The idea was to review SFDanceworks Season 4, but as I left the Cowell Theater that sits on the dock of the San Francisco Bay, a wave of equivocation eclipsed that plan. It was ...
Rudyard Kipling’s name is eponymous. His “White Man’s Burden” lament has served as a sanctimonious apologia for centuries of imperial rape and pillage on foreign soil. Kipling is also the author of “The Jungle Book,” a children’s cautionary tale ...
Again with the Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh! This time it’s not a movie version of a work by the bard, but rather, a close encounter with him along fault lines predicting a fractious interlude. You may wince at ...
“Shostakovich Trilogy” is an evening-long tour de force by Russian-born choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. It’s outstanding for its theme: the tumultuous reconciliation of a world-altering revolution and subsequent counter-revolution with the career of Dmitri Shostakovich, a composer influenced by Igor ...
Diablo Ballet reaches beyond its San Francisco bedroom community setting to recruit dancers from a host of backgrounds, both personal and professional. It brings in choreographers from across oceans or just a tunnel and bridge away. It draws on ...
Even given transparent formulas for box office success, it’s curious how each filmmaker’s starting point holds out an argument of its own. Ralph Fiennes, who directs and appears in “White Crow,” a film that collects around the idiosyncrasies of ...
If the phrase “History is written by the victors” has become a truism, here is the film that takes the would-be victor, fascism, and transforms its own records and documents into a mirror of its perfidy. It also stands ...
Few can stride across a floor, arms raised to usher in festivity, as convincingly as Val Caniparoli, San Francisco Ballet’s reigning King Without a Crown. The story ballet fixture, be it ...
It’s informative to read in ODC Artistic Director Brenda Way’s program notes that motivation on her part for mounting Kate Weare’s full-length work “World’s on Fire” issues from a wish to look deeply into our heartland, to better understand ...
In the novel, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” we learn that Eskimos have more than one hundred words for what is wet, white, and falls from the sky in cold weather. The current-day Avant Garde ...
