Looking Back Forward

San Francisco International Arts Festival
May 21-June 8, 2008
Various Venues
San Francisco, California

by Rita Felciano
copyright @ Rita Felciano, 2008

Travels and computer crashes delayed this look backward on one of the braver attempts to pull San Francisco out of what sometimes justifiably has been described “smug self-satisfaction.” In its fifth incarnation the San Francisco International Arts Festival was still struggling to reach a broader audience than its key constituency of local artists. The more the pity it is for the rest of the theater going public since this Festival is one of few opportunities to see work from abroad by performers who have not yet—and some who perhaps never will—attract the attention of the area’s major presenters. The program—heavy on dance this year— at the very least opened windows into where young dancers in places as disparate as Israel, Croatia, Germany and Brazil are investing their energy.

Additionally, SFIAF offered local groups the opportunity to showcase new works. Axis Dance Company presented a Joe Goode commission; Dandelion Dance Theater performed “Oust”, a Buddhist-inspired take on displacement. Dance Elixir Dance’s premiered an elegant “Capital Life,” and Element Dance Theater, collaborating with Navarrete x Kajiyama,created a multi-media installation, “The Mapping Project.” Many of these pieces will return during those companies’ own seasons.

SFIAF is still a low-budget affair, and Founder/Executive Director Andrew Wood takes advantage of the fact that many local mid-career artists spend part of every year working abroad where they often find more support for their creative efforts. These artists have not only referred foreign colleagues to the Festival, but their own work, originally created abroad, gets shown here in co-sponsorship agreements. It’s a realistic and practical way to get new artists in front of audiences. Even though the quality was not uniformly excellent, enough was of interest to make Wood’s premise seem viable for the future.

No group confirmed this more than Art Street Theatre.  Their touching and ever so subtle “Yes, Yes to Moscow,” a German/American collaboration based on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”, premiered in Berlin last October. It received a glowing performance at its American premiere at the Festival. This was global art small in scale, big in impact.

With “Moscow” playwright Mark Jackson (Interrogator), Beth Wilmurt (Olga), Tilla Kratochwil (Masha) and Sommer Ulrickson (Irina) asked what would happen if Chekhov’s three protagonists actually did go back to Moscow. Using new and language from the play, they created a dance theater piece of striking originality that retains the stagnancy and wistfulness of the Russian original. The very appropriate choreography expanded upon moments of particularly emotional intensity, places where in life language just might fail.

Dressed in smocks, the sisters’ Moscow is a sterile institution in which an examiner (Jackson) questioned them about their past much in the way federal officials used to interrogate prospective immigrants. His repetitive laconic delivery stood in marked contrast to Chekhov’s febrile intensity. At first the three women were individually undifferentiated, but gradually they revealed themselves as the maternal Olga, the passionate Masha and the dreamer Irina that we know from the play. One more time they were using memory to keep reality at bay, clinging to each other and still hoping for a better future in Moscow.

The dance sections, apparently also arrived at collaboratively, were nuanced and excellently performed by these dancer/actors. The arrival of the soldiers in town, for instance, became a parade that turned into a kick line. One of Irina’s dream solos evolved into spastic fits. Chekhov ended his play with a whisper of hope; however, if there was one in “Moscow,” I didn’t hear it.

Fanciful whimsy and immaculate precision are not often as intricately intertwined as they were in Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters’ mesmerizing collaboration, “an attic an exit.” This enchantingly wise and witty work, four years in the making and shown on festivals in Portugal and Poland, received its definite premiere in San Francisco.

Seiters, also a visual artist, seems to have an ongoing interest in domestic environments. She once made a piece which was performed among dozens of hanging teacups; in another the dancers seemed to emerge from wallpaper.

So it was not surprising that domesticity--getting dressed, eating, food stuffs, dishes and silverware--played active roles in this dreamy piece about two people who moved with such perfect synchronicity that you wondered whether they had been cloned.

Yet nothing that these two white painted and platinum blondes offered seemed mechanical. Throughout they moved with natural ease, images that split apart only to meld back together. Passing dishes along the floor, their shooting arms connected to the same source of energy. Hand stands and floor rolls were stamped from one mold. A duet for angled arms looked like it might become a wrestling match but slithered back into companionable togetherness. Even at the end when they appeared to go separate ways, they seemed bound to each other.

Gesture language—some of it quite Chaplinesque from a knife and fork dance to eating rope spaghetti—complemented a large scale traveling trajectory around the stage. Donning suspended coats and picking up identical suitcases initiated the trip. Marbles spilled from one of them, the only moment of chaos I can remember. The other suitcase released a rope which became a tool with which, perhaps, to take stock of where this journey was leading. Measuring and creating picture frames—with their hands, the rope, once by pulling up a square of floor into a door became a way to examine a shifting landscape in which these dreamers were looking at themselves dreaming.

The Festival also offered two strong soloists the opportunity to present worthwhile San Francisco premieres. Both works, incidentally, included novelties of an unusual type, simulated defecations.

Christina Moura’s appropriately named “like an idiot” consisted of an assemblage of small episodes in which she mixed portraits of herself and what she thought were our perceptions of her as a woman, an Afro Brazilian, as a dancer. There is, of course, no way that person and persona can be separated in any performance. It was that tension which gave “idiot” some of its intellectual pull. But Moura is also a beautifully liquid dancer who dove into the floor like a dog sniffing the earth or scooted across the watery stage like a kid on ice.

By presenting such a fractured image of herself, she kept throwing the gauntlet at the audience. Her sense of daring and hostility at times seemed a little naïve but overall these elements added a pungent smell of urgency to the “idiot.”

Working her sweater into a headscarf, she turned a modern woman into a tribal elder. Or did she? As Carmen Miranda on a child’s scooter she dared us to laugh. But tearing a piece of paper—at an agonizingly slow pace--into a stick figure and running around after labels were theatrically simple minded. Some episodes were more deliberately transgressive. She dropped stones from her bowels, stones that she had carried around like jewels. A childlike game of spitting water into a multi-stream fountain made me wonder how she did. Then the game became one of daring by spraying the audience with water. What kept the piece alive was its mix of humor, devil-may-care attitudes as well as as sense of pain and self-doubt. “idiot” was full of games, both serious and silly.

Israel’s Shlomit Fundaminsky was scheduled for a duet but a partner’s illness necessitated a change in programming. With “Inner Pocket”, a solo for herself, Fundaminsky presented a multi-layered portrait of a woman confined to a place from which she cannot escape. Program notes suggested that this was “24 hours in a woman’s life". In Fundaminsky hands, a lithe and excellently nuanced dancer, “Pocket” became an economically and clearly realized evocation of conflicting emotions and impulses, both self-imposed and externally generated. I couldn’t help but see a political analogy by this Israeli artist.

Restricted to a darkened room, Fundaminsky hunched her shoulders as if withdrawing but birdlike she also stuck her neck out. Stooping she paced along the stage’s periphery, generating long steps from her hips. She appeared both haunted and hunted. Repeatedly she opened imaginary windows and doors to let the outside of Eyal Weintraub’s sound score filter in. Then just as quickly she drew the curtains close. But she couldn’t escape the world inside her. Lashing out and struggling, unseen forces yanked and pushed her. In moments of quiet, she contemplated herself in a mirror. But there was also something pitiful about the way she shyly flirted and wrapped an arm around her back as if being caressed by a partner. Later on we witnessed her luxuriating in bed and, perhaps, even masturbating.

Repeatedly she squatted on an imaginary toilet, the only place open for light to stream in from above. At first this so very literal image looked embarassing and voyeuristic. But then I realized that the privy quite often is a person’s only place of privacy all day long. So maybe that recurring image was not so inappropriate after all. 

Photos.
Art Street Theatre. Top to Bottom: Beth Wilmurt, Sommer Ulrickson, Tilla Kratchowil by Iko Freese.

Leslie Seiters by lean to productions.

Christina Moura by Mila Petrillo.