LINDSAY DEUTSCH
San Diego Tribune
August 18, 2006

Dance takes back seat to music at 'SummerFest'

By Janice Steinberg

Although an exciting evening of performances, Wednesday's “Dancing at SummerFest” was a puzzle. Unlike in a similarly titled program last year, the La Jolla Music Society didn't bring dance and music as full partners to the Sherwood Auditorium stage. Rather, the program offered two well-matched chamber pieces – both by 19th-century middle-European composers, played by the same core group of musicians – and, as a sort of odd man out, choreographer Allyson Green's dance to a Bach suite for solo cello, played by Felix Fan.

Not that Bach is ever an unwelcome guest. The Suite No. 6 in D Major for Solo Cello, BWV 1012, with its progression of Baroque dances and range of moods from playful to yearning, provided a gorgeously textured tapestry for Green's “Nada Que Declarar (but everything to say).” Like the piece's bilingual title, this is a border-crossing work, created by Green for the six members of Tijuana's Lux Boreal Danza Contemporánea.
A seventh dancer, guest artist Carolyn Hall (from New York), seemed to embody Green's experience of crossing the border weekly to work with the Tijuana company. The outsider, Hall held back as the others swam through the space, their arms sweeping out and taking them into easy drops, their groupings fluid. Like the two women, Hall wore a sundress, but theirs – and the men's T-shirts and jackets – were in a warm palette of oranges and purples, while Hall, um, wore green.

If that sounds too literal, it was. So was a narrative in which Hall was gradually accepted, then had to say goodbye. Where “Nada Que Declarar” soared, however, was in Green's use of space, her thoughtful exploration of borders via lines of dancers that kept forming and breaking, and Fan's placement in a different spot for each of the six movements.

In the reflective Allemande, Fan sat center-stage, separating two couples – Briseida López and David Mariano, whose careful tenderness suggested a dying love affair, and Azalea López and Angel Arámbula with their intensely physical connection; in an exquisite moment, he leaned forward and she rested curled-up on his back. (The other dancers were Henry Torres and Raul Navarro.)

Little was added by Alan Stones' sound design of Tijuana street noises that preceded the movements or by Green's projected photos of Tijuana scenes; difficult to see, at least they didn't distract from the dance. Fan's constant changes of position, while they served the dance spatially, were challenging acoustically. The lively Courante, for instance, sounded thin, but did that reflect a greater facility at slower movements or his position in a rear corner of the stage?

There were no acoustic problems with the two purely musical pieces, Moszkowski's Suite for Two Violins and Piano in G Minor; Opus 71 and Dvorak's Piano Quintet in A Major; Opus 81. Violinists Bei Zhu and Lindsay Deutsch and pianist Weiyin Chen attacked the turbulent Moszkowski suite, nimbly chasing each other in a screamingly fast molto vivace.

For the Dvorak, the three women were joined by violist Paul Neubauer and cellist Gary Hoffman. One of Dvorak's most acclaimed works, the quintet opens with a tranquil exchange between cello and piano, interrupted within seconds, however, by a blast of power from the rest of the quintet.

Such thrilling contrasts mark this piece, which careens between tranquility and agitation, softness and crescendo, performed here like a perfectly balanced conversation – the strings holding back to let Chen's sparkling piano burst through and Neubauer's viola sometimes taking the lead, a sweetly autumnal sound to the violins' summer.

Conversation was also nourished by the programming, which allowed one to contrast the Dvorak's breathtaking range with the narrower Moszkowski, in which the allegro moderato, despite an occasional melodic theme, too often revisited the turbulent theme of the opening allegro energico.