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San
Francisco Examiner
Capacitor's balancing act (continued)
The "alternative" challenge
It's a thrill for nightclub-goers as well, judging from the success of the
company's first staging of "Flux Capacitor," its interactive dance
party and performance, seven months ago. That one-night event at King Street
Garage sold out to a crowd of nearly 1,000, so that the company is now reviving
its sci-fi-influenced blend of aerial work, juggling and modern dance in the
larger venue next door.
These days increasing numbers of New York choreographers, frustrated by diminishing
opportunities to perform their work in traditional theater spaces, are turning
to club gigs and trying to make a cross-generational virtue of necessity.
But most don't have the artistic control Lomask now has -- or her abiding
vision.
"When I first came to the Bay Area in 1997 my intention was to perform
only in alternative venues," says the 27-year-old, a graduate of State
University of New York at Purchase."I had no interest in the theater
because I felt my generation wasn't going to the theater. And I was creating
work for my generation, so why should I go there?"
But mounting her work to the standards she wanted was easier, at first, in
theaters. So Lomask's eclectic group of circus performers, capoeristas and
traditionally trained dancers worked their way through choreographic showcases
and on to producing full-length works at Oakland's Alice Arts Theater and
elsewhere, and meanwhile developed two distinct audiences: theatergoers and
club-goers.
Two venues, two mindsets
Later this month Capacitor will revive "Within Outer Spaces" at
San Francisco's SomArts Gallery Theater. The heady collection of metaphor-rich
space-age movement imagery, developed in collaboration with a think tank of
astronomers Lomask calls the Capacitor Lab, is designed for the theater but
also occasionally performed in clubs. (continued)
