Abhinaya Dance Company of San Jose. Photo by RJ Muna.
Thirty-six companies will comprise the guest list for the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival this month as that institution celebrates its 30th anniversary, not merely a triumph of community savvy, but a reflection of the astonishingly diverse cultural composition of the Bay Area. Watching the festival develop over the decades from a, frankly, amateur, undisciplined and often unwatchable event to a sleek, professional gathering has been a heartening process.
This year, the producing organization, World Arts West, is marking the milestone in a couple of significant ways. The festival has been expanded to four weekends (yes, there is that much talent around here) and all the dancing will be accompanied by live music, much of it performed by artists from all around the world, much of it indispensable to the art of which it is a part and much of it downright thrilling. The opening program, seen Saturday afternoon (June 7) at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, featured nine troupes or soloists performing works drawn from cultures as far flung as Hawaii and Tajikistan. Somewhere in all of this you can probably trace the evolution from very well rehearsed dance hobbyists to confident professionalism.
There’s more to cheer. This year, directors Carlos Carvajal and CK Ladzekpo, have reprised their sterling contribution from 2007; gone are the inconsistent lighting and annoying pauses between dances. The pair have also dispensed with movies and speeches (they have my profound and eternal gratitude), but they have retained some of the most winning traditions of the festival. All the performers (more than 300 on Saturday) return for a mass bow at the end of the program, packing the stage; and afterwards, many hang in the lobby, so that ticket holders can inspect their incredible costumes close-up and ask all kinds of questions. Saturday, I was astonished to note the exquisite detail and workmanship in the headdresses of Charya Burt and the members of the Khmer Dance Academy. You also get free a terrific program book loaded with essential information and full casting details.
The opening program, with most of the participants selected during open auditions last January, added up to superior mix of sacred and secular, traditionally and mildly innovative, serene and cute. The festivities opened with eight girls from the Chinese Performing Artists of America Center, located in Cupertino. The performers twirled, shook kerchiefs, floated red ribbons and launched somersaults, all to the sound of a traditional Chinese orchestra. At the end of the program, the women from Las Que Son Son (a first timer at the festival) shook their voluminous yellow skirts as they animated dances from their Cuban-Haitian heritage and, to the pounding of a four-drum consort, also regaled us with somersaults. Perhaps, expressions of joy are universal throughout the world.
Earlier, Raices de mi Terra, backed by a marimba band, offered an exuberant tour of the dance heritage of Mexico’s Chiapas state. First, eight women garbed in serapes and wearing headdresses that resembled baked Alaskas, recreated a religious procession; Later, joined by the men, staccato footwork prevailed. Charya Burt and her six female dancers recreated an allegory from Cambodian mythology. The serene patterning, curved feet and delicate hand work were transcendent. Patrick Makuakane of Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu seemed to invite an entire Hawaiian village on stage for the festival commission, Maui Turning Back the Sky, a blend of traditional moves and modern insights.
Additional evidence of the fusion of ancient and contemporary sparked Shakti—the Powerful Goddess, another festival commission featuring Abhinaya Dance Company of San Jose. Mythili Kumar’s troupe, adept in South Indian Bharatanatyam, deployed that style in the service of a good versus evil parable that included the kind of spacious patterning one expects from American modernism. Kumar’s ferocious Shakti was not a deity you would tangle with. But her dancing daughter, Rasika Kumar, adorned with ankle bells, proved a feisty rival.
The oddest entry on the program, Mumu, came from Ongdance Company. Choreographer Kyoungil Ong presents a Korean shaman ritual dance concerning the waking of the dead with all the traditional paraphernalia (including elaborate masks), but she lends it a mad contemporary energy that I found fascinating and would happily sit through again, if only to experience the souls of the departed entering the afterlife via a billowing white cloth. Contributing to the wonderfully bizarre effect was the hair-raising performance by the Korean musical ensemble which calls itself wHOOL. The sound of an eerie flute-percussion duet, bolstered by synthesizer groans, resounds in my ear as I write.
Ongdance Company. Photo by RJ Muna.
Instructive, too, in its way, was the performance of Miriam Peretz, incarnating dances from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Peretz is an Israeli and former member of Inbal Ethnic Dance Theater, yet she has absorbed this alien culture so persuasively that you must ask if national origin really matters in mastering any dance art. Peretz also reaffirmed the unbreakable link between dance and music. Accompanied by Salokhiddin Fakhriev and Abbos Kosimov, two brilliant exponents of the doira (a Central Asian drum), the dancer etched a rhythmically complex solo, partially improvised, that brought Tajikistan very close to a Broadway tap dance palace, to the detriment of neither.
The contrast of moods sustained the program, which as it crept towards the three hour mark, wore this viewer down. I hope the festival is not reverting to its bad old ways, but, of course, one is always free to leave a marathon before its conclusion, and it was tempting to do that on Saturday. The program length may explain why Theatre Flamenco’s suite, second to last on the program, made so little impression on me, despite Carola Zertuche’s able performance. Not everybody can be featured. The Ethnic Dance Festival simply needs to tighten up next year; you can all too easily get too much of a good thing. One fewer act per program might do it. Audiences and friends of the performers will probably disagree.
The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival continues at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater through June 29. Performances are Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. 415.392.4400. www.worldartswest.org
