Whether you mix peppermint schnapps in your cocoa or prefer your chocolate straight and cold with a sidecar of cookies, it’s a good guess you don’t often pose the ingredients on various body parts and drink the concoction while upside down. Yet such is a simple snack for Sweet Can. As the little circus revealed during Habitat, a show focused on the anticipated arrival of a letter, these performers apply physical challenge and emotional complexity to the simplest of tasks, while conjuring effortless grace during the nearly impossible. Even while using aerial silks, slack rope, hoops, wheels, swings, and rings, Sweet Can performances have the look and feel of dance. Little wonder: Long before director Joanna Haigood began teaching at the San Francisco Clown Conservatory, she was garnering awards around the world for her choreography, which often incorporated architecture and suspension. Since music is as elemental to dance as gravity, Sweet Can also lays claim to some of the area’s finest musicians. Its latest show, Yes Sweet Can, blends the beauty of flight with the frivolity of tap-dancing garbage cans, and makes use of every ounce of the troupe’s formidable talent, not to mention its chocolate milk.
Dec. 18-Jan. 3, 7 & 9 p.m., 2009
