Adoniou dance imagines blindness

Monday, February 13, 2006

Rachel Howard, Special to the Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle Yannis Adoniou has triumphed over many seemingly ill-advised concepts during the eight years in which Kunst-Stoff, the experimental company he co-founded with fellow choreographer Tomi Paasonen, has raced to the forefront of thought-provoking San Francisco dance. He has re-imagined "Les Sylphides" -- that icon of balletic romanticism -- as a 21st century horror story, and made Rene Magritte a poster boy for postmodernism. Friday, during Kunst-Stoff's Bay Area Now debut at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, he unveiled a dance about blindness. It was, well, not much to look at. "As we close their eyes," created with input from two representatives of the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, had moments of promise. At one point Kara Davis and Jose Campos danced a clingy duet while Sheldon Smith and Nicole Bonadonna provided absurdly inadequate verbal descriptions. At another, Austin Forbord traced Bonadonna's body with a video camera, the live images imitating the sensation of touch. Jennifer Vogt's stage design drew a red string above the audience like a laser beam. It was anchored to the stage by a red drum that made mysterious noises when the string was touched. But for most of the work, the effects remained too distant to compellingly engage the senses. When four mikes lowered to amplify the dancers' panting breath, when sounds continued as they moved through darkness, the ideas were understood rather than felt. I wondered if Kunst-Stoff weren't having trouble transferring their avant-gardism to a larger venue. "As we close their eyes" might have worked better as an installation at one of the more intimate spaces Kunst-Stoff usually plays, where the dancers are so close that you can feel their energy and smell their sweat. Last year's "In-sight" fared better on the big stage, with Cara Judea Alhadeff's lush, subtly disturbing photographs beautifully filling the back scrim. Described in the program as a work questioning the ultimate reality of images, "In-sight" lingers in the mind as more of a dreamscape. Naked bodies emerged from a pulsing white chrysalis. Davis wore a shroud over her head, the face of a photograph eerily aligning with hers. A series of solos to frenetic drumming (Jethro DeHart's music heard taped) did not pack the same manic energy as in the closer confines of ODC Theater, but Leslie Schickel and Julian DeLyon shared an especially entrancing, entwined pas de deux. I hope Adoniou gets another chance to adjust his risk-taking movement theater to such a vast space. Though you might not know it from last weekend's outing, his work deserves to be seen on a large scale.