ODC/San Francisco.

ODC/SAN FRANCISCO YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS THEATER SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA FEBRUARY 12-29, 2004 Reviewed by Allan Ulrich

The San Francisco Bay Area's longest running, continuous modern dance company is no stranger to the ends and beginnings of eras. This year's "Dancing Downtown" home season introduced four (of nine) new dancers and a generous five premieres, signed by three choreographers, over a three-week season. Making work rather than making statements has always been the secret behind the success of the troupe, which arrived in town as a collective until founder Brenda Way formally assigned the director's role in the mid-1990s.

Way's choreography again dominated hated both fm its vision and the steps that flowed organically front the conceptual foundations. In the ambitions Noir, Way attempted to recreate the ambiance of Hollywood's film noir era, jettisoning tire nostalgia in favor of evoking the cold war paranoia that fuelled the popular ads in that period of American cultural history. With a live jazz quartet, sound bites from Bogart movies, smoky stage pictures (lighting by Alexander V. Nichols), and swanky costumes, Noir distilled the ambiance deftly; one half expected a celluloid femme fatale like Jane Greer to sidle from the wings. Yet, what convinced most here was the jittery increment trajectory. Garbed in trench coat and fedora, Private Freeman wanders through the mists, as if pursued by sinister forces, contorting his limbs, constantly looking over his shoulder.

Yukie Fujimoto, a mysterious woman in scarlet, points her index finger at the hapless hero. Couples fall into a conga line and unison foxtrots. Combinations line truncated. Dread, like a clammy Raymond Chandler fog, pervades all.

Fiendish Variations reaffirms Way's fondness for Bach and her penchant for gamesmanship. In the first part, Bach's Organ Passacaglia in C Minor is accompanied by musicologist Robert Greenberg announcing tire variations on a ground bass. In the second section, we hear the Passacaglia and appended fugue without commentary. In the first part, four dancers elucidate Way's cumulative material, which is reassigned in the second section to another quartet, joined for the fugue by the original four-some. The recurring phrases, wittily developed (little jumps, bands enveloping faces, sudden floor rolls), attest to the fiendish rigor of the choreographer's craft. The new dancers conformed to the ODC company look: sic&, athletic, and multi-cultural.

Co artistic director KT Nelson scored a career triumph with RingRoundRozi, a brilliant full-company essay that refracts the behavior of children at play through the techniques and sensibilities of adults. Linda Bouchard's original score (including a child's voice) complements Nelson's spasmodic bursts of energy, as her dancers leapfrog, loll in a metaphoric sandbox, tease their pals and fall into bonding gambits of a pre-sexual nature. Like kids drawing lines in the sand, some democratic their space with expansive rond de jambes; they frisk in a garden of innocence that will be recaptured only in memory.

However, Nelson's Pass quintet succumbed To terminal winsomeness in its brawny Tayloresque athleticism; a tossed baseball cap punctuated the cadences in Bach's Violin Concerto in A Minor: too cute and derivative by halt, although newcomer Anne Zivolich proved an effervescent presence. Even less persuasive was Kimi Okada's Flight to Ixcam, a politically committed but choreographically impoverished paean to Okada's brother and thousands of others who disappeared dining tire civil war in Guatemala. The intense deployment of props (miniature coffins) and design elements (rising mounds of earth from which victims emerge) ultimately trivialized a serious subject through decorative overkill.

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