Smuin’s ‘Sushi’ is 9 spicy morsels
That surveillance camera perched above the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is clearly a fake, a cartoonish prop fitted out with a blinking red light. But its anonymous gaze seems plenty real to the dancers in “If I Were a Sushi Roll.” It turns them into a swarm of seriously jittery pixels who ping and scuttle about in this truly, madly funny and spirit-tingling inspiration.
Seen in its Smuin Contemporary American Ballet world premiere on Friday, April 20 — the shining middle panel of the troupe’s three-piece Dance 02 program — Val Caniparoli’s “Sushi” spools out in some amped-up hyper-reality. Each of its nine sections gets a coolly provocative title.
Frantically preening in “Describe You,” a throng of 16 might be prepping for a speeddating session. Later on, in
“Dog and Frog,” a pair of sometimes macho, muscle-flexing men (Dustin James and Oliver-Paul Adams) and their occasionally rivalrous dates (Erica Felsch and Valerie Harmon) circle and confront each other like lovestruck warriors. “Coffee Expert” is all caffeinated, percolating motion, topped off with a painted cuppa joe wheeled onstage. Credit Douglas Schmidt for “Sushi’s” witty, fishcentric scenic design.
Caniparoli’s enlivening wisdom, in “Coffee” and throughout the piece, comes in the droll, laconic music he’s chosen to set. The songs by the American composer Nico Muhly and the singlename Faroe Islands singer-songwriter Teitur, from their album “Confessions,” meander from folk to Baroque to ErikSatie-ish whimsy. Among its other offbeat insights, the lyrics invoke Jane Fonda as a beauty idol, celebrate the smell of a computer printer in the morning and muse on a sushi roll’s curiosity about the people in a Japanese kitchen.
What might have come off as coy is anything but in the joining of the work’s disparate elements. There’s an unexpected, even subversive sense of purpose at work here, signaled first by Susan Roemer’s sober costumes (prim but elegant dark skirt-length dresses for the women; dark suits, white shirts and narrow ties for the men).
When the piece arrives at “Her First Confession,” Ben Needham-Wood and Terez Dean seem seriously wrapped up in their flowing amorous pursuits. Suddenly the male suitor notices that seeing-eye camera and can’t get it out of his mind. As he stares up at it, warily transfixed, another man (Maxwell Simoes) takes up with his partner. An ache seeps in as Needham goes on helplessly watching the camera watch him back.
Is he emotionally paralyzed, able to witness but not to act? Or is he somehow spying, via that camera, on the betrayal going on behind his back? The alienating digital age possibilities multiply. Then life, complicated and absurd, goes on.
Caniparoli’s choreographic invention never flags. At once twitchily original and rich with sampled swatches of Irish step dance and tap, Agnes de Mille ardor, raucous rock ’n’ roll and Smuin Contemporary American Ballet: Dance Series 02: “If I Were a Sushi Roll,” by Val Caniparoli; “Oasis,” by Helen Pickett; “Falling Up,” by Amy Seiwert. Through Sunday, April 29. $32-$79. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., San Francisco. (415) 912-1899. www. smuinballet.org
⏩ Additional performances: May 11-12 at Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek. May 24-27 at Mountain View Center for the Arts. June 1-2 at Sunset Center, Carmel. the desperate visual grammar of hand signs, the movement vocabulary delightfully overflows. To a one, the dancers respond with conviction and ebullience.
In the end, “Sushi” narrows down to a single dancer, a potently expressive, now barely clad Robert Kretz. The title of this final dissolve, “Small Spaces,” is both accurate and ironic. As Kretz systematically compresses and pares himself down, “If I Were a Sushi Roll” makes yet another heart- and mind-expanding advance onto new terrain.
The other two works on the bill are revivals. “Oasis” (2016) plunges the audience into a sensory aquatic realm. Designer Emma Kingsbury’s rippling curtains and burbling videos pair with Nicholas Rayment’s shimmery dark lighting and Jeff Beal’s propulsive eponymous score. It all comes close to trumping Helen Pickett’s choreography of swimming big gestures and her fluid deployment of the ensemble. Rapturous as it is, “Oasis,” also feels a little relentless as this abundant evening of dance winds down.
Dance 02 opens with Amy Seiwert’s “Falling Up” (2006). First performed a year after founder Michael Smuin’s death, this serene and slightly chilly essay on classical partnering returns almost 11 years to the day (April 23) after that loss. Friday’s performance marked the end of another chapter, with Seiwert celebrated onstage for her decade of work with the company, as she departs to become artistic director of Sacramento Ballet.
The women, dancing on pointe in silky creamcolored costumes to the men’s bland dark trousers and gray jerseys, are the center of attention in “Falling Up.” Again in again, in their own shapely arabesques or rising in lifts, they keep taking flight. The men, as they sometimes are in dance and life, are a means to an end, right up to the final moment of female ascent.