FatChanceBellyDance

One of the effects of skyrocketing rent in any city is that the surrounding cities become cooler. Inexpensive space attracts artists who fill that space with work they can no longer afford to present in a city increasingly ransomed to luxury condo developers and corporate chains (Hello, Liz Claiborne).

When San Francisco was cheaper, it was more known for its artists and writers, and Oakland, perhaps unfairly, for gun crime and blight. Now San Francisco is a city dominated by tech money rather than its former Bohemianism, and the Oakland Art Murmur, at least in terms of sheer exuberance, wipes the floor with any equivalent art event happening in what we arrogantly term “The City.” It’s been decades since one could imagine, for instance, a restaurant large enough for a mid-sized crowd and space for both dancers and a live band — and that was run by people who thought it would be financially viable to regularly present lesser-known ethnic dance forms set to acoustic instrumentals and singing in foreign languages. There is actually one restaurant in Hayes Valley, with both interest and space to accommodate such events, whose plans are rumored to have been felled by a single grumpy neighborhood resident who complained to the city that he didn’t want his ‘hood becoming “another North Beach.” To this we say, “We should live so bloody long.” Ah well, San Francisco, we can’t win for losin’.

Well, San Mateo has it: On the third Friday of every month, Lebanese restaurant Tannourine hosts an evening of bellydancing, featuring FatChanceBellyDance and guests, often accompanied by live music by local North African band Helm. FatChance arose out of a Bay Area dance dynasty stretching back to the ’40s. Jamila Salimpour collected folk dances and finger cymbal patterns from Morocco, Egypt and Turkey, while dancing in nightclubs in Los Angeles and her own Bagdad Cabaret on Broadway here in San Francisco. In those days successful clubs could import dancers from these other countries, and so Jamila was able to learn certain steps from other dancers who got them straight from “the source.” She developed a vocabulary for the basic movements and a teaching method to break them down for the American student, and began to teach classes in Berkeley in the ’50s. In 1968, she formed “Bal Anat” with her students, presenting the various folkloric dances and costuming at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

Jamila Salimpour, wearing a dress by Masha Archer, photographed by Charles Homer Archer

Salimpour’s daughter Suhaila now helms Bal Anat, but one of her other students, (and this author’s mother), Masha Archer, branched off to form her own group in the early 1970s, the San Francisco Classic Dance Troupe. While she shared Salimpour’s love of bellydance, she resisted what she felt was her teacher’s pessimism regarding the danceform ever having a life outside the nightclub and occasional theme festival (after all, even in the Middle East and North Africa, it had existed exclusively in nightclubs for decades and was not an artform its seminal cultures cared to preserve as anything but male entertainment. The original bellydancers, the Ouled Naïl, were Algerian Berbers who performed the danse du ventre for the French male colonists).

Archer was also uninterested in authenticity for authenticity’s sake, and so described what she did as primarily an American style of dance derived from Middle Eastern and African folkloric roots. She altered steps to suit her taste and to make them, she felt, appropriate for the modern Western woman. She eliminated floorwork (basically what it sounds like, movements done on the knees or back) and emphasized balletic posture and fluid arm movement. She also furthered the dance’s reach by having her troupe perform at events that didn’t normally host Middle Eastern, or even any, dance performance. Her troupe danced at gallery openings, book fairs, city hall, the Cinco de Mayo parade, the San Francisco Photography Fair, even photographer Imogen Cunningham’s memorial (Archer’s own husband was the late photographer Charles Homer Archer), all part of her design to pull the dance out of the nightclub and into its rightful place as one of the great performance arts.

Masha Archer (née Maria Muchin), photographed by Charles Homer Archer

Another factor in Archer’s quest to create distance between the dance and the nightclub was her emphasis on the chorus, rather than having a lone woman dance by herself, as was customary in the clubs. The chorus is a group of “backup” dancers onstage performing basic movements behind the featured soloists and duets. Believing that the audience could be taught how to regard the dance by the dancers onstage, that seeing the chorus support and respect the featured dancers would influence the audience to do the same, Archer surrounded her featured dancers with a half-circle of supporting dancers, or the “tribe.” Importantly, Archer also continued Salimpour’s tradition of dancing in folk-inspired costuming, rather than the bare legs and sequins of the nightclub acts. Wearing pantaloons, hipscarves, and piles and piles of ethnic jewelry, the San Francisco Dance Troupe looked like something out of an Art Nouveau fantasy.

Archer’s troupe disbanded in 1986, and one of her students, Carolena Nericcio, started teaching, initially, simply to have people to dance with. Inevitably, she and her students started to perform. Nericcio and several of her dancers are heavily tattooed, and at first danced at tattoo shows and other festivals. Bellydance still had not shaken its more lubricious associations, and Nericcio had to endure predictably tactless questions such as, “Can I get a private dance?” and eventually named her troupe for her reply, “Fat chance.” She also began assembling the moves she inherited from Archer (and indirectly, from Salimpour) into a system that enabled dancers to better communicate with each other onstage, which ultimately allowed her to increase the repertoire of movements.

Carolena Nericcio. Photo by Kristine Adams

Bellydance (at least this style) is an improvisational dance, and under Archer’s tutelage, dancers had to become so attuned to each other that they could just sense when one movement would change to another. Nericcio established a standard group formation, which placed the “leader,” at the front left of a trio or quartet of dancers. She also created a language of cues, which could be as conspicuous as a plunge of the arms or as subtle as the making — or breaking — of eye contact, and with which the leader could signal to the other dancers a change from one movement to another, or to a variation on the same movement, or a rearrangement of the group from which another dancer could assume the lead position.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the codification of these rules and signals expanded the improvisational opportunities. With the necessity for telepathic abilities minimized, dancers could perform more complicated movements and combinations. The leader could signal the”Egyptian Basic” (a sort of emphatic, hip-swishing walk with raised arms) with a set number of spins on the end, or cue the front row to change places with the back while shimmying, and even without rehearsal, the dancers could perform these steps as a unified whole. In fact, some people who see FatChance perform are surprised to learn that what they witness is not choreographed beforehand. Each performance is a unique work of art invented in the moment, a phenomenon made possible by the silent language of cues and signals, assertion and deference, between dancers. Nericcio has also reinstated floorwork (to great effect) and added movements from flamenco, kathak and other belly dance styles to her version of bellydance, which she has labeled “American Tribal Style.”

American Tribal Style has become so popular that Nericcio and her certified trainers (often members of FatChance itself) travel around the world teaching workshops in it. Satellite bellydance companies have formed on nearly every continent led by enthusiasts drawn to this dance’s mix of ancient roots, modern sensibility, and cooperative spirit. (continue reading about third Fridays at Tannourine and see more images and videos of American Tribal Style Bellydance here)

Garry Winogrand, Central Park Zoo, New York, 1967; gelatin silver print; Collection of Randi and Bob Fisher; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The first several hours I spent in SFMOMA’s Garry Winogrand retrospective, I thought writing about it would be easy: it seemed like each of the 300 images offered such imaginative fodder that the only problem would be to avoid long-windedness. But eventually I realized that that approach would be pointless, for the very reason that Winogrand’s work, while never simple or obvious, isn’t exactly opaque, either. They’re not the sort of images that one blinks at for a while before concluding that art is incomprehensible and wandering off in a state of alienation. The confluence of aesthetic and dramatic elements in each image is incredibly engaging — however one interprets them. What is the black man thinking as he stares into the eyes of the dehorned rhino in “Bronx Zoo, New York,” made in the turbulent year of 1963? What is the rhino thinking, for that matter? What is the tuxedoed man shouting as he drives his slick car in 1959′s “New York”? Or is he singing along with the radio? Is there someone just out of sight in the passenger seat that he’s shouting at or is he just taking advantage of a moment to himself in his car to enjoy a good scream? Is it reading too much into the image of the suited man of late middle-age from 1960, to think that the angle at which his solid frame is set against that of the tall buildings around him, and the gesture of pulling his spectacles case out of his inside breast pocket (or replacing it?), together with the grimace on his face, combine to look nearly like the posture of a man clutching at his chest at the start of a heart attack? And that the seeming grimness of his solitary experience is amplified by the comparatively jolly, oblivious men chatting behind him?

Garry Winogrand, New York, ca. 1962; gelatin silver print; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Part of what’s delightful about the collection is deciphering these elements as if they were clues to a hidden storyline, and then marveling at the fact that there is no storyline; that these are just rich, spontaneous momentary scenes that Winogrand managed to recognize and capture in the moment of convergence. Taken together, one could posit that they create a storyline of sorts of the American middle-century. To that end, the exhibition is divided into three parts: “Down from the Bronx” concentrates on photographs he took in New York between 1950 and 1971, “A Student of America,” on photographs from the same decades taken during trips outside New York, and “Boom and Bust,” also outside New York, from 1971 to his death in 1984. The common line on Winogrand’s canon is that the darkening of his vision over the decades reflected the country’s growing disenchantment in the post-Nixon years. This is not quite persuasive as an explication of Winogrand’s practice, nor of his vast, mercurial subject. One might, for instance, object to the presumption that everyone should share the same view of America, that there was, in fact, this downward turn of mood starting in the ’70s. Well, yes, maybe for some people, but if you were black, or a feminist, or homosexual, or pro-choice, or anti-HUAC, you might have felt the opposite, and that it was rather the entrenched and legislated bigotries of the ’50′s that had been disenchanting.

25. Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1980–83; posthumous digital reproduction from original negative; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

This interpretation also disregards the presence of more troubling material in the New York years. But such examples, though rare, are stunning. In one image from 1960, a woman makes her way through the cold and driven snow down what looks to be one of the wide, brownstone-lined streets of Harlem. She is black and she appears to be poor: rather than a shawl, she’s wrapped around her head a neckscarf, which isn’t wide enough to cover the back of her head or neck, or even long enough to tie under her chin, so she’s fastened it with a safety pin. For an era when a certain fastidiousness with one’s toilette was customary, regardless of a person’s means, she seems strangely unkempt. Her scarf is sloppily hung, and her coat is missing a button. These bits of negligence echo a dejection in her face. She seems tired, sad, and is one of the few women Winogrand photographs at such proximity who does not even look up at him (notable because this was also an era before the ubiquity — and compactness — of cameras; surely she would have noticed the tall ginger with his lens trained on her?).

The opposite is also true for the later work. Who could fail to detect some humor in such images as 1975′s “Fort Worth,” in which a boy’s smooth round face and tiny eyes weirdly resemble that of the sheep standing next to him? Or in the likeness of smiles on the faces of the elephants drinking from their waterbucket in 1974′s “Austin”? Is the tipsy ebullience of the three ladies in (another) “Fort Worth” from 1974-77 any less authentic than that of the slightly more polished but still frisky couple at the Metropolitan Opera in 1951?

Neither is it clear that the pall Winogrand’s work took on over the years (if we concede that it did) says more about the country he tasked himself with describing than it does about him. It’s not so out-of-the-ordinary for an artist as he ages to pass through an idealism or at least an exuberant realism (which is how I’d describe Winogrand’s New York work) into a more somber realism, or even unabashed expressionism, regardless of time or place. The young Donatello sculpted jaunty young Davids in gleaming marble and shining bronze, but towards the end of his life carved a harrowed, harrowing, Magdalene Penitent out of poplar wood. Goya went from rather sassy royal portraits and The Naked Maja to nightmares like Saturn Devouring his Son and the Black Paintings. Winogrand had much less time to experience and document the disintegration of his Weltanschauung, dying young and suddenly at age 56. Nevertheless if his work changes in tone over the arc of his truncated career, it might be worth considering a less neat (and historically-selective) explanation than that “America went to s***, obviously, and so did his photographs.” (continue reading)

Armored kneeling archer, Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). China. Terracotta.
Excavated from Pit 2, Qin Shihuang tomb complex, 1977. Qin Shihuang
Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum, Shaanxi.

It’s hard not to give oneself over entirely to awe when regarding any of the great man-made wonders of the world. One wants to stare moist-eyed at these masterpieces and ponder the soaring ambition, ingenuity and perseverance of man, but there’s always that moment when the docent or catalogue informs you of the horrific human cost of the endeavor: slaves crushed under limestone blocks and blinded architects and the like. With the introduction of the unwelcome historical factoid, uttered apologetically or printed small in the footnotes, what should be monuments to man’s genius instead become ostentatious symbols of his cruelty.

On display through May 27th at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum is “China’s Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor’s Legacy,” featuring ten of said warriors as well as 110 other objects from the burial sites surrounding First Emperor Qin Shihuang’s tomb completed around 208 B.C.. Merging seven states into the first incarnation of a unified China, the First Emperor (whom I’ll henceforth refer to by his name, Zheng, rather than his title) oversaw innovations in architecture, plumbing and irrigation, and the standardization of script, measurements and currency. He abolished the old hierarchical feudal system and instituted one of prefectures and counties answerable to and controlled by the central government — which led to what should be but isn’t one of the most infamous mass book-burnings in history. He initiated construction on the Great Wall of China, which can be seen from space but still wasn’t his most spectacular project. His chef d’oeuvre was his own underground burial complex, a 40-year vanity project the size of four football fields and for which he corralled over 700,00 workers and a vast amount of resources and wealth. This is not just a tomb — his tomb is there, but has not been opened — the complex includes a scale replica of his palace, stables (with bronze model and real, sacrificed horses), an armory, a zoo with more animals, rivers of Mercury modeled after the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers, entertainment parks with musicians and acrobats, additional burial pits and cemeteries, all rigged along the perimeter with auto-triggered crossbows and arrows to shoot potential graverobbers.

Armoured General (detail), Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE). China. Terracotta. Excavated from Pit 1, Qin Shihuang tomb complex, 1980. Qin Shihuang Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum, Shaanxi.

The most dazzling excavation from the site, and the focus of this exhibit, is the terracotta army, 8,000 in number, and each slightly larger than lifescale and individually featured. Not one looks like another, either in physiognomy, costume or even coiffure. They represent a one-off burst of realism in Chinese art, unprecedented and thereafter discontinued (at least until the modern era). The fact that the museum can only present ten of them is unfortunate; undoubtedly much of their power lies in their great number. Examining photographs from the site invites one to imagine what it would be like to stumble in upon this vast, silent and fearsome crowd; it really is an army, and even without their original coloring, they are vividly lifelike. Whether standing with their weight seemingly centered on the balls of their feet, as if ready to sprint forward at any moment, or crouching with their (absent) arrows primed, there is a directness to their gaze that suggests their sculptors intended whoever beheld them to feel beheld by them as well. This makes sense, as the warriors had a more active purpose than simply to be admired; presumably anyone who made it past the rigged arrows and crossbows needed a good fright to deter them from the treasures within. Also, a king who believed immortality was achievable and that he had only to prepare for it, needed an armed guard in death as he did in life.

Compare the terracotta warriors to the Greco-Roman way of depicting soldiers: Polykleitos seemed more concerned with perfecting his figures’ Contrapposto (probably one of the less effective battle postures) than with creating figures that would incite the same fear that a real soldier would. The Borghese Collection’s “Fighting Warrior” stands with his legs splayed, his shield-bearing arm outstretched, his weapon-bearing arm preparing to riposte. It almost seems like he’s posed this way as an excuse for a flattering in-the-round presentation of his beautiful thighs. The Greeks, and their Roman successors, had a complex purpose in depicting warriors, to convey not only the virtues of warriors themselves but the ideals of Man: proportionality, grace, the brave life, the noble death. One can be drawn into their experience, as one is to, say, that of Dying Gaul (a personification of the fallen region), with his pained brow and vanquished mien. The terracotta warriors possibly have a less lofty purpose, as a literal stand-in for the real thing. Despite their uniquely-fashioned visages, they do not invite one to consider them as people, to wonder about their experience and their non-military personae. Instead, staring out with illusory alertness, they project: “There’s nothing to see here; turn around or get an arrow through the neck.” They are possibly some of the most accurate depictions of warriors in art if one considers what a warrior’s role is to the men and states that send him to war — not a human being that experiences, but a machine that functions. (continue reading)

Sigh. The Palace Hotel has removed the famed Maxfield Parrish painting, The Pied Piper, from its home and original setting, Maxfield’s (the main bar’s appropriate name). They estimate its worth between $3- and $5 million, will sell it at auction In Christie’s sale of notable American paintings May 23rd. Who knows where it will end up, or what the Palace, owned by Hawaii’s Kyo-Ya Hotels and Resorts and managed by Starwood, plans to put in its place that could have a fraction of the cultural significance of the painting. The bar itself was given legacy status by the San Francisco Architectural Heritage, and it wasn’t for the woodwork.

It was always an odd choice for the hotel’s bar, which in no way diminutes the tragedy of its loss. San Francisco seems more and more like New York in a way that flatters no one–how carelessly we trade our history and our beauty for a quick mega-buck. Yet, whenever I went to Maxfield’s for a drink or appetizer–and the only reason to patronize the place was to sit in the presence of this painting, not for the indifferent food or the hilariously-priced drinks–I wondered at the choice of subject matter for the setting. It doesn’t fit Peter de Vries’s claim, that “Murals in restaurants are on par with food in museums,” which is more a dismissal of the frequently poor quality of the art commissioned or collected to hang in restaurants (or the food in a typical museum cafe). The Pied Piper‘s quality cannot be faulted; it shows off the renowned illustrator’s skill with conveying distance, fantastical landscapes, the softness of children’s faces, and tones so warm you want to press your cheek to the canvas. No, it was the strange juxtaposition of the subject matter with the people sitting in front of it that complicated my experience. Maxfield’s is pricy, although not particularly posh. The atmosphere isn’t quite appropriate for dates, too well-lit and sporty. The booths and tables often have what look like the gang from the office, determined to like each other outside the work setting, drinking and sharing appetizers and and laughing loudly. Sitting at the bar, gray and lumpy under the vivid painting and its graceful characters, are often what look like your classic businessmen–middle-aged, expensively but stylelessly dressed, alone with their martinis. They’re not the San Francisco version of businessmen, the digerati and tech-rich (those also lack style but are younger and more talkative and are probably down the street, spending even more hilarious money at Hakkasan). They seem like they’re on business trips, and that these business trips are a frequent, if not constant, feature of their jobs. After all, tourists don’t wear suits and spend dinnertime drinking alone in a hotel bar, and the Palace Hotel is not situated in a very residential part of the city; San Francisco locals probably have their own neighborhood watering holes. Or I suppose, the men could be drinking by themselves after work downtown to postpone having to go home, although those could kill the evening at The House of Shields across the street on New Montgomery, which is darker and quieter, and according to lore, used to have a piss-trough next to the bar. But these men seem to be passing through, staying at one of the landmark hotels of the city, and not having much interest or energy for exploring its other offerings. I’d observe them and imagine that they had their own kids at home–as surely many of them do, and surely in the decades-long history of that painting hanging there, most of the solitary men drinking under it have been businessmen on business trips, far from their family, possibly with no idea what their children were up to were up to. Imposing this imagined life as I had on the men, The Pied Piper takes on a new mischief.

Its subject is the German legend from the Middle Ages: the Pied Piper of Hamelin offered to use his magic pipe to lure the rats out of the infested city for a sum. When he did so, and was refused his payment, he came back while the townspeople were at church and used the same magic to lure the children away, never to be seen again. It is believed the legend is based on actual events wherein the town of Hamelin did indeed lose all of its children, but not known whether this was due to the plague or an ill-fated Children’s Crusade. Another theory is that all citizens regardless of age were referred to as “Children of the Town,” and that in the 13th Century many of Hamelin’s citizens emigrated to places like Transylvania, Moravia, East Prussia, and others, leaving Hamelin with very few “Children of the Town.” The Pied Piper is also seen as a parable for paying one’s due, which also lends dimension to this painting’s placement overlooking the off-hours Financial District hangout.

So I’d observe the men and draw this melancholy symbolic connection between their lives and the luminous work above them. There’s no hint of tragedy in the painting itself; the piper in his jolly costume couldn’t look more benign, the children seem calm and happy, and one of them is even smiling. One has to know the legend and then imagine the devastation of the bereft families, not to mention that of the town now stripped of its future, for the piece to take on its full weight–and for my presumptions about the absent fathers and their fatherless kids to bear any relevance. It did for me; I thought the work’s location, and the fact that it was originally created for that location (rather than bought later by the owners), was deliciously fraught. It was not only the very rare great work of art available to be viewed in a dining establishment, it also bore an unsimple relationship with its audience, something even rarer in the interior decor of restaurants, where the “art” is something meant to quietly establish an ambiance and then recede into the atmosphere without provoking thought or discussion. The Pied Piper was a beautiful, gleaming indictment of the class it was created for–another rarity for an artist not known as a social or political gadfly.

There is a petition one can sign to protest what is likely to go down in San Francisco history as one of the more crassly, myopically commercial decisions to desecrate the city’s heritage in a long time. http://www.change.org/petitions/kyo-ya-hotels-and-resorts-bring-the-pied-piper-home-stop-the-sale-of-san-francisco-s-cultural-legacy

UPDATE: It’s coming home! http://blog.sfgate.com/cityinsider/2013/03/25/beloved-pied-piper-painting-is-returning-to-the-palace-hotel/

I do hope it’s re-hung in the bar, though, whether that means it has to be put behind glass or not.

this is actually from my first gig. whatever.

I’ve been continuing my dance studies with the Fat Chance Belly Dance school, and as part of its student group, the Blue Diamonds, recently took part in my second gig. I’m mostly staying in the chorus (the sort of back-up, supporting dancers) these days, until I become comfortable enough with the many new moves and their sometimes subtle cues and their often mind-bogglingly complicated group formations. Since it’s an improvised dance style, yet one that is usually performed in a unified group, there’s a lot more to dancing than simply knowing the steps. Learning to read the cues that lead into the steps, and, more tricky, learning to give those cues clearly–even to remember what the steps are when under pressure in a performance–takes some getting used-to. The student performance group functions in a way that sort of eases one into each phase of the process with limited possibility for humiliation. We dance at parties and fundraisers, in restaurants that host live shows, and tomorrow, at Rakkasah, a local Middle-Eastern dance festival. Compared to venues and events that host Fat Chance, these are relatively low-pressure situations where we can work on our performance skills away from the scrutiny of the professional dance world.

for some reason there was a shower in the venue. Which was a gay bar. What?

First you dance in the chorus, and learn how to manage your costume, which brings its own world of beautiful inconveniences. For instance, how tightly do I have to tie my coin bra at the back, so that it doesn’t slip down and make my chest look droopy, while still being able to breathe? Can I wear two floor-length skirts and pantaloons without tripping, and how do I actually have to move my feet to avoid that? Which of my bracelets can I wear without them pinching my wrist or flying off when I move my arms? Can I wrap my turban so that it’s sturdy but doesn’t give me a headache? And if my arms bump into it when I do the Egyptian basic (a sort of emphatic hip-swish with the arms raised and framing the face), is the turban too big, or are my arms just too close to my head? How can I get in and out of cars and walk into a venue with grace with all of these skirts on? How do I manage the bathroom situation with multiple skirts, pantaloons, hip scarves with long fringe, and a dance belt?

After you’ve danced in the chorus a few times, if you’re comfortable, you can join the featured dancers as a follower. This generally involves warning the more experienced dancers about what moves you’re not comfortable with yet so that they know not to spring something new and terrifying on you. It also involves getting used to dancing without a mirror in front of you with which to check your posture, your position in the formations, etc. It’s easy to forget which way is which without the mirror’s help, and since many of the steps move within what we think of as an invisible box set at an angle against the “front” of the stage (whatever that may be, which is rarely a classic proscenium arch-situation), you have to be vigilant about learning the dance angle and the various moves’ attitudes without the mirror’s guidance.

Bindi at the ready.

When you have followed for a few performances, you can gauge how comfortable you would be to lead formations in the featured groups. Again, since it’s an improvisational dance style, albeit a structured one, the pressure of the performance situation shakes your ability to think on your feet. If you know ten moves, you will probably forget seven of them when leading the combinations, at least at first. Then there is the music, which you’re expected to become familiar with beforehand, and be able to fashion the moves to suit not only the varying rhythms, but shifting moods, of each song. This is especially tricky because certain moves are played out in a set number of counts, and they also sometimes turn the group to face the “back”–basically, you don’t want to be in the middle of a fast combination, and one that has a defined beginning, middle, and end that would be difficult to stray from, and be stuck facing the back wall when the music abruptly shifts to a slow tempo. Suddenly you can neither complete the combination gracefully, because the music has changed and the move that went with the previous tempo is now obsolete, nor just begin a new combination more appropriate to the music, because everyone’s facing the back wall and there’s an expectation that combinations will be played out completely before beginning a new one. And even if the person in the opposite leadership position (whoever is at the front left of the group in whatever direction the group is facing is the leader) decided to take over, he or she has to perform the Jedi mind-trick of corralling three or four dancers who are stranded in the middle of a truncated combination to all stop moving–and playing their zills–at close to the same time, immediately perceive his or her new status as leader, and gracefully begin a new, tempo-appropriate combination with their backs to the audience. If there is audience all around, that actually might be easier, because in that situation, all the dancers are attuned to not just the possibility, but the likelihood of a leadership change at nearly any point in a combination that turns the group around, because all areas of the audience have to be faced at some point. So the momentary failure to accurately align the steps to the music might more swiftly be dealt with by a near-instantaneous leadership change and, basically, ninja-level bellydancing on the part of both followers and the leader(s). But you’d still be yelled at for not knowing the music. Leading requires remembering steps, signaling them clearly, knowing their length and being able to place them within the given songs at rhythmically and musically-appropriate moments, all while smiling, maintaining beautiful dance posture, and not tripping over your skirts.

I’m only comfortable in the chorus at this point, but since this particular gig was small and only four of us were available to dance at it, I followed for one song (Sharia el Souk, the second one). Once again, the video is a big help. I can see that my floreos (hand-flourishes derived from flamenco, around 5:10) are a bit paddle-like, and that my hip bump (around 5:50), which is supposed to be a movement isolated to the hips, turns into more of a generalized full-body happy-dance. So I know what to work on in class. The songs are Kako Kolan and Sharia el Souk, by Helm, and Short Belly Dance Drum Solo, by Raquy and the Cavemen.

UPDATE: Recently, I danced my third and fourth gigs, Rakkasah and the kickstarter party for Fat Chance Belly Dance’s annual “Devotion” production:

Taboo Media photographed me with Yuska Lutfi Tuanakotta.

San Francisco Ballet in Morris’ Beaux. © Erik Tomasson

While San Francisco Ballet’s premiere of resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov’s new Rite of Spring was the big draw in Program Three, the evening started with two of last year’s premieres: Ashley Page’s Guide to Strange Places and Mark Morris’s Beaux.

I’ll talk about Beaux here: Having seen (and written about) it last year, I have to say it had not grown on me, despite compelling cases made for the piece in both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I have not gotten over the awfulness of the costumes. Alastair Macaulay makes a good point in the NYT that the camoflage-patterned unitards in orange, pink, and yellow worn by the men of Beaux may be costume designer Isaac Mizrahi’s “response to the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the American military.” Maybe so, but however cleverly a design element in a dance piece responds to the social or political developments of the day, that design element fails if it neglects its one primary job: to reveal and enhance the lines of the body. Mizrahi’s splotchy body stockings visually transform some of the most superbly-sculpted and proportioned men one is likely to get to look at in person into bulbous, stubby figures moving like a bad optical illusion before a backdrop of the same busy pattern.

But something else bothered me more: it was the fact that they were all men. In the same article, Macaulay cites (and refutes) Balanchine’s edict, that “Put 16 women on the stage, and it’s everybody — it’s the world. Put 16 men, and it’s always nobody.” I’m inclined to agree with Balanchine, but am unsure why. I imagined a similar ballet with women, and it seemed that I’d have no qualms about it (at least not with the fact of their gender)—in fact, for all my love of seeing both male and female dancers together, I’ve always felt that it is a particularly moving experience to watch women dancing for and with each other. Seeing these men was not only not moving, but there was something depressing about it as well. I wonder if it has to do with power. It is uplifting to see any group of people who have not enjoyed privileged positions in their society band together and support each other. But there is something sinister in the self-sequestration of the powerful. It’s why the Vatican is probably the most concentratedly corrupt 109 acres on earth, and why mens’ clubs are rightly regarded as laughably out-dated relics of a world that only outdated relics of men would want to belong to. An organization designed for women is understood to be attempting to elevate the status and welfare of women in the world—and to therefore be laboring towards equality for all. An organization for men invites the suspicion that it is in place to maintain an imbalance, an unjust status quo.

Yet even this doesn’t quite cover it—when I imagine that all the men of Beaux were, for instance, black, that, too, seemed like it wouldn’t have the same derogatory effect. In the recent “South Africa in Apartheid and After” at SFMOMA (which I also wrote about), there was a photograph by Ernest Cole of some mine workers performing some sort of ceremonial dance in their camp. They dance in their workclothes with a few ornaments added for the ritual. South Africa probably endures its own grim incarnations of gender inequality, but this image of men dancing with and for each other does not suggest the sort of self-satisfied, and self-protective, sausage party of the examples I used above. These men clearly lead tough, dangerous lives, and labor for the aggrandizement of others. They are also living in camps where the presence of women is forbidden. Their dance is a defiance of the bleakness of their lives, something exuberant and graceful drawn out of the dirt and squalor.

San Francisco Ballet in Morris’ Beaux. © Erik Tomasson

One doesn’t get that sense from Beaux. Now, the dancers who perform the piece (and they are faultless, by the way) may not in fact be the sort of alpha males that their collective personae project. But a man onstage becomes “Man”–a symbol, especially in non-narrative ballet. And because most of the men in this program were white or close to it (despite SF Ballet’s racial diversity), Beaux comes off as a celebration of the classic white male archetype, rather than a re-envisioning of it. And this is despite the element of homosexuality that Macaulay referred to—an element possibly not as moving as it could be simply because the ballet stage is probably the one area wherein homosexuality constitutes the least disadvantage. Watching Beaux, I wondered, “What exactly is it about these twee steps set to Martinu’s twee nouveau-baroque tinkling harpsichord music that Morris felt he needed male bodies, and only male bodies, to express?” If it would have been different and disadvantageous to include female dancers, then he must be wanting to say something about masculinity, to shine some light on something he presumes will be new and edifying for us. What is it? If you’re going to celebrate the historically-celebrated, you’d better make a case for why they need the extra attention, and for how your focus on them isn’t merely sycophantic or self-indulgent. Even reconsidering Beaux as the “happiest rethink of masculinity that ballet has seen in decades” leaves one wondering what it is that is being advanced regarding masculinity, and why it’s being posited as new. Whatever these men were portraying, it didn’t seem particularly foreign or unusual, at least to anyone whose idea of masculinity wasn’t formed by Monday Night Football and David Mamet plays. And is a more sensitive, LGBT-friendly, colorful idea of masculinity really supposed to be new for people sitting in a theater in San Francisco watching a ballet? One has to wonder if this “rethink of masculinity” is a worthy endeavor, considering what we could accomplish if we as earnestly set out to rethink femininity, or simply humanity, instead. 

Thiago Bordin and Hélène Bouchet in Neumeier’s Nijinsky. © Erik Tomasson

A few people straggled almost unnoticed onto the stage of the War Memorial Opera House before the house lights had dimmed, and they began to talk. Even before the dancing had begun, their presence was an announcement that one had better not expect to see a traditional narrative ballet that opening night. However, the ambition to create a piece that comes close to the innovative prowess of its subject—Vaslav Nijinsky—would require more than an opening gimmick. Nijinsky is still one of dance’s towering figures, and one of the very few who merit the term “genius” both as a performer and a choreographer, blessed with abilities of the practitioner and the visionary. This is the man who envisioned a young faun as a masturbating nymph-chaser, and disguised a ménage à trois as an innocent game of tennis between two women and a man (and that was the cleaned-up version; his original idea was for an all-male cast and even less ambiguity). His ballets incited riots and still look modern today, while other examples of innovative and even revolutionary art softens and grows quaint with time.

John Neumeier’s Nijinsky, performed in a limited run by San Francisco Ballet guest company The Hamburg Ballet last month in San Francisco, imagines Nijinsky at the moment of his last public performance—in Switzerland in 1919—already in the throes of the mental illness that would end his career early and would plague him unto his death in a clinic at age 61. Neumeier has his Nijinsky revisit important moments of his life, dancing with and as characters from his most famous ballets. This could be seen as a predictable physical transposition of the dancer’s schizophrenia, but at times the elements from Nijinsky’s own choreography and that of others whose ballets he made his own, when combined, embellished, and added to the foundation of Neumeier’s own choreography, illuminate areas of his persona and history in ways both beautiful and seemingly true (anyone who has not read one of the many bios on the dancer, or Nijinsky’s own harrowing diaries, can’t help but take Neumeier’s word for just how true).

Here we see Nijinksy the very young man, new star of the Imperial Ballet and the newly named Ballet Russes; he’s lush, self-absorbed, and vulnerable as the Golden Slave in Fokine’s Scheherazade, caressing himself and obliviously bewitching the people around him. Even more effective is the pas de trois between Nijinsky, his future wife, Romola de Pulsky, and the Faune from L’Après midi d’un faune, acting as a sort of erotic surrogate for a preoccupied Nijinsky. Known for being cold and dull in real life, he channeled his entire wealth of charisma into his stage persona. In this scene he is a sort of indifferent, while this wilder, more sexual persona from his imagination woos the rapt woman. (That this is a preposterous fabrication of events—Romola having stalked and practically bullied the known gay dancer into an icy marriage—should only bother those who attend the ballet seeking facts and accuracy.) (continue reading)

David Goldblatt, Saturday morning at the Hypermarket: Miss Lovely Legs
Competition,1980; gelatin silver print; 11 x 11 in. (28 x 28 cm);
Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, South Africa; © David
Goldblatt

“More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.”—J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace.

South Africa in Apartheid and After, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is a photographic investigation of the troubled country by three photographers: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, and Billy Monk. All native South Africans, each brings a very different perspective on his homeland.

The exhibition opens with photographs from Goldblatt’s 1982 project In Boksburg, a group of portraits of day-to-day life in a middle-class, predominantly white suburb of Boksburg, near Johannesburg, shot between 1970 and 1980. Goldblatt’s photographs are riveting as a catalogue of the accouterments of suburban living and the globalization of its milquetoast aesthetic: tract housing, OCD lawn care, concrete fences. Pervading his images is the sense of willful escapism that the suburbs can impart and are even designed to do. Perhaps this interpretation comes with an awareness of the ignominies of apartheid, particularly the disgrace of its final convulsions before its repeal in 1990. Considering that In Boksburg was shot during one of the most shameful episodes in human history, the series reads like a study of the deliberate obliviousness of its subjects.¹

Many of Goldblatt’s images convey this contradiction between a place and the aspirations played out there. Black people rarely appear in the photos, and there is little evidence of black life or culture at all, except for a few shots of people looking dour at community meetings organized to address increasingly dreadful race relations. How strange the white semifinalists of the “Miss Lovely Legs” competition look, with their feathered hair and peekaboo nipples, teetering on a platform in front of an audience composed mostly of children and modestly dressed blacks. Other photographs require the viewer’s knowledge of their historical context to the land for the fullest reading. In one image, a smiling woman appears to be leading a small group of equally glee-filled children in song or to be telling a story. These are the Voortrekkers, a Boy Scout–like group set up by Afrikaner nationalists who found the actual Scouts to be too diverse and so established a new group to exclude not only black South Africans but also English-speaking whites and Jews.

Just as our American suburbs represent an escape from the “evils” of city life, Boksburg comes across as a sort of blinkered retreat from the ugly surrounding reality of the imperial cultures’ making. Goldblatt suggests that the transplanted cultures have brought with them a strict refusal to be affected by or to acknowledge their surroundings. Their homes could be in any suburb of the developed Western world; their hobbies and entertainment are familiarly middlebrow; their disregard for the humanitarian outrages their lives are built on is palpable. (continue reading)

We conducted an informal, anonymous survey through the Theatre Bay Area Facebook page and e-newsletter. While the sample size was small and necessarily self-selecting, the number of people who had experienced harassment was striking.

One San Francisco–based actor who responded to our survey remarked, “Theatre is clearly a different world than many workplaces regarding human resources in general. As such, I have found a lack of training regarding sexual harassment rights, filling of complaints and proper reporting of such incidents, to be the norm.” Another local actor expressed the sort of sentiment that perhaps keeps us from advancing on this issue, if not actively perpetuates it: “it’s the American Theater and not a regular workplace so ordinary rules don’t apply. Plus your [sic] only together for weeks rather than years. This school teacher mentality is inappropriate in this art form and should be abandoned.” The idea that the theatre (or any place) is and should be regarded as something other than a workplace, that it’s an environment where behavioral mores and laws don’t apply, seems to be the root of the problem (as is the astonishing assertion that, because of theatre’s transient convergences of personalities, one should be willing to put up with treatment in the theatre that is frowned upon elsewhere or even illegal). It’s a dangerous attitude: “The rules don’t apply to us, so we don’t need to acknowledge them. Stop complaining.”

While it takes a long time, generations even, to change cultural psychology, the steps we as a society take to redress our attitudes toward each other, and therefore the way we act, include implementing laws to dissuade—and promise severe punishment for—certain behavior. We’ve categorized inappropriate touching in public and in the workplace, we’ve delineated what constitutes harassing talk, we have criminalized nonconsensual sexual intercourse, and we have promised that breaching these guidelines will cost you your job and possibly your freedom.

But these strictures only work as well as the people implementing them, and again and again we hear about cases in which incidents of harassment were reported but no action was taken because managers purported not to know what to do about them. This is something that happened in a San Francisco theatre last year:

A woman works part-time in a local theatre. A board member of the theatre takes an interest in her, uses what are supposed to be work-related conversations to introduce topics that anyone might agree are inappropriate to the workplace, like what kind of semiviolent sexual practices he enjoys. She stops responding to his calls and frequent texts. Her colleagues notice what they interpret as nothing more harmless than his crush on her and tease her, even after she makes it clear to them that their teasing aggravates, rather than assuages, her distress. (Any sort of teasing by colleagues after a person has asked them to stop is illegal in the workplace.) He disregards her attempts to ignore him and continues to ask her out and make inappropriate remarks to her at work. She asks the artistic director what can be done about this increasingly intolerable situation. “I don’t know what to do” is the response.

Her initial complaints disregarded or met with confusion, she begins to second-guess her instincts, to believe that she has no choice but to accept the invitations of her pursuer. The frightening thing to observe in her retelling is the gradual dissolution of her autonomy, imperceptible to her at the time but unmistakable in retrospect, abandoned to his subtle but precise manipulation of her by the people who are required by law to intervene. She is alone in her suspicions that she is being subjected to morally and professionally indefensible behavior and worries that she will lose her reputation, her peace of mind, even her job, if she continues to complain about what no one seems to take seriously or believe that something can and must be done to stop it. Perhaps she has misjudged him? He brings her soup when she is sick. He invites her out for casual dinners and appears for a time to have accepted her request that their relationship remain strictly professional and platonic. The fact that nobody seems to take her worries seriously makes her wonder if she’s overreacted, and she starts to rationalize to herself that his behavior, though perhaps inappropriate and crass, is not actually dangerous. When he doesn’t do or say anything that makes her uncomfortable for several meetings, she lets her guard down a little, starts accepting invitations to dinners at his house.

One night, he rapes her.

(continue reading)

poster art by Emily Barber

Ok, so a short play I wrote (that is, the first play–in fact, the first piece of fiction/adaptation I’ve ever attempted) was read last night as part of the SF Olympians Festival, a thirteen-day series of staged readings of original plays with classical themes by local writers. I took two sisters: Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother to the muses, and Themis, goddess of good counsel and order, mother of the seasons, peace, justice, and later, the fates. They were daughters of Gaia (earth-mother) and wives to Zeus (at different times, I should think). We were free to interpret the goddesses and their characters in any way or at any point in their goddess-lives that we chose. So I made your standard family estate squabble. Here is an excerpt:

Mnemosyne: Do you remember when she ordered the box of ladybugs from that gardening place? I think she assumed there’d be 30 or so in it, that she’d have a small colony for all her plants in the living room and corridor. You weren’t there when she opened the box; it must have been hundreds that swarmed out. First they hovered in place, a dense red cloud humming under the chandelier. Then the cloud seemed to explode, and these buzzing red dots just flew in every direction. I don’t think I’d ever seen a ladybug before, and now dozens were flying into my face, grazing my arms and legs, getting stuck between my toes and tangled in my hair. I remember thinking that the world had changed, that these furious little creatures would now always be with us, recklessly slamming their tiny, hard bodies into the windowpanes, alighting with a shudder onto our eyelids and noses when we lay down, crawling along every surface in our home so that it looked animated and we couldn’t walk or sit without hearing the startling crunch of their dotted shells under us. Somehow I don’t remember what she did after she released the insects into the room. I only remember standing alone in the swarm, blinking as they brushed past my eyelashes and tickled my ears. And then I went to your room. I imagined you’d know what to do, how to live with them. You were sitting on your bed with your arms crossed in front of your chest. The ladybugs were flying all around you and you looked so disgusted.

Themis: Of course I was disgusted. Who orders live insects for a few indoor potted plants? And doesn’t even check to see how many of them they’d get?! You were little; everything that didn’t make sense was magic and that was fine with you. But I was picking carcasses out of my shoes and backpack and pockets and hairbrush for the next two months. Can you tell me what is more depressing to a ten year old than a handful of dead ladybugs? Their legs all folded under and brittle and falling off… You don’t remember what mom did after that because she left you, literally crawling with insects, and went back to her studio. I’m the one who went around opening all the windows. I’m the one who spent the next four hours with a jar and a piece of paper trying to capture as many as I could and release them outside. I’m the one who had to pick bits of crushed exoskeleton out of the cat’s teeth for a week. Mom just unleashed this chaos into the house and pranced off! As usual.

M: But it was beautiful! For a moment.

T: Everything was beautiful for a moment. But then it just turned into something unfinished that no one was willing to deal with but me. No one but me ever wanted to think about the fallout of these caprices. We have a house full of half-painted, rotting canvases, heaps of unfinished mothworn dresses with the needles still stuck in the hems, we have a house itself that none of us can afford to keep and no one wants to sell.

Voilà. To read the full ten-page script, click here.