Katie Faulkner and Private Freeman in Faulkner’s Until We Know For Sure. Photo by Andrea Basile.
In thrall to puffery, the arts community has been known over the years to deploy the word “festival” indiscriminately, but what claimed to be the 2009 WestWave Dance Festival , a solitary two-and-a–half hour concert produced on an unlikely Sunday evening (July 12) at San Francisco’s Cowell Theater, really does render the entire festival notion meaningless. I understand that in the current financial crisis, funding has winnowed in some cases to almost nothing, and a once flourishing summertime project in the Bay Area now seems close to extinction. It may rise again, but it will take Herculean efforts in the present economic crisis.
So, let us consider this sole mixed bill both as a remembrance of seasons past and a possible harbinger of better times to come. Fortunately, Sunday’s concert was produced by Joan Lazarus, who, until two years ago, was the festival’s valiant director. In this project, she made a good stab at offering a wide panorama of Bay Area dance, from ballet to contemporary to global. Lazarus, alas, had no control over the Cowell Theater box office staff, whose lack of preparation for a capacity crowd yielded a starting time 30 minutes later than the hour printed on the tickets. Not a mood enhancer.
The six featured artists added up to a superior buffet, though it was clear that you might want to skip one or two items if you came back for a second helping. The performers mingled premieres with repertory and reconsiderations, live action with film. The latter was something of an innovation for WestWave and a smart one too, especially if the projection goes off as smoothly as it did Sunday. Sometimes, there’s even a connection between what’s live and what’s on celluloid. Katie Faulkner’s 2008 film, Loom, and her more recent dance, Until We Know for Sure, pair the choreographer with Private Freeman (ex-ODC dancer and doing very well in a freelance career) in what looks like an evolving relationship; and they really did seem like the cutest couple of the year.
The film has a droll deadpan feel, marred only by an overreliance on Godardian jump cuts (so 1960s). When the camera settles down, we get a cool episode, a blue interlude mostly in silhouette where a gesture expresses volumes. In the live component, Faulkner goes for low center of gravity physical comedy, as the couple scurries across the Cowell stage like concupiscent cockroaches. Faulkner is a local choreographer to watch and she and Freeman are irresistible.
I am told that Amy Seiwert (and her pickup company, im’ij-re ) compiled her new ballet abstraction, Response to Change, in a couple of weeks, all the more to marvel at the fluidity and trajectory of the work. Her music is The Life of Birds, composed, originally, for the Seattle Chamber Orchestra, by Mason Bates, whose San Francisco Symphony commission last May confirmed his reputation as one of the Bay Area’s hotter young musicians. It was a wise choice; the rhythms are infectious and the scoring should be alluring for dancers. Seiwert intersperses group forays and presentational unisons with duets that involve manipulation of limbs and flipping of bodies in arabesque. The piece looks somewhat unfinished; it seems, at this point, to lack an emotional center, although the lead duet couple, elegant Kathi Martuza (from Oregon Ballet Theater) and towering Matthew Linzer, generated uncommon excitement. Perhaps, Seiwert should set the one movement of the Bates that she omitted because of time constraints; perhaps, the center will be there. No doubt: Response to Change merits wider exposure.
Benjamin Levy has exposed his Wake duet on earlier occasions, more specifically during his outdoor home season last fall. Sunday, the ambiguity of the title grew ever more striking as Brooke Gessay and Scott Marlowe battled it out on the Cowell stage with even more potency than previously. There are few more gripping portrayals of shifting emotional landscapes on view in the Bay Area. The Levy film that preceded the duet is an erotic scorcher in black-and-white. A man embraces another; there’s a cut and one of the participants in this clinch metamorphoses into another person of a different gender. There’s another cut and another lover, and so on. Call this a postmodern version of La Ronde and you’d be close.
The choreographer Manuelito Biag continues to fascinate, but his new Terra Incognita, a trio that also recruits Alex Ketley and Kara Davis, presents a few problems. The movement vocabulary, a rolling style, cadenced by the odd whiplash leg, seems to borrow from both contact improvisation and urban street dance, strikes one as highly original, as it is animated here by all three of the performers, who also rearrange the chairs on the stage. You get a bit giddy watching it all, even when you realize that it’s not tempered by much dramatic emphasis. Then, there’s the music. Faulkner may be an accomplished dancer and choreographer, but she’s a lesser songwriter; and hearing her repeat one of her lesser ditties well past the point of listener interest did Biag no favors. He should listen to that droning from the auditorium sometime; he might change his mind about the music.
It’s always wise to wind up a mixed dance program with a visit from Patrick Makuakane and his band of non-professional singers and dancers who impart such joy to everything they touch. Makuakane’s updates on Hawaiian movement culture make crowdpleaser sound like the loveliest word in the English language. Here, deploying a substantial women’s ensemble, he offered a suite that ranged from a traditional body-wrapping funeral rite to a revival of his familiar setting of Roberta Flack’s “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face,” the women’s florid hand gestures conveying a world of feeling.
WestWave was slow to crest. The first 27 minutes were given over to Kim Epifano’s unbearable Flash Real, described as a song dance cycle. Epifano was once a dancer and choreographer of some accomplishment, but this “scored improvisation” of recycled hoary performance art tropes unfolded with a scary sense of entitlement and a feeling of desperation, too. Nobody who totes around and opens suitcases on stage these days should be taken seriously. The live contributions of musicians Stephen Kent and Richard Johnson didn’t help much, as Epifano strewed the stage with debris, sang, swung from a chandelier and then showed us a movie about (I think) hunger in a third world country. The cutting edge has never seemed duller.
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