Claudia Bauer is a freelance writer and lifelong bunhead in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in Dance Magazine, Pointe Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Critical Dance and SF/Arts Monthly. She tweets every so often at @speakingofdance.
Under are the articles written for DanceTabs.
San Francisco Ballet – Shostakovich Trilogy – San Francisco
★★★✰✰ The choreography in Shostakovich Trilogy, which was co-commissioned by SFB and ABT and premiered in 2014, is as frustratingly capricious as the music.
San Francisco Ballet – Die Toteninsel (premiere), Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes, Björk Ballet – San Francisco
★★★✰✰ Liam Scarlett has great taste in dancers. For the 29 March world premiere of Die Toteninsel, his fourth commission for San Francisco Ballet, the British choreographer chose the lyrical and athletic principal Joseph Walsh and soloist Lauren Strongin…
San Francisco Ballet – The Sleeping Beauty – San Francisco
★★★✰✰ The performance was thrilling …because it marked the Aurora debut of soloist Wona Park, whose Kitri debut in the season-opening Don Quixote got loads of buzz. At just 19, she dances with an ease beyond her years…
Various Artists – D.I.R.T. Festival, storm SURGE edition – San Francisco
★★★★✰ This year’s festival, titled storm SURGE …brought together eight local and visiting artists with connections to coastal and island communities that are on the front line of rising oceans.
Natalia Osipova – ISADORA: A Tribute to Isadora Duncan in Two Acts (world premiere) – Costa Mesa
★★★✰✰ Half-narrative and semi-abstract, ISADORA hop-skips through the dancer’s life; it’s described in the program notes as a “freely interpreted biography,” and it cherry-picks around unsavory elements…
Interview – Alexander Ekman & T.M. Rives on dance and film
“I think you’ve just got to dare to go there. It’s hard, it’s scary, but creation is always kind of scary in one way or the other. So I think you’ve just gotta have guts and go for it anyway.” Alexander Ekman.
Interview – Annabelle Lopez Ochoa on creating Guernica for SF Ballet’s Unbound Festival
“I don’t know if we can make the world a better place, but we can definitely have the audience think about it.”
San Francisco Ballet – Unbound Festival Program D: works by Edwaard Liang, Dwight Rhoden, Arthur Pita – San Francisco
★★★★★ A hundred monkeys might eventually type out Hamlet, but only a herd of unicorns on Ecstasy could come anywhere near Arthur Pita’s Björk Ballet.
San Francisco Ballet – Unbound Festival Program A: works by Alonzo King, Christopher Wheeldon, Justin Peck – San Francisco
★★★★✰ If Helgi Tomasson was hoping that Unbound: A Festival of New Works would generate heated debate on the state of ballet today, his wish has already been fulfilled just one night into the massive festival…
San Francisco Ballet – Robbins: Ballet & Broadway quad bill – San Francisco
★★★★✰ There’s nothing like watching a woman crush a man’s neck with her thighs to make you go hmm, maybe that whole #MeToo thing has legs.
San Francisco Ballet – The Sleeping Beauty – San Francisco
★★✰✰✰ The efforts of San Francisco Ballet’s artists are sadly misplaced in this largely joyless and wholly unsatisfying rendition of The Sleeping Beauty.
Miami City Ballet – The Nutcracker – Los Angeles
★★★✰✰ The MCB dancers exude Balanchine brio and delight in performing his intricate steps, but they had to give their all to keep up with the youngsters.
Pacific Northwest Ballet – Her Story: Her Door to the Sky, Afternoon Ball, Plot Point – Seattle
★★★★✰ Suspense be damned. I’m just going to give away the ending of this review: Crystal Pite’s Plot Point, which closes Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Her Story triple bill, is a terrific piece of dance-theater.
Dorrance Dance – Jungle Blues, Three to One, Myelination – San Francisco
★★★★★ Dorrance Dance is received with such universal enthusiasm and love that reviewing them feels like an exercise in redundancy, like piling on to a scrum that’s already 30 players deep.
Paufve Dance – XO: eXquisite Orientation – San Francisco
★★★★✰ In XO: eXquisite Orientation, Bay Area choreographer Randee Paufve channels the fears and frustrations that distress many of us….
San Francisco Ballet and School – Student Showcase, Promotions and Company Joiners
San Francisco exists in its own world, out here on the distant West Coast. The San Francisco Ballet, though, just became more global than ever, with new 2017-18 members joining from around the world. The company school, which presented its annual Student Showcase 31 May through 2 June at YBCA Theater, draws international students as well…
FACT/SF and The Foundry – Platform, Deep South (premieres) – San Francisco
★★★★✰ It can be fascinating to see how two artists, starting with the same media, create completely unique works.
Interview – Catherine Turocy, artistic director of New York Baroque Dance Company
Meticulous reconstructions of Petipa, Cunningham, Graham, Taylor works are performance staples these days. Much rarer is a reconstruction like “Le Temple de la Gloire” (The Temple of Glory) a 1745 political opera-ballet with music by Jean-Philippe Rameau and a libretto by the philosopher Voltaire….
San Francisco Ballet – Trio, Ghost in the Machine (premiere), Within the Golden Hour – San Francisco
★★★✰✰ Myles Thatcher is an inventive young talent…
American Ballet Theatre – Whipped Cream – Costa Mesa
★★★✰✰ Be careful what you wish for. The Boy in Alexei Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream wishes for unlimited sweets; overfulfillment sends him to the hospital with sugar hallucinations.
