Dance companies are putting best feet forward with online shows.
Bay Area companies share their creative performances on video
Even the most artfully shot video can’t capture the live experience of most performing arts. When an actor is well matched with a role, there’s that imperceptible moment in theater when the awkwardness of a person delivering lines on stage melts away as she inhabits the character. Musicians locking into a groove on the bandstand can transform the molecules in a room, emitting a bristling current that seems to flow through everyone in the audience. A dance performance can be just as electrifying in person, but it’s the only performing art that isn’t necessarily diminished by video. In the hands of skillful videographers and a smart editor, the camera can enhance the dance experience, providing audiences with perspectives, details and views unavailable from a single vantage point. Which is to say that video provides a silver lining to the COVID-19 storm clouds that have swept away all opportunities to take in dance performances in the flesh. The disaster has put even the most established dance companies in financial peril, and some have responded by making performances available online to reach audiences. In keeping with its vaunted status as dance’s crown jewel on the West Coast, the San Francisco Ballet has taken the lead with SF Ballet @ Home, a free weekly series that offers an entire ballet from the company’s archives online. Streaming on Facebook, IGTV, YouTube and the San Francisco Ballet website, www.sfballet.org/sfballet-home, the series includes commentary by the creative teams behind the productions and the company’s dancers featured in them. Pieces include “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” by New York City Ballet’s Justin Peck (available until noon Friday) and Christopher Wheeldon’s “Bound To” (2:30 p.m. Friday through May 29). Video is particularly valuable in documenting site-specific works, which radically reconfigure relationships between performance and venue. Oakland’s aerial dance company Bandaloop seeks out spectacular natural settings for performances. For a taste of its exquisite vertigo-inducing work, start with “Coyote Waltz,” a vertical dance created for and performed in Yosemite National Park, which you can watch at bayareane.ws/Bandaloop. San Francisco’s Jo Kreiter Flyaway Productions works in cityscapes, using aerial dance to illuminate conditions and history often overlooked and forgotten. “Needles to Threads” was the third installment in a series exploring urban poverty, creating breathtaking beauty out of squalor, and you can see it at flyawayproductions.com/videos. As dancers have been forced to adapt to working in solitude, video has captured their experience. Last month, Smuin Ballet shared “Social dis DANCING,” an intimate look at the company’s dancers, sheltered in place but hardly locked down, at www.smuinballet.org/smuin-fridayssocial-disdancing. And last week Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater released a similarly
structured video with dancers performing “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” from “Revelations.” Kicked off by choreographer and Ailey Artistic Director Robert Battle clapping off the tempo, the piece captures the dazzling Ailey dancers alone at home performing their parts of the raucous church service. Check it out at www.alvinailey.org. While the Bay Area can’t claim Ailey as our own, the New York City company’s long-running Cal Performances spring residency (and summer AileyCamp, which has been canceled this year) have firmly ensconced Ailey as an essential part of the region’s dance scene. Looking for reminders of our local riches online quickly delivers pay dirt. Here are some suggestions for getting started. Robert Moses’ Kin created the contentious duet “AM/FM,” which was directed by Morgan Wise and choreographed by Moses. You’ll find it at vimeo. com/robertmoseskin. Before Amy Seiwert took over as artistic director of Sacramento Ballet she was a busy choreographer with her own project. She created the erotically charged duet for the video “Barn Dance,” which was co-directed and edited by John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson. See it at vimeo. com/260855222. For a taste of the embracing aesthetic of Alonzo King Lines Ballet, start with this excerpt — vimeo. com/234339949 — from “Figures of Speech,” an evening-length ballet exploring the power of lost languages set to artist-activist Bob Hollman’s collection of poetry and song by an array of indigenous peoples. Considering the company’s reputation and consistently strong productions in major venues and its own Mission District studio, Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco should have better produced videos available. But this excerpt — bayareane.ws/Dialogos — from “Dialogos,” from a September 2015 performance at Cowell Theater, gives a good sense of artistic director, choreographer and master dancer Carola Zertuche’s power and presence. And as postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin’s 100th birthday approaches in July, the time is ripe to revisit Dohee Lee’s restaging of “The Prophetess” at bayareane. ws/Prophetess. Inspired by Halprin’s original 1948 piece, which was based on the biblical figure Deborah, the only female judge mentioned in the Bible, Lee presented her version of “The Prophetess” as part of a celebration of Halprin’s 95th birthday. The eternally innovative Halprin, whose dances often turn into ritualistic celebrations, would probably get a kick out of KQED’s “If Cities Could Dance,” which can be found at www.kqed.org/if-citiescould-dance. In its second season, the video series explores subcultures and distinctive movement vocabularies that have taken root in communities around the country. Last month’s episode looked at turf dancing in Oakland. It’s an exhilarating reminder of what it means to move freely, outside our homes and within our bodies.