So, it’s time for Edition 31 of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, as successful and far-reaching a dance project as this community has enjoyed in our time. The Palace of Fine Arts Theatre came alive Saturday afternoon (June 6) with Polynesian maidens, roguish cloggers, exuberant Mexican villagers and Balinese gamelan artists. They added up to nine companies or soloists and there are a lot more to come. The festival has engaged 37 troupes this season, most of them chosen from public auditions last winter. Three additional weekend bills will take the festival through the month and reinforce the depth and diversity of the Bay Area cultural community.
The good news about this year’s participants: Thirteen world premieres are scheduled, the most in the festival’s history. The shows are once again co-directed by Carlos Carvajal and CK Ladzekpo in the spirit of genuine professionalism. The fare on every program is balanced, the spoken introductions have been muted and the spotlight hoggers have been banished. Saturday afternoon, I even wished that a few dance companies could have lingered on stage for a bit longer, and that has never happened before at the SF Ethnic Dance Festival. Then, every show concludes with a mass curtain call and a casual encounter with the audience in the lobby, where the opulent costumes may be scrutinized close up.
One suggestion for the producers: the program book is terrific, but you can’t read it in the dark. How about a very brief announcement of the name of the group we are about to see?
What’s not so good about this year’s festival: executive director Julie Mushet has, through no failing of her own, lost a key grant that subsidizes live music, which is essential in the world dance sphere. The results are depressing; with one exception, the performances of all who danced to recorded music were severely diminished. Also, there’s been a concerted effort to feature children this year and the kitsch factor is high. For example, the Presidio Dance Theatre, an amateur institution, rounded up dozens of students for a Ukrainian suite, the performance of which parents and nobody else could love. The most virtuosic feats of this nation’s folk material (especially the boys’ leaps from a crouching position) are simply beyond these youngsters, no matter how well schooled they have been. This looked like cultural tourism. What ever prompted the judges to select this school’s presentation for inclusion?
I was also less pleased than most of my colleagues with the contribution of the festival’s poster child, the 10-year-old soloist, Athira Pratap, an exponent of Bharatanatyam, the form of classical dance born in South India. This girl may develop into a first-rate performer, but her still evolving musculature did not full articulate the stances, gestures or symmetries of this discipline. The poor creature was also dancing to recorded music (a number called The Eternal Voice) and the canned quality of the sequence could not be denied.
Murphy Irish Dancers. Photo by RJ Muna.
No doubt that music sets up an interplay between musician and performer that is uniquely combustible. In its world premiere, Subak, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, showed us how much music matters in Indonesian culture and elsewhere. At the rear of the stage, the 16 players performed on the gamelan jegog, fashioned from bamboo marimbas, and the sound lingered in this ear for hours. Downstage, we witnessed a movement ritual of planting and harvest, choreographed by I Made Moja, and featuring 11 dancers. It begins with devotional crouches and imagery drawn from nature, and concludes with a visit from the appropriate goddess and it was supremely beautiful.
Two other Ethnic Dance Festival regulars made bracing contributions to this concert. Mary Jo Murphy-Feeney founded the Murphy Irish Dancers in 1963 (before anyone ever heard of Riverdance); on Saturday evening, she was feted with the Malonga Casquelord Lifetime Achievement Award. In the afternoon, her company attested to the smashing results that derive from a rigorous tradition and hard work. The parade of live bagpipers set the mood. A premiere by Patricia Feeney-Conefroy traced an Irish folk legend; the details of the narrative yielded to the sheer exhilaration of the dancing by dozens of performers of all ages. The jigs came at you with almost frightening precision. I was much taken with the calibrated virtuosity of Evan Trudell’s dancing; Michael Flatley should look to his laurels.
Also, not to be resisted, were the 11 members of the Barbary Coast Cloggers in a suite of three numbers from Appalachia, dazzling in their percussive regularity and air of celebration. Juxtaposing the cloggers and the Irish dancers on the same program proved instructive in tracing the evolution of percussive dance. Even recorded music could not dampen the syncopated heels of these guys; can’t deny, however, that the Western regalia often brings to mind The Village People.
The Compañia Mazatlán Bellas Artes (IMBA) opened the program with Zenón Barrón’s 2004 Fiesta Tabasqueña, a corn planting ceremony that evolves into a social ritual in the Mexican state of Tabasco. The consort of musicians, the swirling skirts and the good cheer were evident. But the percussive quality of the choreography lacks rhythmic variety. At the end of the program, Te Mana O Te Ra, a Polynesian company based in Walnut Creek, offered a premiere that involved a huge cast, all apparently specialists in pelvic movement and wafting arms. A rouser, to be sure!
Carola Zertuche of Theatre Flamenco. Photo by RJ Muna.
Yet, two of the most memorable entries in this program were also two of the quieter numbers. Despite the annoying recorded music, Sri Susilowati’s Mourning Dance took us to the heart of Sundanese culture. No right angles were discernable in this sinuous solo, which at once stretched from the earth to the heavens. Then, a rejuvenated Theatre Flamenco raised the temperature with its Encuentro, a torrid love duet that began with the magnificent singing of Felix de Lola and ended with artistic director Carola Zertuche and Juan Siddi expressing their mutual attraction through the manipulation of a green mantilla and competing footwork. I was surprised this didn’t come with an R rating.
The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival continues Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. (through June 28) at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.
Tickets: 415.392.4400, www.cityboxoffice.com
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