Photos by Weidong Yang

Weidong Yang is a physicist who invented a method to detect movement as fine as a tenth of an atom. With Kinetech, a collective of artists and scientists he assembled earlier this year, Yang works on a human scale, drawing on years of martial arts and dance training and performance, as well as his skills as an engineer, to produce a tactile and visual experience inspired by fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, entropy, fractal noise, and infinite loops.

Combining technological contributions by Florian Hoenig, Sachin Deshpande, and Marc Fawzi, and choreography by Bay Area favorites Daiane Lopes da Silva and Karla Quintero, Kinetech presents Open Lab--Sensory Awakening May 20-21 at KUNST-STOFF arts with three modes of aesthetic experimentation: Mosaic, Rag Doll, and Flo, each built of codes, projections, and dancers in motion.

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Photo by Chelsea Rowe

They say it takes three weeks to break a habit, and the third annual KUNST-STOFF Arts Fest gives you three-and-a-half to take dance classes, participate in workshops on choreography and creative-intuition, and attend performances loosely centered on the theme "Inhabit," May 15-June 7. Curated by KUNST-STOFF artistic director Yannis Adoniou, events feature local and visiting artists working in dance, new media, technology, film, and more.

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Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg returned to Zellerbach Hall Rodin May 10-12 at Zellerbach Hall with Boris Eifman's 2011 ballet Rodin, about the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. In contrast to other choreographers after Balanchine, who have practically made abstraction synonymous with contemporary dance, Eifman often returns to stories and refers to his works as "stage psychoanalysis." Yet the idea of abstraction hovers beneath a piece like Rodin, which, though ostensibly about the love triangle between Rodin, his wife, Rose, and his mistress and muse, the sculptor Camille Claudel, is also l'art pour l'art: an ekphrasis of sculpture, an aesthetic transformation of ugly feelings.

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Photo by Kim Anno and Kyung Lee

More than two years have passed since the earthquake and tsunami devastated Fukushima prefecture in Japan, and only last week, The New York Times reported that the radioactive water used to cool the nuclear reactors in Fukushima is accumulating at an alarming rate. The independent writer of Fukushima Diary catalogues phenomena: mutated dandelions, unseasonal cirrocumulus clouds, absent azalea buds.

Jose Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama's Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater, past honorees of Dance Magazine's 25 to Watch, present BAILOUT!, their newest activist interdisciplinary site-specific installation, May 10-12 in and around Dance Mission Theater. BAILOUT! tackles Japan's nuclear disaster from the perspective of our relationship with the oceans. The installation considers what recourse remains to those served by governments that would rather rescue financial institutions than address massive environmental consequences, as well as our complicity in the act of urban living.

Navarrete and Kajiyama have previously created work on genetic modification of crops and diminishing natural resources, as well as the city's transgender and ethnic communities.

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Photo by Margo Moritz

San Francisco's Hope Mohr Dance premiered Failure of the Sign is the Sign at ODC Theater May 3-5, along with a work by New York-based choreographer Susan Rethorst. The set design by Katrina Rodabaugh is extraordinary: Strung from the ceiling are jagged branches hung with exposed incandescent light bulbs, soft sculptures in soft blue in the shapes of a castle on a planet, trees sprouting from a whale, and organs, soft organs: lungs, heart, pancreas. Tegan Schwab, swaddled in long blue tubes, rolls fetally, larvally, the tips of her fingers and toes making light contact with the bare wood floor.

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Photo by Erik Tomasson

Christopher Wheeldon's new Cinderella made its U.S. premiere to a packed audience at the War Memorial Opera House May 3. With lavish sets and extravagant costumes designed by Julian Crouch, San Francisco Ballet delivers the anticipated fantasy of the fairy tale ballet and more.

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Jamaica Itule Simmons

Danza del Caribe

The CubaCaribe festival ended this weekend after two weeks of performances and classes. The skill and energy unleashed throughout the festival were predicted and summed up in its opening night, though. There was palpable anticipation around Teatro de Danza del Caribe's sold-out debut at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts April 19. The company performed a mixed bill as part of the two-week CubaCaribe Festival honoring teachers and dedicated to recently deceased artistic director Eduardo Rivero.

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, now in its second year under its third artistic director, Robert Battle, brings four new programs to Zellerbach Hall April 23 through April 28. The difference in repertoire is evident to anyone who has followed the 55-year-old company.

Presenting works by Nederlands Dans Theater's Jiri Kylian and Batsheva's Ohad Naharin alongside American choreographers Kyle Abraham, Garth Fagan, and Battle himself, the company has taken a step into international waters.

Abraham's Another Night begins in silence and Jacqueline Green in electric blue with sinuous limbs snaking through a haze of smoke hailing the entrance of Dizzy Gillespie's "A Night In Tunisia." A pair of dancers meanders in, she exits, eventually there are 10 -- a motley rainbow of men and women.

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Vince Scarano

Strap on your platforms, shimmy into your bellbottoms, and get ready to get down at David Dorfman Dance's "Prophets of Funk" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Celebrating the music of San Francisco's own interracial funk band Sly & the Family Stone, the piece showcases diversity of ages, sizes, and races with nine dancers (including Dorfman himself) who strut, line dance, air guitar, hustle, and generally bring their nonstop slinky groove right back to the '70s.

The band will be breaking into song and speech about social injustice, all to the sweet sounds of the interracial, multigender crew that brought us "Dance to the Music," "I Want to Take You Higher," and "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey."

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By Irene Hsiao
Flamenco, dance of passion and resistance, has its origins in southern Spain, blending Andalusian and Romani dance with the Spanish seguidilla, emerging at about the same time as the Spanish settlement of California.

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