Be Here Now

REVIEWS

SF Gate

If one judges a dance company by the quality of choreographer it attracts, then Smuin can hold up its head with pride. The 23-year-old company’s continuing relationship with Trey McIntyre has yielded another pop-inspired piece the company can dance for years to come (and probably will). “Be Here Now,” seen Friday, May 12, at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center, is the highlight of the troupe’s final season program, which also includes a premiere by Smuin dancer Nicole Haskins and a revival by choreographer in residence Amy Seiwert.

It’s a lively mix for this versatile company, and those who attended to wallow in the nostalgia generated by the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love were probably satisfied. But “Be Here Now” (title courtesy Ram Dass) is a complex work that looks back with mixed emotions. McIntyre is an absolute master of interpreting popular music in the classical vocabulary, especially for large ensembles. Those ensembles can really sizzle, but he has more on his mind here than reliving the past.

 “Be Here Now” begins with scratchy footage of atomic bomb blasts, with a mushroom cloud metamorphosing into an ice cream cone and the 12 dancers kicking out to a vintage recording by the Mamas and the Papas. Men are bare-chested, women sport period fringe, and the group dominates. But McIntyre’s prologue suggests that fear of nuclear annihilation and the search for a better world guided the ’60s. Most of the young did not find that world, and there’s an undeniable sadness among all the drug experimentation and group gropes. When, to the sound of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” a bulbous parade float disintegrates into a dancer wearing a shirt that reads “UR God,” we sense that an era has corroded from within.

McIntyre sets the piece to pop music of the period (Janis Joplin, Steve Miller and the Youngbloods, among others), but a new recording of an African American choir singing “Which Side Are You On” inspires the best choreography, a muscular love duet for Jonathan Powell and Ben Needham-Wood. Erin Yarbrough-Powell, Robert Kretz, Terez Dean and Michael Wells contributed substantially. If “Be Here Now” misses the insouciant charm of McIntyre’s earlier “Oh, Inverted World,” it’s a more thoughtful opus.

REVUE

Grand Rapids Ballet’s 2024-2025 season finale “Be Here Now” promised to capture the spirit of the 1960s but in ways far more nuanced and complex than the audience members who show up wearing giant round pink-tinted glasses, mod floral print mini dresses, and white go-go boots expect.

Indeed, the second act is made up entirely of Trey McIntyre’s beautiful Be Here Now, an extended acid trip more than a little reminiscent of the musical Hair, full of dancers dressed as hippies moving individually and collectively as mandalas and shot through with music from The Mamas and Papas, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, among others. There’s so much flower power to this delightful dance created for the San Francisco Ballet and performed here for the first time anywhere else that the audience is literally showered with silk flower petals at the end of the performance.

But equally noteworthy as the message of love, peace, and understanding that drives this piece is the representation of the very real tensions and undercurrents of change that sparked the revolution of the 1960s: projected images of the A-bomb and soldiers, created by McIntyre, create a sense of dynamic conflict that grounds the spaced-out spiritedness of so much of the movement. One of the most salient parts of the dance is a pas de deux between men—that is equal parts embrace and fight, ostensibly to represent civil rights in an embodied way.

And this is why such a glorious representation of this era, an embodiment of the ‘60s revolutionary spirit, is meaningful now. It’s not just the love, peace, and understanding we need; it’s also the potent demand for change in response to the utter madness of the current Age of Aquarius.

San Francisco Classical Voice

…fantastic ensemble choreography and tight structures that appear organic, even improvised, but result from McIntyre’s intense attention to detail.