DELWAIDE WITH BORROWED BODIES.

DELWAIDE WITH BORROWED BODIES SONYA DELWAIDE ODC THEATER SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA MAY 31-JUNE 3, 2001

Powerful, virtuosic dancing characterized Sonya Delwaide's concert, "Les Invites." A rare occasion of drama without pretense, "Les Invites" ("The Guests") was performed by dancers of the highest caliber, including bodies on loan from ODC/San Francisco, AXIS Dance Company, and Diablo Ballet. Delwaide, a Berkeley resident and Quebec native, managed to inspire diverse performers with her penchant for theatricality and physical comedy, so strongly evident in her own body.

The evening opened with Apero (1992), an application of Baroque sensibilities to a contemporary cocktail party. Yukie Fujimoto, Brian Fisher, Brandon Freeman, Heather Tietsort, and Erika Johnson were balletic and spastic by turns. Jerking pelvises and compulsive grooming conveyed sexual innuendo and paranoid vanity. Delwaide encourages ugliness, even cultivates it, which is a significant rebellion against the preference for prettiness in concert dance.

Still, Delwaide's L'Attente (wait or hope) proved she doesn't unequivocally dismiss beauty. Featuring dancers from Berkeley Ballet Theater, L'Attente showed a rich reflection of community through unpredictable linkups and breakaways. In spite of their youth, these dancers are technical pros who performed with aplomb. Delwaide's rebellious side leaked out here as well, in Caitlin Kakigi's renunciation of her bridal veil. Frances Stohlman thunderstruck the audience with her grounded, undulating attack and startling series of parallel, tilted cabrioles.

Alexander V. Nichols's set and lighting designs did more than simply support Delwaide's dancers; they partnered them. Nichols magically made a backdrop of wide, horizontal strips of crushed paper appear and disappear, alternately obscuring and revealing ODC Theater's red brick wall. Netting replaced the theater's wings, providing shadowy cover for resting dancers while extending the dances' illusion of perpetuity. He boldly immersed red-clad dancers in red light and set a match to Delwaide's explosive transitions.

Delwaide appeared briefly in Suite sans Suite (Disjointed Suite). No dancer has been described as intense so often, and with good reason. Delwaide interrupted her swivels and slides with violent torso hiccoughs, moving from Cunningham-style tension to rag-doll release. Her face was a palimpsest of other lives, moving as if possessed by spirits. Suite sans Suite was a truly disjointed yet coherent piece that spoke to humanity's straggle with attraction and aversion. Each section, whether Frank Shawl in gestural angst or Jacques Poulin-Denis and Nadia Adame in a lyrical he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not duet, rendered our push-pull legacy with clarity and profundity.

Suite sans Suite's theatrical mood segued brilliantly into Tra (Wood). The sounds of a music box shifted into gusting wind as one group of dancers exited upstage while another solemnly entered. Delwaide made abundant use of drama, danger, and despair in Tra risking a heavy-handedness around the concept of our being always alone. One person became another's baggage in a series of lifts in which the liftee was suspended in rigor mortis under the arm of the lifter. The quintet formed a chain gang, a tribe after the apocalypse, a lost legion of lovers.