| A
Rich Diversity  What
is Bay Area dance, and where is it going?
by
Rita Felciano
Bay
Area dance, as we know it, for all intent and purpose
is about thirty years old. Not that there was no dance
around before that time. The late Lou Harrison remembered
that in the 30's he got a lot of jobs dancing in San
Francisco—since he was the only male around!
San Francisco Ballet, founded in 1933, is the oldest
ballet company in the country. Oakland Ballet was founded
in 1965. In modern dance Anna Halprin and Welland Lathrop
had a modern company in the forties and Ruth Beckford,
who danced with them, founded the first recreational
modern dance department in the country at Oakland Department
of Parks and Recreation in 1947.
Still
dance didn't hit the popular radar screen until Margaret
Jenkins, after studying with Merce Cunningham and performing
in Twyla Tharp's first company, returned to San Francisco
and started teaching in 1972 and the Margaret Jenkins
Dance Company the following year. Jenkins had come home
to work. Brenda Way and her Oberlin Dance Collective
(now ODC/SF) traveled west in a painted school bus in
1976 as part of the post-hippy influx of Easterners.
Between those two choreographers, modern dance began
to get respectably-sized audiences and a modicum of
critical attention. Terry Sendgraff's pioneering work
on trapeze and Deborah Vaughan's Dimensions Dance Theater,
an African American company with both contemporary and
traditional repertoire, received much less attention
despite the fact that they started their influential
work in the East Bay around the same time.
Today
the Bay Area has legitimate—though ultimately unprovable—claims
to being the second largest dance community in the country.
It's a community that is fractured, anarchical and in
constant renewal but also one that shows signs of having
settled into long-term stability.
The
fact that the Bay Area is such a hospitable place for
dance has something to do with its traditional isolation
from the center of powers in the East. But it also has
historical roots. In addition to the gold diggers and
railway builders, the 19th century sent anarchists and
political revolutionaries escaping from repressive European
governments to the Bay Area. They created a climate
that still pervades local politics but also fostered
an atmosphere hospitable to artistic iconoclast such
as the Beat poets and the hippie movement. Dancers who
wanted to climb walls, call up the spirit of deplaced
people, use sports' imagery and insist on incorporating
speech into their movements, fit right in.
If
Bay Area dance has to be characterized by any one feature
it would have to be by the breath of its practitioners.
The twenty-five year old Ethnic Festival regularly auditions
over a hundred companies for the two-dozen or so slots
on its June Festival. Many of the so-called community
groups have a hard time making it into the Festival
since the competition has become stiff. Some of these
world dance ensembles are professional in anything but
their name. EDF dancers range from ensembles serving
specific cultural groups-Irish, Greek, Mexican, African
American-to companies such as Westwind International
Folk Ensemble, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, or Nei Lei Hulu I
Ka Wekiu which attract dancers from all walks of life
and cultural backgrounds.
Some
of these traditional companies are also beginning to
experiment with re-contextualizing their art forms such
as performing Flamenco in pants, belly dance in peasant
skirts and blouses and Kathak in cowboy hats. This opening
of established forms and styles may ultimately inject
new energy into fairly fixed forms of expression.
From
the world of classical European dance, San Francisco
Ballet nicely fits into the Bay Area's pattern of diversity.
SFB has probably the broadest perspective on repertoire
of any ballet company in the country. Just this year
artistic director Helgi Tomasson followed a hunch and
commissioned a complete unknown, Russian-born and Royal
Danish Ballet based Alexei Ratmansky who repaid the
trust with a witty and sunny Le Carnaval des Animaux.
Oakland
Ballet, which is re-thinking its identity under the
leadership of new Artistic Director Karen Brown, for
many years made a name for itself with a repertoire
that resurrected works from the Diaghilev era, Americana
pieces and new choreography. It's not yet clear what
OB's repertoire eventually will look like.
The
Bay Area also is home to a number of sometimes struggling
but surviving second-tier ballet companies: Smuin Ballet/SF
is a populist and popular one choreographer company.
Alonzo King has been rethinking the classical vocabulary
for his Lines Ballet for the last twenty years. Ballet
San Jose Silicon Valley, sometimes it seems, is surviving
on the sheer will power and passion of its Artistic
Director Dennis Nahat. Other smaller ballet ensembles
are the Lawrence Pech Dance Ensemble, Diablo Ballet
at the edge of the Bay Area in Walnut Creek and the
Mark Foehringer Dance Project, recently located to San
Francisco from Mountain View.
The
longevity and relative good health of Bay Area ballet
has also spawned a number of promising choreographers
who may be shaping of what we will see in the years
to come; Julia Adam and Yuri Possokhov (SFB), Michael
Lowe (OB) and Amy Seiwert (Smuin Ballet/SF).
The
times are long gone when the dance world could be neatly
divided into modern and ballet. In the Bay Area the
modern/postmodern spectrum is more colorful than the
city's unofficial flag, the rainbow banner. Austin Forbord
and Shelley Trott in their documentary Artists in Exile:
A Story of Modern Dance in San Francisco (www.raptproductions.com)
make the point that artists who accept the "exile"
of being in the Bay Area do so because they value the
freedom to experiment and work outside established hierarchical
structures. No doubt, there is truth to this argument
and explains not only the number but the sheer variety
of individual artists working here. Since no one artistic
personality dominates—Joe Goode probably comes the closest—heterodoxy
is the norm in Bay Area modern/postmodern dance. It
ranges from Cheryl Chaddick's full-bodied modernist
to Nancy Karp's coolly formal, Reginald Ray Savage's
jazz-inflected to Scott Wells' contact improv-based,
Fellow Traveler's imagistically theatrical and Axis
Dance Company's integrated expressions.
Perhaps
in part because of the area's relatively benign climate,
site-specific, often outdoors works have played an important
role in the Bay Area whether in the form of activist
dance theater as developed by Sara Shelton Mann's Contraband
or in the more elegantly subdued versions by Joanna
Haigood's Zaccho Dance Theatre.
Contact
improv—there is a large community of avocational contact
improvisers here-dominated young dance makers' interest
in the eighties and early nineties when some of them
shifted their focus inward, becoming interested in opening
creative channels through release technique and other
physical practices (i.e. yoga, martial arts, authentic
movements). But since Bay Area dance makers are a highly
individualist lot it, the impetus towards syncretism
should not surprise. Dance Brigade, for instance, incorporated
aerial works, ballet, dancers in wheel chairs and acrobatics
into their spoken, sung and danced Nutcracker Sweetie
already in the eighties.
Dance
theater may not have been spawned in the Bay Area but
it continues its attraction for dance makers who take
the freedom to combine movement with video, clowning,
language, elaborate props and often a sense of humor,
sometimes born out of desperation. A younger generation,
some of them with pronounced predilection for pedestrian
movements—Erika Shuch, Tanya Calamoneri, Jessica Fudim,
Christy Funsch—are taking these options into yet unexplored
directions.
While
the influx of artists into the Bay Area continues—Alma
Esperanza Cunningham is a recent arrival—Bay Area dance
also shows signs of maturing. Yes, people move away,
sometimes even to New York, but as last year's Dance/USA's
study "Dance in the San Francisco Bay Area: A Needs
Assessment" shows, dancers come here for the long
run. Seventy-nine percent of Dance/USA's sample respondents,
with an average of 11 years of professional experience,
say that they have spent more than 50% of their careers
in the Bay Area. The dot com boom/bust cycle displaced
some artists but not as many as was initially feared.
Performance spaces closed, artists found others. These
days the East Bay, in particular, seems to be becoming
into its own as a place to make and see dance.
The
process of putting down roots can also be observed through
the newer companies that have sprung up in the last
ten years. It's not only this year's Ethnic Dance Festival
that sported several dual-generation companies such
as Murphy Irish Dancers, Minoan Dancers, Mythili Kumar's
Abhinaya Dance Company (Bharatanatyam) and Fua Dia Congo.
Koichi and Hiroko Tamano and their Harupin Ha Bhuto
Dance Theatre moved to Berkeley in 1978. They have trained
a whole generation of dancers, among them the members
of inkBoat, who these days travel more widely than their
mentors ever did.
The
offsprings of the pioneers who came in the seventies
are beginning to make their local and national impact.
Their work could not be more different from that of
their parent companies. The first one probably was Joe
Goode, who danced with Margaret Jenkins and whose Joe
Goode Performance Groups has pioneered dance theater
since the early eighties. Robert Moses who creates works
on social issues as well as pure movement pieces for
his seven-year old Robert Moses' Kin, danced with ODC/SF
for ten years. Jo Kreiter, having also trained in Chinese
pole acrobatics, is taking her own aerial explorations
into directions quite different from that of her mentor
Haigood at Zaccho. Keith Hennessy, Jeff Curtis and Kim
Epifano all started with Contraband. They have their
own companies and still live and perform in the area.
So
where is Bay Area dancing going? Almost anywhere if
dancers like Sonja Delwaide, Chris Black, Sue Roginsky,
Lea Wolf and Sean Dorsey, are any indication.
copyright Rita Felciano 2003
Photo:
Flyaway Productions, photo by Elizabeth Gorelik.
|