Santa Ana's Saint Joseph Ballet changes name to the Wooden Floor

People of a certain age know about the Singing Nun, the Belgian singer-songwriter and religious order member who took "Dominique," her song in French about a saint in medieval Spain, to No. 1 on the American and worldwide pop charts in 1963.

In Southern California, the arts scene carries the legacy of a Dancing Nun. Santa Ana's Saint Joseph Ballet was launched in 1983-84 by Sister Beth Burns, then a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, and funded by the Catholic group. Now, the dance school dedicated to helping children from poor families choreograph their steps to a high school diploma and a college education has made a pirouette, changing its name to the Wooden Floor.

It may be one of those "huh?" names, says Melanie Rios Glaser, the company's executive and artistic director, who succeeded Burns, now a board member, in 2005. But there's a tradition of that in the world of experimental and cutting-edge art that the school now occupies. Rios Glaser cites the Mattress Factory, a contemporary art venue in Pittsburgh, the Kitchen in New York City, and REDCAT in downtown L.A., where the Wooden Floor will perform a two-night engagement in January. The name is inspired by the students' feelings about the school, Rios Glaser says. "The studio floor has so much meaning for our kids. They become very eloquent about how they relate to it."

Two members of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange congregation -- they don't call it a convent -- attended the performance on Thursday in which the name change was announced in the middle of a dance piece.

Sister Katherine Gray, general superior of the congregation, said she's proud that the dance school has grown from its small beginnings as a ministry of her group, and that it's not important that the name reflect the school's roots, so long as its charitable work continues. "Anything that enhances that, we would support," she said. "It's still doing the work, and more, for which it began, and we'll continue to have a relationship of friendship."

Dance review: Bill T. Jones' 'Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray'

Reporting from Santa Barbara

Our new president's interest in the lore and legacy of Abraham Lincoln is not exactly a state secret. So when the most prominent and perennially controversial black choreographer on the planet makes a full-evening work about Honest Abe and the link between the dangerous turbulence of his time and ours, head for the storm cellar.

Commissioned by the Ravinia Festival as part of its Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration, Bill T. Jones' “Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray” arrived at the Granada Theatre on Tuesday as part of the UCSB Arts and Lectures season. It moves to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Friday.

The title comes from Lincoln's second inaugural address, the performance from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (without Jones on this tour), the sensibility from an artist of color who sees how the furious public schism over slavery in Lincoln's lifetime is a boil that bursts, night after night, in the ugly town meetings we see on CNN.

Indeed, “The Boil That Bursts” is the title of one of the sections of this 80-minute work in which dancers portraying their contemporaries are shadowed by ghostly projections of predecessors in period costumes -- the present never free of the past. 

The gauze oval enclosure designed by Bjorn Amelan and the video images by Janet Wong sometimes make the dancers within look shrouded in mist. But elsewhere the designers project written quotations, song lyrics and opinions on top of the dancers so that every move is overwhelmed with data.

Pina Bausch, 1940-2009

 

Pina Bausch died today of cancer at 68. To call the artistic director of Germany's Wuppertal Dance Theater a choreographer doesn't fully described the artistic innovator.

"Her influence extended far beyond the dance world into the theater world, and even movies and the staging of opera," Lewis Segal, former Times dance critic, said Tuesday.

"It is limiting to call her a choreographer; she liked the term 'dance theater.' She was important because she thought everything belonged together -- speech, movement, design, commenting on the audience.

 "She was famous for saying that she was not as interested in how people move as in what moves people. She wanted to tell a story."

Read about Bausch in Diane Haithman's obituary.

-- Sherry Stern

Photo: Baush in 1995. Credit: Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP/Getty Images

Why Michael Jackson danced like no one else

The way people move is as unique as their DNA -- indeed, it is their DNA in action, living proof of their singularity. But most dancers have to give it up to become professionals, to lose themselves in the style of a school, a choreographer, a company, an image of unanimity.

Not Michael Jackson. It was his supreme achievement as a dancer to remain indomitably himself and, in the process of entertaining us, to offer a vision of expanded human potential. What's more, long before excesses and obsessions claimed him, he helped turn MTV into DTV, making television the place where dance films set to new music inspired a generation with their creative power and originality.

Best seen in his music videos (where his vocals are pre-recorded so he doesn't have to wear a mike), the components of his personal style are easier to list than duplicate. Start with isolation: Each move alone as if in a close-up, sudden and incredibly sharp. Weightlessness: The sense of freedom from gravity and a body with no mass or muscles, just pure torque. Transformation of the mundane: shadow-boxing and other familiar moves drawn from athletics and pop dance renewed and heightened through a spectacular sense of flow and delirious speed.

Like the brilliantly calibrated gliding steps that formed his signature moonwalk, Jackson's nervy, high-velocity turns seemed to operate in zero gravity, and his finest dance performances gave the illusion of being a momentary impulse, almost accidental in their perfect balances and other evidence of faultless technical control. If his high-pitched vocal sound simulated perpetual adolescence, the way he moved kept him super-stylized and ageless -- a lover, a monster, a streetwise idealist at home in many cultures and a smooth criminal too.