Maureen Walsh

Series founders Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith in A Public Affair. They take coffee orders, too. No, seriously.

The Concept dance series is a rare bird hiding in San Francisco's cultural aviary. Put on by RAWdance, it's pay-what-you-can, semi-undiscovered, and there's free food. First-date heaven! Or, for those muddling around sans date, you're practically guaranteed to meet new and (this being a dance audience) attractive people. Singles heaven!

Beyond that, though, lies something even more appealing and harder to define. It just feels good to be there. Part of it is the brick-walled, historic venue, 66 Sanchez Studio, formerly known as the James Howell Studio. The rest is because of curators Ryan Smith and Wendy Rein, the co-directors of RAWdance. They founded the group in 2004, and in 2007 they started this twice-yearly series. The two dancers, lithe and coiffed, have this emcee shtick that would be annoying if they were any less good at it.

See, after welcoming the audience -- Smith: "Is this anyone's virginal experience of the Concept series?" -- they hand out cups of popcorn, take coffee orders -- "or else people get limey" (Rein) -- then go dance the hell out of a piece or scamper offstage to ensure everything is running smoothly. Then they come back to vamp a bit, breathless and accommodating (more coffee orders, more popcorn), while the next performers prepare or someone in the crew leans over the front row of seats to ask an audience member to dim the lights halfway, as the switch is just behind her.

It's cozy like that.

More >>

Lydia Daniller

The Secret History of Love

Despite all the video games, baked potato bars, and racquetball leagues in our great country, it seems people still care about love. We salute your lizard brain pursuits! You know who hasn't always had easy access to love? Queer people. Homophobia written into law and people's minds has meant a threatened existence for queers in our past, and sadly, in our present. Despite the terrible threat and violence a prejudiced society presented, plenty of folks found creative ways to live out their nontraditional gender expressions, drag personas, and same-sex love. Choreographer Sean Dorsey -- after two years of intensive interviews with LGBT elders -- collects these inspiring tales in The Secret History of Love, which starts a four-day run tonight at Dance Mission Theater.

More >>

Neelu Bhuman, Piro Patton, and Sabrina Wong

Mica Sigourney and Lisa Townsend share the dance theater they've developed as artists-in-residence at CounterPULSE.

Lisa Townsend's indifference and Mica Sigourney's MASTERWORK collectively illustrate the risks and the rewards of giving artists the support they need to experiment. Townsend and Sigourney are part of the Artist Residency Commissioning Program at CounterPULSE and have developed their dance theater pieces over the past several months. They get rehearsal space, "work-in-progress showings," and a performance venue to make whatever they want. Some artists profit enormously from that freedom, while others use it strictly to indulge themselves. The double-bill of these two works, which concluded Sunday, cover both extremes.

Indifference uses dance theater to explore Albert Camus' The Stranger, the 1942 novel best known as an illustration of existentialism. The title character is Mersault, estranged because of his consummate apathy. Asked by his girlfriend Marie whether he wants to get married, he responds that it doesn't make any difference to him and they can if she wants to. More weightily, when he shoots an innocent man, he offers no explanation why and feels no remorse afterward.

More >>

Gadi Dagon

Some protesters protesting Max, a dance piece by Ohad Naharin, were asked whether they'd seen the work. They hadn't.

Anytime you see the Batsheva Dance Company in performance, you can pretty fairly expect a gut-wrencher, a blasphemy without words. It's a trademark of the Tel Aviv troupe's leader, Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. But last Saturday, audience members entering YBCA's Novellus Theater encountered a few surprises.

Among them, we found Naharin's work Max to be as low-key as anything in his repertory. My gut nearly went unwrenched. But even before we entered the theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts -- no kidding -- we got protesters! Protesting a dance show!

I was handed a leaflet advocating the boycott of Batsheva, citing the group's failure to condemn the persecution of Palestinians as complicity in "Israeli apartheid." As "Israel's best known ambassador of global Israeli culture," quoth the leaflet, Batsheva is a marquee name for the Brand Israel campaign, active since 2005 or so. Apparently Israel has an image problem! The Israeli foreign ministry wants us look beyond its occupation (and worse) of the Palestinian territories. (Really though, "Brand Israel"? As propaganda goes ... wow.)

Naturally, I asked four of the 10 or so protesters if they knew of Naharin's work, which is pretty clearly pro-human rights. Nada. God bless 'em, these folks turned out to be one hell of a way to kick off the night. Because Max needed a little social context to really pop. And because I can't deny that the protesters made some valid points. Though not about Naharin.

More >>

Gil Riego

Baldur Helgason

Thursday night at Artopia, SF Weekly announced the three winners of 2012's Masterminds Grants. Two individuals and one dance troupe each won $1,500 to further their work. They were among more than 100 applicants in the competition, now in its fifth year. Ten finalists were chosen, and each had work on display at the Thursday night event.

One winner was Baldur Helgason, an illustrator originally from Iceland. To read more about Helgason and his work, read his profile by our arts critic Jonathan Curiel.

More >>

Three years ago, while working on a commissioned video installation, director Jacob Krupnick put out an open call for amateur dancers. Inspired by the range of styles exhibited in not-so-amateur dancer Anne Marsen's improvised routine -- which included Bollywood, breakdance, hip-hop, ballet, freestyle, and rave -- he set out to make a feature film for her to star in. The perfect soundtrack revealed itself in popular mash-up DJ Girl Talk's 2010 album All Day.

After a Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $25,000, Girl Walk // All Day is touring the country's theaters and film festivals, including opening night of SXSW. The film plays at two S.F. venues -- Public Works and the Roxie Theater -- as well as Oakland's Vessel Gallery in the next week.

Girl Walk // All Day follows three characters (the girl, the creep, and the gentleman, played by Marsen, John Doyle, and Dai Omiya, respectively) as they dance their way through New York City. Along the way they experience the inhospitable nature as well as the embrace of certain public spaces, eliciting rudeness and appreciation from strangers, and discover the uplifting power of dance. They tap atop Wall Street's Charging Bull. They get kicked out of Yankee Stadium. They enlist a group of women off the street to perform Beyonce's "Single Ladies." In doin so, the dancers reveal the scope of landscapes, personalities, and human responses in NYC. We caught up with director Jacob Krupnick in New York to find out more.

More >>

The economy sucks, but we don't care -- the Bay Area is home to artists so talented they deserve to take over the world. That's why the Masterminds grants are given to three local and emerging artists who need that little push to become even more awesome.

SF Weekly has narrowed down the potential winners to 10 finalists, with the three winners being chosen Feb. 16. at Public Works during Artopia. Until then we're going to fall in love with their creative work all over again by featuring the profiles (written by our arts critic Jonathan Curiel) of two finalists each day right up until the event. Today, meet Eric Cohen and Eliane Lima.

More >>

Liz Acosta

Last Saturday we got sucked into a television set. We were walking through the lobby at CounterPULSE and somehow fell through to the other side. Luckily, we spent our time experiencing a sneak-preview of the supersurreal multimedia dance performance Hotel in a Bottle: On the Other Side, created and directed by Erin Malley.

We don't want to give it away, but it includes motion- and sound-sensored visuals, illusory portals, a sheep, and subliminal investigation. If you are into psychedelic drugs, dreams, or Haruki Murakami's fiction, you'll love it.

More >>

Erik Tomasson

Maria Kochetkova and Vitor Luiz in Onegin.

It's winter in San Francisco, it's cold (or at least gray), and the San Francisco Ballet's 2012 season has kicked off this week with a heavy, Russian tragedy. (Save the whimsical Don Quixote for spring when spirits are lighter.) Through Friday, the War Memorial Opera House is sunk into 1820s Russia, when social class determined destiny, and women had few opportunities other than to love and yearn to be loved.

The ballet is Onegin, based on the poem by Alexander Pushkin -- the tale of a urban sophisticate who rejects the innocent country girl, kills his friend, and then returns later only to be rejected by country-girl-made-good and sink into bitter loneliness and regret. (We're guessing Pushkin may have been a "glass half-empty" type.)

Onegin has also been turned into an opera and even adapted into a dark little film starting Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler. But the ballet is the creation of John Cranko, first staged in 1965 by the Stuttgart Ballet, set to a score arranged by Kurt-Heinz Stolze that mixes various pieces by Tchaikovsky. The set and costumes come to us from Santo Loquasto, perhaps best known for being Woody Allen's designer in 24 productions. The point of all this shameless name dropping? The talent runs deep, and that's before the ballerinas show up.

More >>

Mark Andrew Wilson

Aperture

Aperture -- it's that setting on your SLR camera you pretend to understand. Actually, it's pretty simple. An aperture is a hole or a gap, and it's a fitting title for the world premiere performance by the Samantha Giron Dance Project that opens tonight (Friday) at Kunst-Stoff Arts. This Aperture explores the cause and effect of breaking away from tradition -- a literal presentation of the gap between what one knows and what one will discover.

The dance troupe describes it as "a contemporary meets street dance, electronics meets strings, father/daughter collaboration." The artist, Samantha Giron, was inspired by her father's unexpected trajectory. Keith Giron, an Apache and Hispanic American, was a first-generation high school graduate and left his low-income family to attend an Ivy League college, effectively paving a very different path for himself and his family than they would have otherwise known. Giron asks a common question through a unique focal point of the Hispanic American perspective (cue the Clash): Should I stay or should I go?

More >>