If you squint really hard with one or both eyes, you can make out the wrecking ball taking shape over St. Cecilia’s Playhouse, the importunate venue that for years was the home of downtown San Diego’s maverick Sledgehammer Theatre. Several months from now, the onetime funeral parlor/church on Sixth Avenue will meet with history, one of the latest casualties amid the city’s obsession with condo projects and the income streams they generate.
If all of San Diego’s new condos were demolished and laid end to end, they’d stretch around a lot of people just as happy with the result.
Dance-oriented Sushi Performance and Visual Art, whose New Wave Showcase is set for Friday through Sunday, May 12-14, at University of California, San Diego’s (UCSD) Molli & Arthur Wagner Dance Building, is one of several local companies that performed at St. Cecilia’s while Sledge was the anchor tenant. The connection would eventually yield a philosophical partnership that’s outlasted the building’s occupancy. Sushi, like Sledgehammer, holds itself out as a champion of the new and experimental “” and with New Wave, each art of choice will meld and complement in the interest of aesthetic expression and global public appeal.
Janet Hayatshahi, former Sledge artistic director and an advisor to the New Wave project, has an explanation.
“There are things that do cross those lines between theater and dance ” gestures, phrases, movement,” she said. “Those struggles that we have in theater are the same as the dancers have in dance: how do you get a gesture to say what a playwright would say?”
“Our vocabulary is the same,” she continued. “We’re all storytellers. We’re all trying to get to the same place in terms of bringing an audience into our awareness, whatever that is. People really need to blur those lines “¦ between dance and theater and even visual art and music.”
Some of the weekend’s itinerary reads accordingly. Alicia Peterson and her dancers will perform “A separate piece entirely,” which features the troupe’s indirect relationship with an oud, a stringed instrument that predates the Middle Eastern lute. Moriah Evans and Evelyn Donnelly will mount a dance piece that focuses on the actual installation of a painting. Don Nichols’ “News Between Copies” includes percussion, video and prerecorded sound in a story about TV news and its financial interests versus the public good.
New Wave is part of Sushi’s 2006 East|West Performance Festival, which features a mix of art and artists from San Diego, L.A., New York, Seattle, Tijuana and Switzerland. And the festival’s contemporary flavor is no accident. The rapid growth of Malashock Dance; the recent advent of George Balanchine’s coveted works at City Ballet of San Diego; Eveoke Dance Theatre’s new 10th Avenue Theatre venue; the construction of an anchor lab space for local dance at the NTC Promenade: San Diego is quietly building a modern dance base whose activity may exceed that of Hayatshahi’s last pursuit.
“This is stuff that you get in major cities, and we’re getting it in San Diego ” not that we’re not a major city, but we’re certainly not one of the top three arts communities in the country,” Hayatshahi said. “I think dance is thriving here a lot more than theater is right now. Very little theater comes through here except the Broadway/San Diego stuff, and those are very cookie-cutter and very much the same.”
Additionally, the festival’s funding sources speak to local corporate involvement in the growth of dance. Donors include the James Irvine Foundation; the San Diego Women’s Foundation, the Horton Plaza Theater Foundation, the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the County of San Diego.
Local theater doesn’t get that kind of civic support, leastwise not so you’d notice. However unwittingly, that bears out a good part of Hayatshahi’s contention: that the really meaningful artistic convergence will be taking place on the stage.
UCSD’s Wagner Dance Building is at 9500 Gilman Drive. Tickets ($10, $15 and $20) are available at (619) 235-8466. More information is available at www.sushiart.org.