Dance
I went to Deirdre's concert on Saturday. I thought it was overall pretty good. Deirdre's piece was very spooky. It was called Status Quo and I thought the title suited very well. The lighting was very dramatic, too, and it worked this time because there was a hard dark immediately after her last jump, and it looked really, really cool. I liked it.
The piece after hers was pretty spooky, too. It was called Exile and it was an ensemble piece and it's my opinion that it all took place in the head of one of the dancers, because she spent nearly 2/3rds of the dance sitting on the floor with her back to the audience and did a few arm things, but mostly was just very small while all of these scary and spooky things went on around her. I liked that one too. I would have, um. Done it differently, if I'd choreographed it, but then, it probably wouldn't have ended up named 'Exile' if I'd done it. :)
Let's see. *grabs the program*
The first piece, ok, I know I'm very limited, but I like my dance pieces to be to music, not poetry. It was called 'The Audience is Listening and the first part was to poetry and the second part was to music, and it was about becoming a strong healthy woman in a world that thinks Ally McBeal is attractive, or at least that's what I think it was about. It featured two dancers, a 'girl' in pigtails and a *stunningly* beautiful 'woman' (I suspect the dancers weren't all /that/ disparate in age, really) and I really liked the second part a lot.
The second piece was called 'Sugar Mama' and it was to a great blues piece but I didn't much care for the dance.
The third piece was called 'Scraped Rime' and it was one of the best pieces in the show. It was about hanging on to youth, and it opened with this very long staticy bit while the dancer, who was in a black gothic kind of dress with a stayed bodice and a pretty full lacy skirt, stood and waited for her music. And waited. And waited. And waited ... while her smile grew more and more fixed, and then fell away, and panic entered her eyes, and -- it was really very funny. *grin* And eventually her music came on, all scratchy like an old record, and it was ... really good. It was a sad piece, but she had enough comic timing and skill that it only rang of pathos instead of being depressing.
The fourth piece featured Fredrika Keefer, who was the center of a controversy because the San Francisco Ballet School wouldn't let her in because she was the wrong body type. And they're probably right: the kid is a mesomorph, a nice solid little girl. She's not the very thin body type that ballerinas generally are.
But she's *really* good. She and woman in the piece did a jazz number called 'Breaking Your Mother's Heart' and it was a lot of fun and she's *really* *good*. The SFBS are morons for not letting her in.
There's a story at sfgate.com about her.
The opening piece of the second act was really good, a hispanic number with excellent costumes (they were orange single-piece pants-suit things, that fit loosely, and had v-necks that clasped at the back of the neck and had a single narrow piece of cloth that fell down along the spine to the scoop-backs; I can't describe them very well, but they were really attractive) and a lot of feeling. It was called 'Street of My Soul' and I liked it a bunch.
I thought the next one, which was called 'Sea, Stone, Serpent' was terrible. It looked mostly like they'd choreographed a few bits and had the dancer do a lot of improve between those bits and I didn't like it at all.
The next one was called 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' and it was aboyt as strange as you might expect from the title. It was very funny, though. It featured these two neurotic people who eventually took most of their clothes off while chanting about what they *really* wanted. I think you had to be there for that one. :)
The next one was called 'Beats Open' and had horrible music and the horrible music was much too loud and as a result I couldn't tell you if I'd have liked the dance under other circumstances, but I sure as hell didn't like it under those ones. I didn't know what it was about and yick. Didn't like it.
The funniest piece of all was called 'Real Men' and had 3 men in leotards and skirts who covered pretty much every cliche you can have in modern dance, and did it all like non-dancers. It was *hysterical*.
The last piece was called 'Believe in Something', but I couldn't tell you what you were supposed to believe in from the dance. I kind of liked their costumes, though; they had black veleur knee-length sleeveless unitards (I'd have made them in black spandex instead of veleur, myself, but they didn't ask me) and they had little jacket things of gauzy grey-striped material that fist just over their shoulders and down a little past their wrists, and had an elastic bit between the shoulderblades to scrunch them up. They were cute. But I don't know what the dance was about.
And there is my review. :)