San Francisco - Alison Bing [28]
DANCE
Never afraid of kicking up its heels and making grand gestures that show off its knickers, San Francisco has been dancing since the Barbary Coast days – notwithstanding an attempt to ban dance during San Francisco’s blessedly brief flirtation with Victorian respectability just after the 1906 earthquake leveled the city’s entertainment venues. From burlesque to ballet and all shades of modern, San Francisco so enjoys dance in all its permutations that its premier holiday event is the Dance Along Nutcracker.
The city is home to the nation’s oldest professional ballet company, formed in 1933 to keep heels and spirits lifted. The San Francisco Ballet quickly established a reputation for excellence, with George Ballanchine himself advising then-director Willam Christensen and setting the tone for the company. In 1944, San Francisco mounted the nation’s first full-length versions of the Nutcracker Suite and Swan Lake, now widely regarded as signature pieces. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s independent ballet companies seek ever more creative ways to break the traditional mold, like Savage Jazz, which does ballet to jazz music.
In modern dance, New York once again gets the credit for innovations that started in San Francisco. Widely credited with originating modern dance, Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) was born just a few blocks west of Union Square and grew up in Oakland before scandalizing and delighting dance fans from Manhattan to Europe. An alley near her birthplace, off Taylor St between Post and Geary Sts, now bears her name. Today, some of the city’s more renowned companies, like Oberlin Dance Collective and Liss Fain Dance, combine raw Western physicality with San Francisco ingenuity. For a listing of dance companies, Click here.
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ARCHITECTURE
Never a city to conform to expectations, San Francisco boasts a plethora of eclectic architecture, offering unexpected delights for visitors and endless challenges for architects charged with creating new buildings consistent with existing historic structures. The question is, which ones to match? A trip across town or even down the block will bring you face to facade with the region’s Spanish and Mexican heritage, East Asian influences, California Arts and Crafts, high modernism and Victoriana movements, plus its own hodge-podge homegrown style. The roofline is as erratic and charming as a crooked smile, and bay windows often function as impromptu altars, often featuring ceramic owls, political endorsements, macramé and action figures in compromising positions.
Little is left of San Francisco’s original Ohlone style beyond the grass memorial hut you’ll see in the graveyard of the Spanish Mission Dolores and the wall of the original presidio (military post; Click here), both built in adobe with Ohlone labor. With the Gold Rush came hasty deforestation and construction, with buildings slapped together from ready-made sawn timber components. Prefabricated houses arrived from Australia and the East Coast, a harbinger of the postwar prefab, and architect-designed, eco-prefab was innovated in the Bay Area during the 1990s.
San Francisco first distinguished itself architecturally not with grand civic buildings – in the Barbary Coast days, City Hall was located at the bawdy Jenny Lind Theater – but with residences for the nouveau riche. As San Francisco evolved from a temporary settlement to a permanent town, rows of Victorian houses were built. These wooden row houses were variations on a theme, using a similar underlying structure and floor plan but often with wildly different embellishments and eye-catching paint jobs.
The mid-19th century was the culmination of the European Age of Discovery, bringing with it renewed fascination with the civilizations of yore. The Victorian era was also a time of colonial conquest, and Victorians liked to imagine themselves as the purveyors of culture and the true inheritors of such great civilizations as ancient Rome, Egypt and the Italian Renaissance. They incorporated imagery from these cultural high-water