October 30, 2007sjDANCEco has reason to celebrate
THRIVING TROUPE MARKS FIVE-YEAR SUCCESS WITH FRESH PROGRAM
By Rita Felciano
Special to the Mercury News
Article Launched: 10/30/2007 02:00:03 AM PDT
Five years may not seem much of a reason to mount a retrospective, but when small dance companies come and go with the turn of a calendar page, half a decade becomes a respectable period to have survived. And sjDANCEco is more than surviving, it is thriving.
With a repertoire that is modest but respectable, the dancers have a clear vision of who they are and where they want to go.
On Friday night, an almost full house - including many students - greeted sjDANCEco's "The Best of . . ." The piece amounted to a historical look at the ensemble of choreographer-dancers, which has been in residence at San Jose State University.
The performance was sjDANCEco's first appearance at the San Jose Repertory Theatre - a larger venue than its home-court Dance Studio Theatre at San Jose State - but it did have its glitches, mostly because of inadequate lighting design by the often-masterful Matthew Antaky. The few wispy strands of stage fog hovering over some of the choreography in no way enhanced what was going on below. Also, too often the dancers stepped outside the boundary of lights as they moved toward the front of the stage.
While one may miss the freshness of a world premiere, which always creates a special sense of anticipation and excitement for an audience, the two company firsts made up for that lack.
Dominic Duong's "Quietus," the winner of this year's ChoreoProject award, is very much a beginner's work. (The ChoreoProject is showcase for emerging professional choreographers.) A solo, it impressed less with content - an earnest search for self - than with Duong's ability as a dancer. Throughout the evening, it was difficult to take your eyes off this lithe and beautifully trained artist who integrates Western dance and martial arts training into his dance.
Gary Masters' 1999 "Diablo Opus," created for Walnut Creek's Diablo Ballet, started out strongly but lost a bit of steam halfway through. A long coiling rope, which eventually unraveled, may have been a metaphor for entanglements; I found it mostly distracting.
Masters designed a series of dances to a broad spectrum of music, ranging from Italian baroque to British techno-punk. They all explored relationships - none of them perfect.
Masters is a wonderfully detailed choreographer, able to suggest emotions with the sparest, yet richest, of dance language. The touches of flamenco in his duet with co-director Maria Basile added drama and texture to this off-and-on tug-of-war.
A more violent conflagration was explored by the three newcomers: Duong, Erin East and Nhan Ho. Heather Cooper, an exquisite dancer, both lyrical and dramatic, partnered an absent lover in one of Italy's most plaintive art songs, Tommaso Giordani's "O caro mio ben." And if the finale looked repetitive and drawn out, blame it on composer Philip Glass. It's in the music.
Masters and Basile eloquently performed excerpts of José Limón's "Mazurkas." These little dances to Chopin flow with a breathtaking sense of letting go and picking up; their phrases blowing about like autumn leaves in the wind. At times, however, Masters looked tense.
Basile's impressive 2006 "Birthing the Ascension" received the kind of lighting attention - suggesting a sense of cosmic flow and order - that should have been given to the rest of the program. While the piece effectively using the ensemble on the floor, it was her opening solo as roaming spirit over the waters that set the tone. It is one of her finest accomplishments.
Cooper's dramatic trio "Raw" featured Jeannine Charles, Ho and herself in an emotional tug-of-war, which left everyone miserable. To balance the piece better, Cooper's own part - a memory? a potential lover? - probably could be strengthened. There was a touch of melodrama to this piece that I wasn't sure was intended.
Though fiercely danced by two couples, the atavistic energy of "Courting Medieval" got lost in this much bigger space. No fault of the choreographer, no fault of the dancers, but this piece works better in a more intimate setting.
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October 25, 2006 - Choreography takes center stage
SJDANCECO PROGRAM VARIED, AMBITIOUS
By Rita Felciano
Special to the Mercury News
Focusing on its five choreographer-dancers, sjDANCEco treated its mostly student audience to a multi-perspective demonstration of artistic growth Thursday at San Jose State University. After four years, the company now needs to stretch beyond the cocoon of the campus community.
With five world premieres and the two solos (by Mary Forrest and Bih Tau Sung) that garnered the ensemble's 2006 ChoreoProject Awards, sjDANCEco's latest ``Making Dance Happen'' concert was ambitious and well-run. If only organizers could get the audience to arrive on time at tonight's repeat performance.
Not surprisingly, given the different points of view and levels of experience, not all the pieces were equally successful. The bouquet has to go to Maria Basile, whose ``Birthing the Ascension'' closed the evening on a high note. Basile based her 20-minute dancing mediation on yogic principles whose illustrations in the playbill were quite unnecessary: This exquisitely designed dance spoke for itself. With a luminous Heather Cooper in the lead role, the dancers went through what looked like pre-ordained patterns of something akin to a cosmic order. Moving in and out of constantly shifting configurations, ``Birthing'' eloquently spoke of permanence within change.
In her own choreography, Cooper displayed a lovely sense of flow, of expanding and contracting movement, of people supporting but also losing each other. Newcomer Sheree Dela Peña is the one who leaves and who, upon returning, no longer can be recognized. Simple but eloquent, ``Into the Light'' is a fine work, performed by Cooper, Dela Peña and Mara Williams.
Another mourning piece, Gary Masters' musically attuned ``Vivace,'' was set to J.S. Bach's glorious ``Double Violin Concerto.'' Created as a memorial to his father, Masters set it on three couples, including other fine company additions Michael Doerner, Erin East and Nhan Ho. Masters uses a fairly traditional modern dance vocabulary, but in his hands loping runs acquire urgency, fleeting connections become intimate and geometric configurations breathe. Small hesitations -- a sense of twigs breaking -- gave the slow movement, in which Masters himself briefly appeared, particular poignancy. But his return to close ``Vivace'' was too obviously symbolic.
Jeannine Charles' goofy ``Deprivation/101'' introduced a welcome note of levity into the program. A rambunctious, highly athletic quintet (Charles, Dela Peña, East, José Iván Ibarra and Williams) engaged in a series of high jinks, as good-natured as they were energetic. Much enhanced by Maggie Heaman and Valerie Leitner's colorful costumes, the piece felt like a children's birthday gotten out of hand. Though fresh and full of ideas, ``Deprivation'' needs tightening; it sags toward the end.
Charles returned, as the one-who-didn't-get-a-man, in Ibarra's soap opera ``Sola.'' Opening to Roberto Cantoral's ``Déjame Sola'' (leave me alone), three flirtatious, skirt-swinging women show that they don't really want to be left alone. When two pugnacious men (Doerner and Ibarra) show up, the drama is set. Ibarra has some flair for mixing social and concert dance impulses to Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, but at this point his choreography is choppy, too much hand-over-fist.
Each of the two modest solos had something going for it. The kneeling progressions of Forrest's somewhat maudlin ``To Those,'' about longing and uncertainty, made intriguing use of the floor. Sung's ``Sweet Melancholy'' showed her as an exquisite mover. How much of a choreographer she is remains to be seen.
sjDANCEco
WHERE
Dance Studio Theatre, San Jose State University, Fourth and San Carlos streets