Catching a bowl on your head
That afternoon, a onetime “dance, opera and art” performance, “Il Fazzoletto,” by artist-in-residence†Andrew Mezvinsky, was at the Performance Art Institute on Sutter Street. Mezvinsky, who lives in Vienna, went there from Rajasthan, India (where he learned dyeing techniques), and there from the Gobi Desert (where he was following nomadic sheepherders). His theatrical work utilized multilayered cut-out images, as in pop-up books.
The music – ethereal and stately – was by†Shinji Eshima†of the San Francisco Ballet and Opera orchestras, the choreography by†Yuri Possokhov, former principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, the libretto by psychoanalyst/writer†Jerome Oremland. Three dancers (in Venetian masks) moved panels of Mezvinsky’s drawings to create a variety of spaces and images; in the end, the audience peered through viewers at a lineup of all the drawings, which the program said would solve a puzzle. Too dim to follow that, nonetheless I was charmed.