SFDanceworks' Season 9: Conway and Yin Shine, Cunningham Slogs

SFDanceworks opened its "Season 9" on Nov. 4 at Z Space in San Francisco's Mission District, premiering new works by choreographers Brett Conway and Yue Yin alongside two Cunningham solos of noticeably less appeal.

The mixed repertory company delivered a line-up of world premieres, new works and contemporary classics that critics found uneven — brilliant at the edges, murky in the middle.

What stole the show?

Local choreographer Brett Conway opened the evening with the world premiere of Troupe Pas-de-cha! — a lively trio set to a cha-cha-chá score by Bryce Dessner, Alejandro G. Iñarritu and Juan Garcia Esquivel. The dancers pranced, strutted and stepped across the floor in shifting formations, reacting with excellent timing to the score's dramatic build-ups.

The piece's signature motif was comic: at the end of various musical phrases, the dancers collapsed, spilling onto the floor in overlapping shapes. The reviewer described the result as "quite humorous" — a release of the pent-up energy of all that stylized walking.

Who closed the first half on a high?

Yue Yin's commissioned duet, A Measurable Existence, rivaled Conway's premiere with a completely different mood. Yin, a New York-based choreographer trained in Chinese classical and folk dance, developed her own "FoCo Technique" (a training method for her athletic style) to pass on to new generations of dancers.

Dancers Sarah Chou and Lani Yamanaka carried out lifts, splits and demanding acrobatic feats with seamless calm. Their contact partner work (improvised touch-based movement between dancers) grounded the piece against a score by Rutger Zuydervelt that lacked a consistent pulse — clear evidence, the reviewer noted, of the two dancers' strong internal sense of rhythm.

The lifts never read as show-off stunts but as elegant extensions of existing movement. Their synchronicity generated what the review called "electric intensity," heightened by Cassie Barnes's mood lighting. Barnes's design stood out all evening, her careful spotlighting surfacing at unexpected moments with artful effect.

What went wrong with Cunningham?

The two Merce Cunningham solos proved less cohesive. SFDanceworks programmed Cunningham — credited with innovating modern dance, experimental in both movement and accompaniment — to show new works in the context of the tradition's groundbreaking forces.

The evening carried an extra layer of drama offstage. Silas Riener jumped in at the last minute to replace Joseph Walsh, a principal dancer at SF Ballet who was originally slated to perform the solos. Walsh instead moderated the post-show talkback, where he quoted Cunningham's credo: "the struggle through the task is the form." The struggle was visible, but Riener carried the burden with progressive ease.

The second solo, Ocean, featured a series of random minute-long scripts that produced a feeling of disjointedness. John Cage's foreboding score of atonal low notes created an unsettling atmosphere — to what end, the reviewer wrote, was unclear. The dancing did not seem particularly inspired by the texts or the music.

What does Season 9 signal?

The program confirms SFDanceworks as a company willing to bet on new commissions while honoring the experimental canon. When Conway and Yin return with fresh work, the odds — judging by Nov. 4 — will favor them.