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I somehow made it all the way through my educational career without
reading Lord of the Flies, so I was able to watch Peter Brook's
1963 film adaptation of the book with all of the suspense intact. The
opening montage was great, a series of still black-and-white
photographs and an accompanying dialogue-free soundtrack that told how
this particular group of British schoolboys found themselves stranded
on a island in the middle of nowhere. I tried not to get attached to
any of the characters, fairly certain that the wilder side of human
nature was going to assert its power as quickly as possible, but it
was hard. By the time the boys were dancing wildly around a fire in
their war paint with Jack sitting above them crowned in seaweed, I was
filled with dread about what would happen next. Despite what seemed
like a clear division between good and evil on the island, the story
reinforced to me that we are never in a position to judge flawlessly
on which side we stand. I was very impressed that Brook was able to
convey a deep sense of horror and rising panic with virtually no
onscreen violence. The film also made the thought of competing on
Survivor intensely unappealing. Not that I was thinking about
it. Nuh uh.
Saturday evening I drove over to the
Cowell
Theater for Double Pleasure, a full slate of modern dance
pieces performed alternately by Dance Repertory/San Francisco and
Huckabay McAllister Dance. It was a real treat to see ten fully
realized works danced in one evening. As you would expect from a
program of that size, there were some hits and misses. By the
intermission HMD had edged ahead with the sexually charged "Three
Conversations on the Same Subject" that used Angelo
Badalamenti's music from The City of Lost Children to great
effect, and also with "Novena," where Erin Mei-Ling Stuart contorted
her body to Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis while wearing nothing but
loose pants. dRepSF's pieces looked a little too earnest next to
these elegances. However, in the second half of the show it was HMD's
turn to look silly. A snippet of Yann Tierson's soundtrack to
Amélie and solid dancing couldn't prevent me from
comparing "Luck of the Draw" to an episode of Charmed, and
"Belinda's Hand" not only seemed deliberately difficult, but try as I
might I couldn't figure out what music adapted from Purcell's "Dido
and Aeneas" was doing to enhance the story the two women were enacting
on stage. In contrast, dRepSF's "Pulling Weeds" held me entranced as
a trio of dancers pulsed within an electronic soundscape, and "In
Time" was a fierce and defiant dance against death. Finally, HMD
returned to form to wrap up the show with "Lucy, You Can't Go to the
Club Tonight," a frothy concoction set to Esquivel that was an
incisive and humorous look at the mating rituals of human beings. The
women wore ruffled tap pants under their dresses for that number.
"Simon"
remembers
Huckabay McAllister Dance
Dance Repertory/San
Francisco
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Heidi J. De Vries
