Site-specific work with touch of history
Built in 1886 for a family of German Jewish immigrants, San Francisco’s HaasLilienthal House holds plenty of history and no doubt its share of secrets as well. An emblem of civic preservation and the family’s philanthropic largesse over the years, the Queen Anne-style mansion on Franklin Street is a key destination for lovers of all things Victorian. Now, for fans of site-specific performance, there’s another reason to visit.
In setting his immersive but uneven new dance-theater piece, “Still Standing,” in the rooms, halls and stairways of this splendid home, director and choreographer Joe Goode both embraces and takes flight from the HaasLilienthal legacy. This place and show, he said in remarks before the Thursday, July 12, opening, “is about going west and starting over.” An immigrant narrative, he didn’t have to add, has plenty of current reverberations. Reinvention and repair are the work’s explicit themes. Guest performers joined Joe Goode ensemble members to embody them.
An audience of 50, all of them wearing masquerade-
style eye masks, split into groups, later subdivided into smaller ones, to be led on the 90-minute “journey” of “Still Standing.” With dancers and ushers gently showing the way, viewers moved from one handsome space to another for cryptic vignettes of dance, collaboratively written text and music in assorted styles. No two groups witnessed all of the same scenes.
First up on one group’s agenda was a stilted exchange between a young boy in knee pants (a focused Quinn Widener) and his aunt (Marit Brook-Kothlow) that apparently referenced the house’s history. Dialogue and a simple two-step routine made the self-evident point that “adults lose their taste for games.” Next up was a talky but affectingly danced pas de deux about a man trying to get over the loss of someone and a woman trying to help him “let it go.” Costumes here and elsewhere (design by Jennifer Gonsalves) prominently featured gold lamé.
Then came the first real enchantment of the evening. Speaking in rhyming verse from under a clinging shroud, the supine Caroline Alexander was like a voluble corpse, making the absorbing case that it takes a death to be reborn. The bare legs and torsos of other dancers snaking in and out from under her bier gave mortality a beguiling visceral kick.
A kind of dreamy illogic took hold, as onlookers filed into the kitchen for some participatory percussion riffs and a snack of vegan corn muffins. A three-person scene in a room decorated with old photographs conjured a ghostly male guest and a spasm of social and sexual unease. One room featured a dollhouse and a lonely child. There was a gay pride duet on a megaphone and a song sung by a Wonder Woman-ish figure. “Time is an illusion,” went one of her flaccid lyrics.
Goode, whose verbal elements walk a fine line between suggestive concision and earnest ingenuousness, isn’t always the best illuminator of meaning. What counted was the way history-scented atmosphere played against the performers’ up-close and yet serene physicality. Past and present jostled and sometimes conjoined. Tickets, as they were for Goode’s 2009-10 “Traveling Light” at the Old San Francisco Mint, are scarce, because only 50 are accommodated at each performance.
As one group’s journey headed toward home – a basement-level bar where it all began – the dance values of the piece kicked in. Performing within inches of audience members in a hall, Brendan Barthel and James Graham were the graceful principals in a muscular but fluid number for four male dancers. Darting in and out of a doorway, Jan-Matthew Sevilla and Wailana Simcock added nimble echoing support.
Working in an outdoor stairwell, Cookie Harrist and Molly Katzman entwined hypnotically to a fervent blues number as the audience peered down at them. Moments later, all the audience members were reunited, as the performers finished things off with an energetic ensemble number. An hour and a half after they got started, they weren’t just “Still Standing,” but moving as fast and hard as they had all night.