Dancing from Fog City to the Big Apple
By Garth Grimball
The night before I left for a two-week trip to New York City I met the choreographer Rena Butler at a work event. She was in San Francisco for her commission with EIGHT/MOVES, Mia J. Chong’s new company. During our brief conversation she expressed how much she was enjoying the dance scene in the Bay, going so far as to say she felt like there was more going on here than in New York. I was surprised. Rarely does anyone compliment the Bay Area for anything as greater than NYC’s “fill-in-the-blank.”
When I told her I was leaving for Manhattan the next day, she quickly confirmed that it was still great and there was good work to see.
Over the ensuing fourteen days I saw Pam Tanowitz’s Day for Night at the Little Island; a lecture-demonstration on deciphering Nijinsky’s dance notation for Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, led by scholar Claudia Jeschke and dancer Rainer Krenstetter at the Morgan Library; Cole Escola’s perfect, campy play Oh, Mary! on Broadway; the Lincoln Center Dance Festival featuring New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Ballet Hispanico, American Ballet Theatre, and Dance Theatre of Harlem; the new immersive dance-theater production Life & Trust; and the many casual dances one sees while walking, commuting, and being in the city that never sleeps: vogueing at Jacob Riis beach, groups of twenty-somethings in parks across Manhattan practicing line dances for the big Stud Country events, buskers bending and gliding through subway cars, kids recording themselves on street corners doing TikTok dances. New York City was bursting with dance.
The Tanowitz premiere and the Nijinksy investigation could be chapters in the same dance text. My biggest takeaway from Krenstetter’s performed excerpts of the iconic choreography was his emphasis on doing less, not over-performing the movement, especially the ending that has been infamously (incorrectly?) performed as explicitly sexual. In Krenstetter’s body, under the direction of Jeschke, the faun’s movements are rooted in naturalism not exhibitionism. Tanowitz’s Day for Night could have been titled “Interlude to the evening of the sprites.” The dance was performed against the backdrop of the Hudson River and the Jersey City skyline. In Reid & Harriet’s flowy, translucent costumes the dancers existed just outside the sartorial norm; as if they were hovering between reality and illusion. But the highly technical movement was affectless in performance. Grounded, like Nijinsky’s faun, in its own internal naturalism.
Oh, Mary! is not a modern dance performance. Life & Trust is mostly a dance performance within the form of immersive theater. Both productions center physicality over language to tell period-specific stories. Oh, Mary! takes place during Lincoln’s presidency, Life & Trust on the day before the 1929 stock market crash. As loose narratives seem to be gaining in popularity, usually in the form of an artist interpreting their autobiography, it was enlivening to see performers in very different productions embody specific characters. While Escola’s physical comedy is broad it always felt rooted in their unique rendering of Mary Todd Lincoln. Life & Trust is based on Faustian stories (while being Sackler family coded) but the devil is in the details and each character was distinct in the way they put on a coat or offered their arm to a companion or bargained to meet their desires.
The Lincoln Center Dance Festival was produced to fuel the desire of dance fans. Seeing the skills of the companies’ dancers back-to-back is an embarrassment of riches. The collectivist playbill was born out of pandemic survival. In 2020, the 5 dance companies formed BAAND Together as a way to support each other with the disappearance of revenues and opportunities. The one night performance was pay-what-you-can with tickets starting at $5. I would love to see something similar happen in the Bay. What if the War Memorial Performing Arts Center produced an evening of a collection of Bay Area dance companies with the same ticketing model? If it happens, consider me seated.
I returned home to catch the final day of ODC Theater’s State of Play Festival, which kicked off a packed month of dance in the Bay. I saw 4 festival artists that day; the following weekend I saw Ballet22’s seventh season. I then attended the opening night of EIGHT/MOVES’s inaugural season. I finished the month with the second weekend of FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival.
Rena was right. It is an exciting time for dance—here, there, and in places I hope to be an audience to in the future.
Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.
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