West Wave Dance Festival
For the adventurous and the traditional alike, the offerings at the West Wave Dance Festival (now in its 24th season) run the shaped movement gamut, from traditional ethnic dance to the latest in edgy experimentation. This year's festival includes transgender choreographer Sean Dorsey's dance-theater history of the AIDS epidemic, The Missing Generation, as well as a full evening of works selected from the Black Choreographers Festival's mentorship program. With 26 emerging and established artists and 18 premieres, West Wave comes in like the tide: again and again but always new.
Sept. 23-27, at Z Space, 450 Florida St., S.F. 415-626-0453 or safehousearts.info/westwave24
Mariinsky Ballet
The great Russian ballet troupe, whose very name brings to mind pristine classicism of image and movement, brings choreographer Alexei Ratmansky's 2002 Cinderella to open the Cal Performances season. Supplementing ballet with mime, contemporary dance, and pedestrian movements, Ratmansky sets the story in the 1930s. Whether the shoe is fur, glass, or Oxford, this fairy tale can always bear a retelling, and all the better when it's equipped with a full orchestra to play Prokofiev's brooding score.
Oct. 1-4, at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley. 510-642-9988 or mariinsky.ru/en/company/ballet/troupe
Sankai Juku
The dark aftermath of World War II prompted a new form of expression in Japan called butoh, an art that fractures time and emotion into strange and raw components. Experience a different pace in a different space when renowned butoh company Sankai Juku returns to San Francisco for the first time in five years with Umusuna—Memories Before History, an exploration of the origins of the earth through the temporality of the flesh.
Oct. 9-11, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., S.F. 415-978-2787 or sankaijuku.com
Affinity Project and Dance and a Half
Get a double feature at the porn theater formerly known as the Dollhouse when CounterPULSE opens its new performance space with a showing of its artists-in-residence. Affinity Project adapts a Haruki Murakami story about an insomniac and her fascination with Anna Karenina in When you read a novel... Find Dance and a Half a few shelves over in the proverbial bookstore in This Year Is Different: An Absurdist Musical about Self-Help, partly about four seekers striving to transform, partly an invitation to consider the mechanisms of post-traumatic growth.
Oct. 16-18, at CounterPULSE, 80 Turk St., S.F.; counterpulse.org, affinityproject.squarespace.com, or danceandahalf.com
Kinetech Arts
A passing thought becomes a trend. An individual impulse becomes a mass movement. A desire becomes a law. In The Tipping Point, Kinetech Arts combines research and art, data visualization and dance, to create an interactive experience that depends on the actions of both audience and performers to illustrate the way that ideas take hold of communities. At a cultural moment when tech continues its relentless march to overwhelm art, the two join forces to make the virtual and the viral tangible and visible in real time.
Nov. 14-15, at Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., S.F., kinetech.org
Akram Khan Dance Company
The British choreographer Akram Khan looked to his origins when he created Kaash, his first evening-length work, in 2002. A multifaceted collaboration with sculptor Anish Kapoor and composer Nitin Sawhney, the piece fuses classical Indian kathak dance with contemporary movement to deliver a vision of Hindu gods and black holes, channeling all manner of cosmic confusion through five bodies that bring chaos into the order of anatomy, geometry, and rhythm.
Nov. 20-21, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., S.F. 415-978-2787 or akramkhancompany.net
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