Company C enters A-list ballet scene
Rachel Howard, Chronicle Dance Correspondent

Monday, January 28, 2008

Attention Bay Area ballet fans: There's a new contender in town. The progress that the East Bay's Company C Contemporary Ballet has made in the six years since its founding has surely been slow and gradual, but Saturday at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts, the transformation seemed sudden and complete.

Company C's latest program, which repeats at San Francisco's Cowell Theater Feb. 9 and 10, puts the chamber troupe in league with such other local favorites as Smuin Ballet and Diablo Ballet, while also carving a distinctive niche. It is a full, lively program, with plenty of lightweight diversions and one heavyweight classic. It is also handsomely danced.

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Company C shines with broad-spectrum program
By Ann Murphy
CORRESPONDENT

Article Launched: 01/29/2008 03:06:48 AM PST


There are nights so dreary, dark and stormy that few performers should be able to hold a candle to the comfort of the couch. Friday night seemed such a night, and yet the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek was jammed with concertgoers who had braved the elements for the opening night of Company C Contemporary Ballet's weekend run. They knew what they were doing.
Company C offered a program that blithely played the field, darting from the lush jazz-inflected classicism of director Charles Anderson's own "Hush" to the spare, sculpted expressionism of Antony Tudor's classic "Dark Elegies," flashing past balletic-athletic territory in "Rhapsody in Blue" by Alexandre Proia, only to wind up in David Parson's land of slapstick parable, "The Letter."

Today, a little behind-the-scenes peek into the world of arts journalism. First, critics don't write their own headlines. Copy editors do. And fortunately for me, at the Chronicle they usually do a pithy and succinct job, far better than I could hope to. But every now and again, the headline doesn't quite sync with what I meant to communicate in the review, and that was the case today with my review of Company C, which ran with the headline "Company C enters A-list ballet scene."

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Company C gets a Twyla Tharp premiere
By Robert Taylor
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched: 05/18/2008 12:00:32 AM PDT

Twyla Tharp is probably the best known and the busiest choreographer working in America. Her Web site lists more than 125 dances she's created since the 1960s, including "Deuce Coupe" to a Beach Boys score, "Nine Sinatra Songs" and Broadway's "Movin' Out."

"Twyla is one of these people who is just choreographing all the time — she can't help herself," says Charles Anderson, artistic director of the Walnut Creek-based Company C Contemporary Ballet.