Ethnic Dance Festival brings on the noise
“Just wanted to warn you,” the man down the row at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall told his neighbors. “We make a lot of noise.”
And so he did, he and his companion, shouting their approval for every troupe of dancers and musicians who surged across the stage at the Saturday, July 6, opener of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.
There was plenty of noise — and color and spectacle — to celebrate. In a program that spanned swirling Indian kathak and infectious Afropop, springy Highland Scottish dance and thundering Japanese taiko drums, this 41st iteration of the World Arts West event played to an enthusiastic big crowd in the first of four weekend performances, all with familyfriendly 3 p.m. curtain
times. An entirely different bill runs Saturday and Sunday, July 13 and 14.
The multiethnic richness of the Bay Area is an oftrepeated commonplace, a trope that’s easy to affirm in abstract, demographic terms. This festival embodies it, vividly and viscerally. It began Saturday with Kanyon “Coyote Woman” SayersRoods’ firmly chanted “Grandmother Song,” an invocation of indigenous lands by this MutsunOhlone and Chumash performer. It served as both a grounding note and springboard.
Indeed, as if launched, San Francisco Taiko Dojo promptly vaulted into action. Hearing and singing merged for the audience, as the performers circled a fleet of widebellied drums with choreographic precision, their sticks wielded both as mallets and proud set pieces raised high in unison and then swept down again into action. What came across at first as a dancerhythm fusion took on a melodic complexity within all the bravura blur of sound and action. Several accelerations of tempo upped the thrill, like a roller coaster cresting to barrel down a drop.
In one of several wellplaced juxtapositions in the program, a pair of Congolese ngongui bell players, Kiazi Malonga and Rashid Okili Mpugani, followed with an entirely different, winningly spare rhythmic and melodic language. Their oscillating patterns readily induced a listener clapalong.
Big production numbers alternated with more modest but no less engaging acts. Chitresh Das Institute mounted an elaborate kathak dance piece from the 18th century about treecutting protesters. Most audience members would have needed the brief playbill note for that to register, but the subject almost didn’t matter. The dancing by the large company ranged from ensemble spinning to subtle head feints and statuestill tableaux vivants. A singer and instrumentalists performed a hypnotic yet kinetic score.
Equally absorbing, maybe more so, were the Afropop performers of ODK. Sporting white sneakers that drew crucial attention to their feet, the dancers were at once solidly grounded, rarely lifting their legs, and yet limber. The eye tracked up to gyrating torso and arms, liberated somehow by the rooted, deftly delicate nature of the steps.
But not everything was so wonderfully watchable. The Jubilee American Dance Theatre, which appeared in the shorter and weaker second half of the first weekend’s program, showcased older dancers in a static catalog of Cajun jigs, Carolina shag and clogging. It was probably more fun for the game performers than for those looking on.
The 21 dancers (plus a band) of Los Lupeños de San José moved through their Mexican polkas and huapangos with fluidity, some footstamping fire and smiles as bright as the women’s dresses. But it went on too long and grew repetitive.
UC Berkeley’s Bearettes + Afro Urban Society offered a cacophonous gloss on marching band rhythms and gyrating cheerleaders at the end of an already drumheavy day.
This festival is not meant for connoisseurs. Rather, as a festival speaker noted from the stage, it’s a place where “community meets excellence.” It’s about bridges between locally activated cultures, not some exquisite apotheosis of form. Only an expert could say, for example, if the Lebanese dabke moves of L’Emir Hassan Harfouche, performing with the Georges Lammam Ensemble, were firstrate. But it was fun for anyone to watch his frontal presentation, not unlike that of an Irish stepdancer, and go along for the gallopinginplace ride.
It’s clear to see and feel why this wildly ambitious festival, which has featured 20,000 performers in more than 100 traditions over the years, draws such enthusiastic and demonstrative audiences. Where else, how else would they see the tiny swooping circles of a Japanese dancer’s fan (Kohaku + Shiho) on the same afternoon with Gâta Bantu’s bodypainted and fringefooted drummers straddling their instruments in exuberant formations?
Because of “funding and staff issues,” according to Executive Director Julie Mushet, the festival decamped to Berkeley for a second time this year (it last happened in 2011). Next year, added Mushet, the dancing returns to San Francisco, in a newly refurbished Presidio Theatre. Plans for programming in both the East Bay and Peninsula are under discussion.
Wherever it happens, the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival makes connections that matter and last. That, finally, is what all the shouting is about.
Steven Winn is The San Francisco Chronicle’s former arts and culture critic.