March 18 2003

By Rita Felciano

ODC/SAN Francisco opened its "Dancing Downtown 2003" series March 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with Bold Sally, a piece that showcased what choreographer and artistic director Brenda Way calls the company's "kick-ass" style: vibrantly physical dancing in which virtuosity is leavened by a casual quality.

Sally (1990) chugged along on top of a Vivaldi concerto for violin and chamber orchestra. A romp for a girl (Yukie Fujimoto) and three of her buddies (Brian Fisher, Justin Flores, and Daniel Santos), the work featured athletic lifts, slides, and plunges and an overall bouncy energy that made cheerleaders look funereal. But its fast-paced encounters also possessed elegance. Fisher, before bringing in his friends, echoed Fujimoto's balletic arm gestures as if to court her with them. In response she dived through his arms. The piece finished with Fujimoto in a triumphant Statue of Liberty pose while Fisher, supported by his comrades in mischief, threw himself into a "fish dive" – a wink at the grand pas de deux, in which a ballerina is presented, head down, to the audience.

The gala also offered the San Francisco premiere of Way's impressive new Remnants of Song and KT Nelson's Running into Open Doors (2001). Remnants was a sensitive, intelligent perspective on one of the great love stories of Western civilization, that of the iconic Abelard and Héloïse – he a 12th-century monk, she a convent-raised novice. Way took a stark approach to a hot story, an approach complemented by designer Jackson Lowell, who clad the dancers in narrow tunics from which limbs shot out like screams of desire. The piece's lateral processions, sometimes approaching marching phalanxes, breathed with humanity; the uniformity of the patterns masked more private comings and goings.

The first meeting of the would-be lovers, strongly danced by Fujimoto and Flores, provoked a protracted struggle between Flores's Abelard and a figure (Freeman) who might have been an abbot, Abelard's conscience, or perhaps a former lover. It was the one moment when Remnant lost its way. The combat's fierceness remained unconvincing, and Héloïse and Abelard's initial contact had been too accidental and fleeting to warrant such an outburst.

Intriguingly, Fujimoto and Flores's lovers duet had a torn quality to it; even while embracing, they seemed to look at themselves from the outside, desperate and reluctant. During the duet's most intimate passage, Jay Cloidt inserted a plaintive French folk song into the collage of his score. It gave the moment a heartbreaking fragility.

Lowell's gauzy white dresses and pants suggested an airborne freedom that Nelson's heavy-handed choreography for Running unfortunately didn't deliver. The piece looked burdened, with too many rambling ideas and motives that lacked follow-through. A rubber-limbed Freeman seemed to be searching for something. Tammy Cheney's whirlwind trajectories shredded orderly configurations, and the luscious Khamla Somphanh, a center of repose, for some reason hooked up with an old geezer (played by Santos). These elements at least needed to be placed in a stronger context, if not expanded. As it was, the busy Running seemed to be going nowhere fast.

The following night, Investigating Grace – Way's large-scale, musically sensitive mining of Bach's Goldberg Variations – replaced Bold Sally. Punctuated by classical fresco imagery, this gorgeous piece started out by celebrating everyday aspects of relationships, when Freeman, who had been ambling through various relationships, suddenly ended up "dead." Only in retrospect did it become clear that Way had placed all kinds of clues leading up to this catastrophe. Grace ended on an upbeat note – or did it? The women, carried aloft, looked like liberated spirits, or perhaps they were mere banners fluttering in the wind. Life is tenuous – that much Way made clear.