Moving on
Footloose's Women's Work series says good-bye to Venue 9.

By Rita Felciano

AT THE END of May the curtain comes down on Venue 9, one of the tiniest important theaters in San Francisco. Venue 9's parent organization, Footloose, lost its lease because – you guessed it – the owner wants to tear down the place to put up offices.

Back in 1996, one month after producer Mary Alice Fry moved into the unprepossessing space – 77 seats, a 25-by-20-foot stage, no wings – she started a bimonthly Tuesday-night series. Since then Women's Work has been an essential theater, dance, music, comedy, and performance lab for women. Many shows that took their first tottering steps at Venue 9 have gone on to successful runs at larger clubs or theaters. Since dance has been a major part of this mix, it seemed appropriate to close Venue 9's Women's Work series (March 23) with an all-dance program.

Sisters Brooke Gessay and Lauren Slater of the LEVYdance Company struck out on their own with a piece they called Crest Drive. As young choreographers, they haven't yet developed the sense of space and time required to shape different elements into a convincing whole. But there was something oddly intriguing about Crest's stiff-legged encounters; the laconic gestural vocabulary, which ranged from wiggled toes to stuck-out tongues, seemed to emphasize angular awkwardness. The dancers gave the impression that release – the dominant influence in Bay Area dance over the past 15 years – has at last run its course.

Huckabay McAllister Dance presented two works. Jenny McAllister premiered The Owl and the Pussycat, a lanky duet for the magnificent Ann Berman and Jason Whitlow set to Griff Roleson's tongue-in-cheek "Bonsoir François." The dancers' sleek black leotards and Whitlow's beret suggested a takeoff on the French apache dance, performed by returning sailors and the not-so-faithful women they'd left behind. A sexually charged encounter that matches dramatic intertwinements with accordion music, the apache dance lends itself to parody. If that was McAllister's intent, more planning has to go into the overall design and the details of Owl's ravenous moves.

Emma Lou Huckabay's Siren Songs was a slithery trio for Berman, Maria Ross, and Julie Sheetz that added dollops of humor to an atmosphere of mystery. Dressed in black tights and aqua tops, the three women, who couldn't be more different from each other, embodied creatures that were sensually seductive but also self-absorbed. With their legs tight together, they wiggled and stretched like mermaids on the rocks; getting up and leaning on each other, they wobbled as if trying out new legs. The trio's long sensuous strokes amusingly brought TV shower gel ads to mind; tiny little shakes – of the shoulders, hips, and fingers – suggested frailty but could also have been flirtatious.

The two-part Loneliness of the Long Distance, developed by Jennifer Chien during an AIRspace residency at the Jon Sims Center for the Arts, didn't turn out exactly as planned. Conceived as a duet for Jesselito Bie and Vong Phrommala, Loneliness examined the shifting emotional and physical closeness of two men. The first part consisted of a video in which a pair of shadowy figures rode an empty bus together, approaching and retreating, touching and withdrawing. The second part of the dance took place onstage, at first on chairs and then on the floor. The gestures remained the same, sparse but telling, with long pauses in between. Since Bie recently tore a muscle, Chien took his place on the floor, and Loneliness briefly became a duet between a man and a woman. But that change didn't matter; it remained a lovely essay on the nature of intimacy.

Deborah Slater's Trio wasn't a trio – it was a duet performed with three chairs. The piece paired Deborah Miller and Rachel Whiting, who rehearsed separately so their parts were combined met for the first time onstage. While Miller's detailed opening dance dominated the presentation, Whiting introduced a calmer note into this fascinating encounter. Slater called Trio an experiment, and it was an appropriate way to close a series that has presented new and formative works by close to 800 woman artists over the past eight years. There is some happiness to this ending: Fry promises that wherever she winds up, she'll continue presenting.