Speaking with the Stars...of Dance

ODC San Francisco hosts the first choreography competition in the Bay Area:

http:///www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/music/2011/01/speaking-dance-stars

Over the past eight years I've contributed numerous features and Shop Talk pieces to the East Bay Monthly, a literary and commerce magazine in the San Francisco Bay Area. For my work on Shop Talk I've loved getting to know the new shopkeepers in town and, hopefully giving them a little boost in traffic. By now, however, I can usually tell which ones will survive, and which won't. These two recent ones are, I believe, keepers.


Modernaire

Step into Berkeley’s Modernaire, and you’re instantly transported back to the midcentury world of Mad Men. Red, orange, turquoise, and chartreuse Murano art glass pops against Paul Frankl’s white, treated-cork tables. You can almost see a Brylcreemed Don Draper, whiskey glass in one hand, ever-present cigarette in the other, reposing on the tweed-covered Scandinavian love seat.

Photo by Spiral-A Photography

Bee Healthy Honey

Verdant valleys carpeted with wildflowers: not our Western vision of Yemen. But for Khaled Almghafi, proprietor of Bee Healthy Honey Shop in Oakland, these are vivid images from his childhood. “Yes, we do have deserts filled with acacias from which we get acacia honey,” he explains. “But we also have mountains and on the beautiful island of Socotra, off the coast, very rare plants. That honey goes for $180 a kilo in France.”

http://www.themonthly.com/shoptalk1004.html

Two for the Road

Chitresh Das and Jason Samuels Smith at the Palace of Fine Arts

What do you get when you combine classical Indian dance and American tap? A jubilant explosion of sound.
On Saturday, Indian Kathak dance master Pandit Chitresh Das and American tap dance phenom Jason Samuels Smith team up to present “India Jazz Suites,” part of the Chitresh Das Dance Company’s 30th anniversary celebration gala.
The performance heralds a collaboration that, since their first match-up in 2005, has received wildly enthusiastic response from audiences here and abroad.Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/Two-for-the-road-87625457.html#ixzz0l1dQJ5np

Performing Diaspora

Diaspora: A body of people dispersed from their homelands. That pretty much describes the Bay Area population in a nutshell. Beginning on November 5, CounterPULSE, the SOMA artists’ collective, presents Performing Diaspora, a series of works-in-progress culminating in three weekends of dance, music and drama featuring a baker's dozen of artists whose fresh and experimental work is rooted in cultural traditions from such diverse parts of the world as Indonesia, Serbia, the Carribean Japan and Africa.

CounterPULSE director Jessica Robinson Love says “The Bay Area has had support for artists who practice traditional forms of dance and that’s very important, especially for recent immigrants. On the other hand we have a vibrant contemporary performance community. What we were lacking was a middle ground - artists based in traditional forms who want to divert from that.”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/Diaspora-dances-around-the-world-67446812.html

Avant garde dance comes to San Francisco this weekend:

Taking it to the Edge
An Evening of Avant Garde Dance at ODC
By Andrea Pflaumer

To someone of lesser mettle than dancer Sara Shelton Mann, broken bones and ripped tendons might have sent them into retirement long ago. But for Mann they only served to drive her deeper into her creative well, garnering an impressive number of accolades along the way, including four Isadora Duncan awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Mann, one of the world’s foremost figures in avant garde dance, presents her newest production, Shapeshifter, in a concert entitled Shared Legacies on October 3 and 4 at ODC. Joining her on the bill is her former principal dancer and protégé Kathleen Hermesdorf, whose company La Alternativa (formerly MOTIONLAB) performs their piece entitled the other edge of there is here. “I’m very honored to share a show with Sara,” Hermesdorf says. “She always attracts great collaborators and has fabulous dancers.” [Mann’s lead dancer, Maria Scaroni, created quite a stir this year with an NEA-sponsored performance of a piece by Jess Curtis that had her appearing in the nude.]

(See page 16)

http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/Launch.aspx?referral=other&pnum=&refresh=Gb519N0eZd60&EID=1dfcbb42-fcde-4678-92c3-f2b3a4bb8140&skip=true

Book Review in the University of Toronto Women in Judaism Journal

The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home

Review by Andrea Pflaumer

Sadia Shepard’s remarkable memoir The Girl from Foreign is as satisfying for the personal mysteries it solves as it is unsettling for the larger geo-political questions it raises. Born in Denver, the daughter of an American Christian father and a Pakistani Muslim mother, Shepard embraces her multicultural identity (‘it’s all one God,’) in a country that welcomes hyphenation. But as a young woman embarking on a writing career she learns that her maternal grandmother, who lived with and was an important part of the family during Shepard’s formative years, was not originally from Pakistan nor was she Muslim. She was, in fact, born into the Bene Israel community of Western India as Rachel Jacobs. In her grandmother’s final years she asks Shepard to ‘tell my story,’ launching the young woman on an arduous physical and emotional journey to discover her grandmother’s roots, a voyage that became one of self-discovery as well.

Joyride Art Show Review

Published in the San Francisco Weekly on-line blog "All Shook Down"

by Andrea Pflaumer

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2009/07/last_night_joyride_art_show_at.php

"I'm Gonna Live Forever...."

For those of you who like that song, you may be thinking, "in this decrepit body?". Well, here's a little different twist on the subject - from ancient India - published in Michael Laughrin's North American Jyotish Newsletter

http://jyotish.ws/wisdom/kaya_kalpa_immortality.html

Kirtan Chanting in America

My article on kirtan chanting for Michael Laughrin's North American Jyotish newsletter:

In the not-so-distant past, before Homeland Security measures rendered airport lobbies off-limits, the only "orange alerts" to which weary travelers were subjected were gatherings of young people in saffron robes handing out tracts and chanting the names of Hindu deities: "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare." Back in the 1970's, the so-called Hare Krishnas raised ecstatic voices and "kundalinis" with their intoxicating drumbeats, encouraging all within earshot to turn their minds to God...

http://www.jyotish.ws/wisdom/kirtan_chanting.html

Photo of Krishna Das courtesy of KD

Tabla and Didj and Fretboard - Oh My!!

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2007/10/bay_areas_annual_didjeridu_fix.php

A Lion in Winter: My Essay about life and death - and encountering a mountain lion in my neighborhood

http://www.themonthly.com/feature2-03-07.html

Big Sandals to Fill: Alam Khan in Berkeley

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/music/successor_to_the_khan_/Content?oid=367600

The most fun I've ever had writing an article: (unfortunately, they only listed it - html to follow)

http://www.themonthly.com/previous/2006/06-06.html

Another Shopping Around: dancing, interior design, artist (the first four pieces are mine)

http://www.themonthly.com/shop-talk06-06.html

Facial Features: a review of non-surgical techniques to reverse the toll of time (listing only)

http://www.themonthly.com/previous/2005/11-05.html

The Painter and the Poet: Profile of Dr. Gerson and Judith Goldhaber and their new book, Sonnets from Aesop (listing only - html to come)

http://www.themonthly.com/previous/2005/08-05.html

A TREE Grows in Berkeley - profile on the work of Ritu Primalni, who is 'greening' ethcnic restuarants - originally published in November 2003 in the East Bay Month's feature UpFront

(HTML to come)