerbach Hall last week, presented by Cal Performances. This was in itself reason for celebration. That the ballets were set to richly varied music proved to be the icing on the cake.
Edward Villella was new to the New York City Ballet when Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine were in the studio with the dancers, making Agon. It was 1957. "Neither of them talked much to us — it wasn't what they did,” Villella said Sunday, after Miami City Ballet, where he's artistic director, ended its visit to Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall. “They just rolled up their sleeves, and the energy permeated the room.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is an M.D. and plays a Bechstein. His newest book, Musicophilia, will be published this month by Random House.
The impact of music on the human brain, Sacks writes, cannot be overstated. It's as important as language. "I'm impressed that a huge amount of the brain is involved in aspects of music,” he said recently from New York. “Keeping time to the music is a purely human thing. No animal can do this.
Mozart Dances, which finally arrived here via Cal Performances last Thursday, achieved the impossible by exceeding its rapturous reviews. Jane Glover, conducting the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and joined by Garrick Ohlsson and Yoko Nazaki on piano, gave a performance of warm dynamics and perfect unity. Ohlsson played each of the three Mozart works as if he and the dancers had spent their entire lives together, instead of rehearsing days before.
Mark Morris, whose association with Cal Performances spans more than a decade, is bringing something completely different to Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley this week.Mozart Dances, unlike last year's King Arthur, and of course also unlike The Hard Nut, which returns in December for its biennial holiday run, has no story — except Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Mozart Dances is set to three of his works. Two piano concertos, No. 11 in F (K. 413) and No. 27 in B-flat (K.
The plan for Ballet San Jose to link up with the American Ballet Theatre began last August, said BSJ Executive Director Stephanie Ziesel as “a very simple lamenting between sisters. I was saying, 'I don’t know what to do for this company.'”
Say this about Helgi Tomasson: He understands little girls. For proof, look at his Nutcracker, which opened Friday night at the War Memorial Opera House. It goes straight to a little girl’s dreams of visiting faraway places, having big adventures and meeting, yes, a handsome prince.
As Ballet San Jose prepares for its annual Nutcracker performances, which begin Satur
Back in 1984, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company premiered a work called Pictures at the City Center in New York. What struck me that night was its familial quality, unmistakable despite Cunningham’s uncompromising style and system.
“We’re inviting Rodin to be our teacher. What can we learn?” Muriel Maffre, ballerina turned curator, was asking her dance class in Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center auditorium.
Resin, a stunning new ballet, will — no, I can’t help it — stick with you for a long time. Created for the Alonzo King LINES Ballet by its eponymous founder and set to an array of recorded Sephardic melodies, Resin, a cohesive suite of dance for solos, duos, and ensembles is over 40 minutes long and continuously spellbinding.
