Sonja Delwaide.

ODC/Theater San Francisco, California September 26, 2003

Watching a dancer's last performance is bitter sweet. In the case of Canadian transplant Sonia Delwaide, it was doubly so. Long-limbed, lightening fast, with incredible feet and a lioness's appetite for movement, Delwaide is also a talented choreographer who shapes technically demanding ideas into cascading phrases that chase each other like rivulets down a mountain stream. To lose Delwaide the dancer is one thing, but to send her off into the uncertain fate of a choreographer-for-hire is disconcerting to say the least.

Since she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1996, Delwaide has choreographed on dancers wherever she lads found them: Berkeley Ballet Theater, Axis Dance Company, Hubbard Street 2, and the Quebecois Compagnie de danse l'astragale which she co-founded in 1992 and directed until 1999. Her farewell-to-performance concert, "du passe au present," was no different. It's not an ideal way to work.

ONE OF THE TWO premieres, the somewhat disjunct le temps, was set on an excellent pick-up group of local dancers (Brandon Freeman, Sheetal Gandhi, Erika Johnson and Sarah Kalmar) and Delwaide's long-time Brazilian-born Canadian partner Jadson Caldeira. The more coherently shaped, Seuls ensemble featured astragale's current quintet of performers Mireille Baril, Dominic Caron, Emilie LeBlanc, Jonathan Saint-Pierre and Sandrine Vachon. The program closed with the 1995 du balcon with which Delwaide and Caldeira had introduced themselves to the region.

Le temps, to an oddly chromatic score by Gabriela Lena Frank, set up Caldeira as an outsider who infiltrates a cohesive foursome whom we first see turning in a weaving back-to-back circle like a floating sea anemone. From his chair upstage where he faces the musicians, Caldeira sends a sinewy slithering leg in the direction of this about-to-explode ensemble. He seems to want to manipulate and draw power from the individuality of these churning, body-climbing and melting dancers. But with the exception of the duets between him and the Fast-limbed Freeman, Caldeira's intrusions into the quartet's mercurial collisions and encounters too often look like an after-thought. It almost seems as if the piece had been conceived without him.

MORE COHESIVELY molded, the marvelously capricious Seuls opens and closes oil a quiet note of dancers following like so many ducklings in a row. In between the dancers explode; bouncing, twitching, kicking and shooting into surprising and quite individual trajectories. Yet they always find themselves partners. If that means hopping in a crouch, flipping someone over the hack or stalking together as if on stilts, so be it. With a hauntingly moaning score by Matthias Ziegler, the piece flirts with comedy as these dancers try to squeeze themselves into impossible positions or end up slumped on top of each other.

The closing du balcon looked as good as new. This was a piece about connections attempted but thwarted. Its reigning metaphor was the frozen laundry which still dots Canada's wintery landscapes. Delwaide and Caldeira danced the piece beautifully, with that special passion that befits an end-run. Her flickering intensity and his full-bodied sensuosity are drawn towards each other like magnets. But their connections remain fragmentary. She hugs his leg, he puts his head on her shoulder. Though they constantly reach for each other, even trying on each other's skin, i.e. clothes, these two people remain frozen in their own universes.