Toba Singer, author of “Fernando Alonso, the Father of Cuban Ballet” (University Press of Florida 2013), and “First Position: a Century of Ballet Artists” (Praeger 2007), writes for international dance journals and websites, and has served as an advisor to the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design. She was the University Press of Florida author representative at the 2013 Miami International Book Fair. “Fernando Alonso, the Father of Cuban Ballet” was nominated for the Latin American Student Association Bryce Award, the de la Torre Research and Dance Scholars Award, and the Commonwealth Club California Book Award.
Film
“Moka” is a revenge thriller tendering a compact story that traverses Lac Leman (Lake Geneva). Some of its action plays out on the lake’s French bank in the city of Évian-les-Bains, and the rest in the Swiss city of Lausanne. ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Opera Paralèlle’s “Les Enfants Terribles” is a Jean Cocteau novel-inspired multimedia cocktail of nearly equal parts opera, filmed images, ballet, spoken word, and live piano accompaniment. Plot lines derivative of the 1972 Franco Zeffirelli film, “Sister Sun, Brother Moon,” and ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Christopher Wheeldon’s co-production with Dutch National Ballet of “Cinderella” is dance theater, conceived of in that genre’s finest tradition, but by no means limited by it. A marvelous scenic design team headed by costume and set designer Julian Crouch, ...
DanceSan Francisco,
Helgi Tomasson created “Trio” in 2011. It proceeds from a sixth sense of what Tchaikovsky’s piece “Souvenir” proposed about the shape of a dance work. Tomasson abandoned the notion of a continuous motif in favor of three different ones. ...
Film
You know you’re in for a treat when among the opening scenes of a film is one where two mature men face each other across a threshold, say nothing, but with an exchange of facial expressions and body language, tell ...
DanceSan Francisco,
“It’s complicated,” Prince Siegfried (Joseph Walsh) might be inclined to confess, if asked to sum up his erotic inclinations. He celebrates his birthday while sharing a carousing bromance with his tutor, Wolfgang (Val Caniparoli), and appeasing his meddling Queen Mother ...
Film
My father broke with the religion of his birth, Judaism, when he was 14. Three factors drove his apostasy, two practical, one philosophical. During my grandfather’s Austrian childhood, a rabbi boxed his ear for an infraction of one of a ...
Books & CDs
Dissemble: (per the OED) Conceal or disguise one's true feelings or beliefs.
Dissemble: A word I have never understood. Why not just say “lie”?
In “Jerzy,” PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist Jerome Charyn bites off more than most of us ...
DanceSan Francisco,
An argument favoring bilingual education: When a child whose first language is not yet well-established is placed in a classroom where only English is spoken, the child develops “subtractive bilingualism,” making mastery of both languages difficult. Something along these ...
FeaturesBerkeley,
In late February, I had a chance to sit down with playwright Lisa Loomer (“The Waiting Room,” “Girl Interrupted”) to discuss her play “Roe,” now at Berkeley Rep. My own experience with the political and practical history of winning and ...
