Featuring eight dancers clad in tunics, tops and shorts, the gracefully energetic piece combined athletic movement and tender moments in duets, such as that performed by elegant Sarah Cecilia Bukowski and partner Joseph Copley, and other groupings. Despite the physical demands Seiwert placed on dancers, and the challenge she gave the audience of keeping up with her intricate, fast-paced choreography, there was a buoyancy to the piece that was immensely appealing. The world premiere of artistic director Lustig’s duet “Words Within Words” followed, stunning viewers with its blend of achingly romantic, sometimes agitated movement and recited verse.
She thinks one of the biggest obstacles in the country’s racial discourse is denial, which she feels is pervasive in the liberal Bay Area, “Let’s not pretend,” she says, “Racism is in women's slippers, bridal slippers, non slip, wedding ballet flats, home shoes, fur pom pom, furry white chunky,women pom pom the air that we breathe, You can’t get away from it, so we have to try and face it head-on.”, That’s precisely what she hopes to achieve with her show, She says she’s been told some audience members are so moved by her honesty that they can’t speak afterward..
What’s up with all the advertising images of unbelievably happy, slim young women enjoying a hearty laugh while eating small bowls of mixed green salad? The absurdity of these images and the subliminal shaming implicit in them has inspired mocking montages on the internet, and now they’ve inspired a play. Playwright Sheila Callaghan’s “Women Laughing Alone with Salad” at Shotgun Players’ Ashby Stage in Berkeley hammers away at those images over and over again from different angles. Images of rhapsodically jubilant women eating salad or pouring bottled water into their mouths are projected all over the walls of Mikiko Uesugi’s two-story set in Erin Gilley’s video design, occasionally accompanied by generically inspirational but meaningless advertising slogans.
The contests, dubbed DigiLit, PoetiX and Algorhythms, will run through the upcoming academic year, with prizes awarded in April, For both writing contests, if a computer-generated story or poem is scored as human by a majority of judges, the creators will win $5,000, women's slippers, bridal slippers, non slip, wedding ballet flats, home shoes, fur pom pom, furry white chunky,women pom pom and a prize of $3,000 will be awarded to the team that enters the best software, In the music contest, six finalists will compete against human disc jockeys during a dance party, selecting music from a list of 1,000 tracks that will be released just before the competition, The prize again will be $3,000..
But San Jose has a broad, thriving arts and cultural community whose fabric is woven from small to medium size groups and institutions, many of ethnic derivation, that are financially stable and sustainable. Some, such as San Jose Taiko, are internationally reknowned. When the Rep vanished last year, theatergoers had options. Many discovered San Jose Stage, the smaller, artistically excellent company on South First Street, and City Lights, the edgy little theater on Second. Both operate more on a repertory model than the Rep, which helps to build loyalty.
