The best of dance in 2008 Rachel Howard
Sunday, December 28, 2008
HIGH: San Francisco Ballet's Maria Kochetkova in "Giselle" (Feb. 19): Tiny, delicate and irrepressibly sweet, the Russian-trained Kochetkova broke our hearts. Cutting through all the hype of San Francisco Ballet's forward-looking 75th season, the company's doll-like new principal gave a performance to remember for a lifetime.
LOW: Mark Morris Dance Group in "Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare" (Sept. 26): Modern masters have their off years, too. Morris resurrected Prokofiev's original score but didn't show any feeling for the music. A handful of clever dramaturgical touches couldn't bring passion to this star-crossed production.
MOST IMPROVED: Smaller Bay Area ballet companies: They a banner year. The reborn Oakland Ballet Company charmed in family-friendly fare, Diablo Ballet danced Balanchine with fresh panache, and Company C Contemporary Ballet romped through the world premiere of a lost Twyla Tharp creation. With the Smuin Ballet also carrying on strongly, there was ballet for everyone.
MVP: Jessica Robinson. CounterPulse's tireless executive director runs a tiny performance venue with a big impact, fostering new work by developing choreographers seemingly in all styles and genres - and just as important, promoting substantive dialogue among artists and their audiences.
TOP 10 StringWreck: (Janice Garrett & Dancers and the Del Sol String Quartet, March 11) Viola-wielding dancers and somersaulting musicians collided in this thoughtful, never gimmicky collaboration, also with choreography by Charles Moulton. Luscious movement - especially from Nol Simonse - and daring antics.
The Symmetry Project: (Jess Curtis/Gravity, March 2 Curtis, the most fulfilled of the choreographers to emerge from the 1990s collective Contraband, returned from his new home base of Berlin with a hypnotizing nude duet for himself and the entrancingly serene Maria Francesca Scaroni.
ODC Theater Festivals: (April through October) His venue was hit with the wrecking ball for a major rebuild, but ODC Theater Director Rob Bailis didn't sit idle. Instead, he teamed with Project Artaud Theatre for an ambitious slate of festivals ranging from postmodern ballet to Haitian to a collaboration with the literary festival Litquake. Plenty of misses, but also some vivid hits, especially performances by local Odissi master Vishnu Tattva Das and Burma-born butoh innovator Ledoh.
Retrospective Exhibitionist: (Miguel Gutierrez, May 9) A fleshy naked man. Holding a backbend. Singing a Kate Bush song in falsetto as a lit candle rises near his bare derriere. Gutierrez, a Joe Goode alumnus now in New York, was outrageous - but his meditation on narcissism was oddly touching, too.
San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival 30th anniversary: (June 6) This only-in-San Francisco panorama of world dance celebrated three decades by expanding to four weekends, commissioning works and showcasing local troupes alongside master musicians from around the globe.
Wonderboy: (Joe Goode Performance Group, June 7) The charismatic dance theater maven's collaboration with puppeteer Basil Twist featured a spookily mesmerizing wooden boy. But just as absorbing was Goode's reinvigorated movement vocabulary, offering lush, richly layered dancing.
Don Quixote: (Kirov Ballet, Oct. 17) The Russians did a Petipa classic proud with a blood-pumping, spirited group spectacle, and two young firebrands - Alina Somova and Andrian Fadeev - in the leads. Craneway Event: (Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Nov. 9) Cal Performances presented the 89-year-old modern dance maverick's timeless experiments in time and space at a former Ford assembly plant at Point Richmond. To see these superhuman dancers doing superhuman things - up close, inside a glistening palace of a warehouse perched on the edge of the sea - was heaven.
Axis Dance Company 20th anniversary season: (Nov. 15) Oakland's trailblazing troupe for dancers with and without disabilities astonished us again with the intense chemistry between feisty Sonsheree Giles and Rodney Bell, lashed tightly to his wheelchair but spectacularly agile, in a duet by Alex Ketley.
San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest 10th Anniversary: (Nov. 22) Festival founder and producer Micaya kept the party rolling with popping, locking and b-boy tricks from around the world - and on roller skates! Special shout-out to the funky, noodle-limbed members of Oakland's Diamond/Sparkle crews.
E-mail Chronicle Dance Correspondent Rachel Howard at
pinkletters@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page N - 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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