Summer Fest '96.

REVIEWED BY RITA FELICIANO

The youngest and still the smallest of Bay Area dance festivals, Summerfest, now in its fifth year, appears to have developed a green thumb for growing dance. By following the old adage to plant only what climate and soil can support, it has again produced a respectable crop.

Summerfest is a concentrated affair, presenting six programs over three weekends, each with four or five choreographers. While this occasionally may have set heads swimming from sheer abundance, for the most part the programs were batched with some care. Their individual profiles made sense. One of them, for instance, seemed structured around collaboration, another revolved around family issues; yet a third featured language.

This being a low-budget endeavor, most works presented were necessarily small. The best were either by choreographers who enjoy this format, such as Duncan Macfarland, Priscilla Regalado, and Daniel Levi-Sanchez, or by choreographers who usually create for their own ensembles but chose to show more intimate pieces here, such as Anne Bluethenthal, Ney Fonseca, and Scott Wells.

Bluethenthal and Fonseca premiered a subtly constructed duet, Who Are You, which dealt with the slippery subject of gender. Flinging reverse cues at each other--Fonseca pulling up hose and Bluethenthal throwing Ali-like punches for instance--they gradually evolved a common vocabulary, resulting in a weighty unison duet. With the "female" gestures on Fonseca and "male" gestures on Bluethenthal stripped of their usual context, the gradual blurring of this language became fascinating to watch.

On the same program a lovely duet by Bluethenthal and Regalado, In a Manner of Speaking, set off Bluethenthal's muscular weightiness against Regalado's more liquid effect. Each woman maintained her own sphere yet was repeatedly drawn into floating lifts or spirals around the other. Regalado's solo For the Love of Jazz, to music by the Charlie Haden Quartet West, was an irresistible invitation to one woman's response to music. Expanding the music into space by leaning into phrases or releasing them with the flick of a wrist, as if shooing away a bird, Regalado underlined a percussive piano line with gently rocking hips and tiny side steps.

The haunting trio Memento Mori by Macfarland, to music by John Dowland and William Byrd, and set for the choreographer with Richard Court and Shahla Tarrant, shifted back and forth between a sense of calm and choking anxiety. It started with a dancer leaning out so much that a partner's strength barely prevented a fall. This first image created a sense of disequilibrium which returned repeatedly in large, futile, circular runs, vertical hops, and episodes of uncontrollable shaking.

Driven, a similarly evocative work by Levi-Sanchez, betrayed its creator's tenure with Twyla Tharp but still conveyed its ideas in an individual manner. Basing his vocabulary on basketball imagery, with running step--forward, backward, and sideways--skips, loping strides, and elegant sliding stops, Levi-Sanchez traced a large circle that gradually constricted until the dancer was running in one spot--with no place to go.

Wells is also interested in sports as metaphor. In Musical Interlude, two dancers jockeyed for position to gain control of a box, a chair, and a guitar. A finely calibrated sense of timing and understated sense of humor enlivened this and the subsequent piece. Untitled, for ten dancers plus ten Frisbees, was Summerfest's only large-scale work. Colorful disks flew in friendly compefition until the sense of playfulness darkened and eventually collapsed into violence when one too many players dropped a disk. Teamwork, clearly, is fragile. And a game is not always a game.