Bay Area Dance Series. - Laney College Theatre, Oakland, California - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1994 by Rita Felciano

The best thing about the 1994 Bay Area Dance Series was that it happened. Last year's season almost didn't make it to the end because of a funding shortage. But help came from the city of Oakland and Laney College; the latter's handsome theater has been home to the series since its inception, and the ninth season rolled off the boards right on schedule.

While it was gratifying to see that BADS was not one more victim of omnipresent cutbacks, it was disappointing to see how conservative its programming was. Much of the work had been presented elsewhere in the Bay Area, and few choreographers chose to tackle the implications of this year's title, "Hometown." Furthermore, the programming was so carefully chosen for stylistic and ethnic balance that it made you wonder whether the organizers had consulted a demographer. A little bit more risk-taking on everybody's part could have added considerable spice to this rather tepid and predictable fare.

Some forty performances were bracketed by two special events: the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards at the beginning and a tribute to the thirty-five-year-old Shawl-Anderson Dance Center of Berkeley at the end. Also included was a weekend featuring eight of the ten City of Oakland Creative Artist Fellows which, unfortunately, I missed.

Eight of eleven programs ranged from performance art to comedy teams; from West African and Central Asian to classically modern and jazz. Conspicuous by its absence was ballet, or anything approaching it.

Most enjoyable was a double bill halfway through the spring which successfully explored the idea of home from different Jewish perspectives: Rachel Kaplan's Diaspora and Dziga Vertov Performance Group's Le Train du Memoir: Exotic Activities and Rudimentary Behavior.

The monologue in Diaspora intertwined the homelessness outside Kaplan's window with the displacement of the Jews and her own constant search for new places to live. She had recruited more than twenty non-dancers whom she deployed in simple line or circle walking patterns as she meandered or tightrope-walked between them. Kaplan's strongly deconstructionist bent as a writer stood her in good stead in this careful layering of personal and public history.

Le Train was visually more complex. Douglas Rosenberg (choreographer, director, and videographer) and Li Chiao-Ping (co-choreographer) took their cue from a return trip to Auschwitz by French Holocaust survivors. They assembled excerpts from Fellini's movie The Clowns, forties French ballads, and an ongoing and eventually fairly smelly barbecue with aggressive, staggered dance sequences. Trimmed of some of its baroque excesses of a year ago, Le Train was a surreal theatrical spectacle, for the most part haunting and consistent in its macabre vision.

But there were other interpretations of home. For Contraband dancer Kim Epifano, it meant growing up alongside a schizophrenic sister in an Italian family. In her Lunatic Girl, a rough-and-tumble athletic affair for herself and dancers Marintha Tewksbury and Jo Kreiter, she recalled the tomfoolery and roughhousing of sisterly relations but also of her sibling's growing terror of isolation.

With Golem Ellie Herman moved back into a previous home, that of the theater in which dance plays but a subordinate role to music and language. This new piece by one of the better butoh dancers in the Bay Area worked some striking, straitjacket imagery and suffocating atmosphere into a Jewish legend in which a talisman figure asserts an independent life with horrifying results. The piece was marred, however, by some clumsy attempts at Eastern European accents.

For Sharlyn Sawyer and her Ballet Afsaneh, home called forth places commonly associated with carpets--Uzbekistan and Bukhara. Her dances from the silk route for female ensemble, Persian Suite and Samarkand, were captivating because they seemed rooted, not in a place, but in a transition between the Middle East and China: There was strong emphasis on necks, upper arms, immensely pliable backs, and elaborate finger gestures.

Definitely at home in Oakland was the troupe Diamano Coura, despite the West African origins of choreographers Zakarya Diuouf and Naomi Gedo. The steps and music of the new Demba Ak Teye (From Yesterday to Today) may have come from a continent far away, but the young girls and older women who danced it were not indulging in nostalgia. They were living in the dance. And maybe that's also home.