Sacramento Ballet - Solos, Duets, And Trios - UC Davis' Mondavi Center - 5/2/13

Vanderhoef Studio Theatre was the location for one of UC Davis' Mondavi Center's Studio Dance Series Events: Sacramento Ballet - An Evening Of Solos, Duets, And Trios.

It is really nice to see dances in a more-intimate setting. In part II, I was actually sitting in the first row, and there is something magical to seeing the dancing so closely that you could stand up yourself and enter the dance.

I missed the Dancer Films just before the event.

Hard to say what I liked best. Probably 'Tarantella' with Lauryn Winterhalder and Christopher Nachtrab, because of its relentless energy, followed by 'Wunderland (Excerpt)' 5th Movement, with Alexandra Cunningham and Stefan Calka.

I really liked 'Scars Already Seen', choreographed by Nicole Haskins, and featuring Ava Chatterson and Stefan Calka. Nicole Haskins is really an excellent choreographer, with a designer's eye, and full of interesting surprises. If there was anything wrong with the dance it was that the dance was too brief.

There were several crowd-pleasers: 'Jazzin', with Ava Chatterson; 'I Think I Love You' with Lauryn Winterhalder and Rex Wheeler, and 'Mexican Trio', with Amanda Peet, Christopher Nachtrab, and Oliver-Paul Adams. Amanda Peet danced a Tchaikovsky pas de deux with Richard Porter, but decided not to appear later, because of an annoying injury.

There was a particular ballet movement I really liked. Who was it? Ava Chatterson or Lauryn Winterhalder? She extended her leg - a développé - toward her partner, while holding hands with him, all the while rotating around a common center between them. She displayed no hesitation or indication that there was anything difficult about it at all. The circle was perfectly-round.

That reminded me of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and Richard Feynmann's investigation of it. He made a very valuable point regarding just how difficult it is to keep round things round:

Then I investigated something we were looking into as a possible contributing cause of the accident: when the booster rockets hit the ocean, they became out of round a little bit from the impact. At Kennedy they're taken apart, and the sections—four for each rocket—are sent by rail to Thiokol in Utah, where they are packed with new propellant. Then they're put back on a train to Florida. During transport, the sections (which are hauled on their side) get squashed a little bit—the softish propellant is very heavy. The total amount of squashing is only a fraction of an inch, but when you put the rocket sections back together, a small gap is enough to let hot gases through: the O-rings are only a quarter of an inch thick, and compressed only two-hundredths of an inch! I thought I'd do some calculations. NASA gave me all the numbers on how far out of round the sections can get, so I tried to figure out how much the resulting squeeze was, and where it was located—maybe the minimum squeeze was where the leak occurred. The numbers were measurements taken along three diameters, every 60 degrees. But three matching diameters won't guarantee that things will fit; six diameters, or any other number of diameters, won't do, either. For example, you can make a figure something like a triangle with rounded corners, in which three diameters, 60 degrees apart, have the same length. I remembered seeing such a trick at a museum when I was a kid. There was a gear rack that moved back and forth perfectly smoothly, while underneath it were some non-circular, funny-looking, crazy-shaped gears turning on shafts that wobbled. It looked impossible, but the reason it worked was that the gears were shapes whose diameters were always the same. So the numbers NASA gave me were useless.

So, basically, Sacramento Ballet can do things that NASA didn't realize it couldn't do.

Dancers leaving the stage after the post-show Question-and-Answer session.