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Fjord Review •

Love and Lust

Sasha De Sola was Manon the next evening, and her interpretation impressed me because of the intelligence she brought to softening her natural tendencies as an actress. I don’t think it’s just De Sola’s combination of blonde hair and bright eyes that gives her a princess’ aura, and she’s unparalleled at playing the vain, preening type. But for Manon, she toned all that down. Reactions happened in stages rather than in sudden shocks—Manon can’t afford to be disturbed or offended when the Monsieur...
San Francisco Chronicle •

Misogyny or masterpiece? ‘Manon’ at S.F. Ballet feels all too relevant

But “Manon” was created in 1974. And for 51 years now, “Manon” has been both heralded as a heartbreaking work of psychological complexity and bemoaned as an overstuffed fantasia of misogyny. What advocates and detractors might agree on is the ballet’s enduring relevance in connecting two themes: extreme wealth inequality and the entrapment of women. This critic arrived at the War Memorial Opera House prepared to once again find “Manon” problematic and frustrating.

But “Manon” was created in 197...
San Francisco Chronicle •

‘I’m excited to feel something’: S.F. Ballet Opening Night Gala makes space for emotional release

Unfortunately, even with some of the finest dancers in the world onstage and one of the best ballet orchestras in the business in the pit, the next 90 minutes proved certain kinds of feeling can become monotonous.

Unfortunately, even with some of the finest dancers in the world onstage and one of the best ballet orchestras in the business in the pit, the next 90 minutes proved certain kinds of feeling can become monotonous.

“Passion! Intrigue! Intensity!” promised the pre-curtain video promoti...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Black choreographers look back to move forward in 2025

Every milestone naturally brings reflection, but the Black Choreographers Festival’s 20th anniversary slated for February is powered by something far more profound than nostalgia.The festival will launch Feb. 7 with a panel discussion at the Museum of the African American Diaspora celebrating BCF’s exhibition, “Spirit of Sankofa.” Sankofa is a principle from the Akan people of Ghana literally meaning “go back and get it,” often represented by the symbol of a bird flying with eggs of knowledge in...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Best of 2024: Dance took an emotional ride from the horrific to the hip

The year in Bay Area dance was an emotional ride. New leaders brought in fresh visions and audiences. At the same time, established hubs faced economic challenges. Notably, the Lines Dance Center, for decades an anchor of the dance community, struggled to bring bodies back into its building at Seventh and Market post-pandemic and shifted from running a robust and diverse roster of classes to hosting just a few teachers who rent space by the hour.The personal losses felt sudden and shocking this...
Fjord Review •

Balanchine's America

I’m of the camp that thinks this was a mistake, muting a bold work of art and leaving us with just, you know, some garden variety genius choreography. But there are compensations: when Balanchine took out the caller he also added a stirring, soul-laid-bare solo for the male dancer, and Kyle Davis’s rendering of this, simultaneously dignified and vulnerable, was the emotional center of this staging by PNB artistic director Peter Boal. Walking across the stage with one hand to hip and the other ex...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: SFDanceworks’ seventh season spans horror and delight with spectacular dancing

The opportunity to fully inhabit one’s fear and horror can be a surprising gift in shocking times. German choreographer Marco Goecke’s blood-curdling, scream-punctuated solo “Äffi” hardly made for escapist entertainment three days after a harrowing election, but as the final offering at SFDanceworks’ seventh season triple-bill, it offered visceral honesty. Juxtaposed with the program’s centerpiece, a premiere by Los Angeles-based JA Collective, it was mercifully offset by the purest, smartest, f...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: Fresh choreographers offer burst of comic delight at RawDance

There’s a bright spot, thank heavens, in the middle of RawDance’s 20th anniversary season at ODC Theater, the bicoastal troupe’s West Coast home.In “Refer,” the second offering on a slate of four premieres, Kelly Del Rosario and Erin Yen explode to life. Dancing in their own choreographic debuts, the company’s two most charismatic members caper across the stage like comic book characters. The music, by the prolific Oakland-based composer Aaron Gold, is textured, high-energy and inflected with ol...
Fjord Review •

Imperfect Beauty

I gave “Black Wave” three consecutive views because Lang’s past works for PNB have proven she belongs to a rank of ballet choreographers operating not just as step-makers but as true artists—her “Let Me Mingle Tears with Thee,” a treatment of Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” was one of the most memorable ballets I saw in 2023. Lang always works with music of substance; she creates clear but nuanced movement with interest in every phrase; and each ballet she makes draws you into a world apart. In “Bla...
San Francisco Chronicle •

Review: State of Play Festival proves the place to be for the future of West Coast dance

A quick survey of the stadium-style rows indeed revealed several artistic directors and dancers representing the Bay Area’s most notable troupes in attendance. And yet the mood was more family reunion than powerhouse conference.

A quick survey of the stadium-style rows indeed revealed several artistic directors and dancers representing the Bay Area’s most notable troupes in attendance. And yet the mood was more family reunion than powerhouse conference.

Whether you were more eager to receive h...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Ballet22 provides supportive space for male, nonbinary dancers

The studio is small but the attitude is big on this warm Oakland afternoon as four dancers stride through Houston Thomas’ ballet “Bass am Wasser.” “Hips, hips, hips!” repetiteur Thomas Bieszka calls, urging a dancer to complete a step with slinkier style. Then, Bieszka reminds the whole ensemble: “This actually should come all the way down from pointe.” The dancers step high onto the tips of their shoes and roll down as Bieszka gently encourages. “I know it’s not easy. You’ve been going all day...
Fjord Review •

Sound Effect

Vengel and Ernesto Peart Falcón hold a bright light between them, and in their shiftings from one clinging posture to another, the energy breaks through their bodies in a vector of sudden illumination, like the cosmos itself bursting open. As a rumble intensifies and the bodies begin to stretch, the image is thrillingly ambiguous, simultaneously calling to mind a young couple awakening in bed and an egg membrane stretching with the first instinctual, mysterious stirrings of life.When the bodies...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: ‘10,000 Steps’ extends ODC’s possibilities in crafty, thrilling ways

For years now, ODC/Dance founder and Artistic Director Brenda Way has been testing out guest choreographers to shake up the 53-year-old San Francisco company’s aesthetic and to search for a successor. Among these visitors, Catherine Galasso has been the most unexpected. With the Thursday, July 18, premiere of Galasso’s “10,000 Steps: A Dance About Its Own Making,” she also proved to be the most delightful.Galasso has artistic roots in the Bay Area but now works in Brooklyn. Over the last decade,...
Fjord Review •

School's Out

What a thrill to start the program with tiny first-graders demonstrating their ports de bras and to end with the can-do professionals of tomorrow—48 of them!—whizzing through choreography as musical as it is breakneck. If the SFB School’s students have danced such a challenging assignment at some point over the past 91 years (the school was founded in 1933, alongside the company), I’m not aware of it. The audience seemed aglow with much more than parental pride. “That was just an evening of fabu...
Fjord Review •

Swan Lake, Encore

As for Jimison’s Odette/Odile on opening night, she stepped into a high-pressure moment heroically, and her interpretation has the potential to develop into something special. In her arabesque she almost has Fonteyn-like qualities of tranquility and softness, so harmonized are her long arms, elegant fingers, and regretful downcast gaze. But her arms in motion need to develop their own style for her Odette to be singular, and the emotional valence needs to vary beyond pained suffering. In other w...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: The dancing is angelic at Alonzo King Lines Ballet’s spring season

Alonzo King’s ballets seem to be everywhere as the North American dance world is having a belated awakening to his choreographic depths over the past decade. But it’s his own company, anchored right at San Francisco’s Seventh and Market streets, that remains the crucible for forming his dance and his dancers, which are inextricable in his art.This was powerfully clear again in the dancing of Adji Cissoko on Friday, April 5, when Alonzo King Lines Ballet opened its spring home season at the Blue...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: At San Francisco Ballet’s ‘Dos Mujeres,’ Latina choreographers place the women in power

Before we get into mixed feelings about Arielle Smith’s new dance version of “Carmen,” let’s take a moment to note again how brilliantly San Francisco Ballet’s Artistic Director Tamara Rojo is playing the much-needed role of her art form’s modern impresario.The latest and final offering in Rojo’s first curated season here, “Dos Mujeres” is not just a double bill bringing together two Latina choreographers; it’s a larger art experience packaged with an expanded audience in mind.Inside the War Mem...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s spirit shines on as company searches for new artistic director 

Zellerbach Hall was packed and spirits were high for opening night of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s 56th visit to Berkeley. But someone important was missing.Robert Battle, the artistic director who tended Alvin Ailey’s legacy while expanding the East Coast company’s repertory in slyly inspired directions, resigned suddenly last November due to health concerns. Battle’s gregarious presence was deeply missed for the launch of Cal Performances’ Ailey Week on Tuesday, April 2, but his influe...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: Oakland Ballet dreams big in ‘Dancing Moons Festival’ excerpts

Fifty-nine years after its founding, Oakland Ballet is a scrappy, community-focused company, yet this hasn’t kept Artistic Director Graham Lustig from dreaming big.Partnering with San Francisco’s Del Sol Quartet, he’s launched the company’s “Angel Island Project,” a ballet about detainee experiences at the facility that processed more than half a million immigrants between 1910 and 1940. The backbone of the work is a haunting 110-minute oratorio for string quartet and chamber choir that Del Sol...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: At S.F. Ballet, Shakespeare is even dreamier post-pandemic

Few who were there four years ago will forget it. Inside the War Memorial Opera House, we flinched at every cough, washed our hands twice as long in the bathroom, and whispered what we’d heard on the news about a terrifying new virus. Then, just hours after the curtain fell on opening night of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the city’s order came: All performing arts venues were closed. COVID-19 was indeed a dire public health emergency. The ballet’s run was over.If March 6, 2020, was a dream inter...
Fjord Review •

Mere Mortals

Among the milestones notched by the production, a company sometimes accused of operating as New York City Ballet West broke out of its mixed-rep/story ballet comfort zone with an intermission-less 65-minute work in the Expressionist dance theater mode well-known in Europe but still shocking to some longtime San Francisco Ballet subscribers. Newcomers were pleased, though: Viewers flowed from the standing ovation straight out into the after-party saying, “wow!” and again “wow!”—and notably not mu...
Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guid •

Review: San Francisco Ballet’s Nikisha Fogo commands the stage as Swan Queen

To debut as the Swan Queen is like no other milestone in a ballerina’s career, though the responsibility of embodying this icon can stoke excitement or terror. The inimitable mid-20th century ballerina Tanaquil LeClercq so feared dancing George Balanchine’s one-act reduction of “Swan Lake” that the assignment made her vomit.No such nerves seemed to beset Nikisha Fogo at the opening of San Francisco Ballet’s “Swan Lake” on Friday, Feb. 23. Trembling with vulnerability in the white swan Act 2, fla...
San Francisco Chronicle •

San Francisco Ballet fans say goodbye to Yuan Yuan Tan

In the basement of the War Memorial Opera House, as Tan prepared to take the stage a final time after 29 years as San Francisco Ballet’s star dancer, Lydia Reviglio of Walnut Creek trawled among bar patrons in an old fur coat, seeking signatures for her handwritten petition.

In the basement of the War Memorial Opera House, as Tan prepared to take the stage a final time after 29 years as San Francisco Ballet’s star dancer, Lydia Reviglio of Walnut Creek trawled among bar patrons in an old fur co...
San Francisco Chronicle •

Review: San Francisco Ballet's AI-themed ‘Mere Mortals’ scores passionate success without scandal

No one alive today knows how big a riot really took place when “The Rite of Spring” premiered in 1913. We do know that the uproar ingeniously orchestrated by Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev was good for the future of ballet, placing dance at the nexus of risky new music, theater and visual art.

No one alive today knows how big a riot really took place when “The Rite of Spring” premiered in 1913. We do know that the uproar ingeniously orchestrated by Ballets Russes impresario Serge Dia...

About Me

Freelance dance critic writing regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle and Fjord Review