Capacitor Gets It Right

While the world's many environmental crises provide a trusty source of emotional poignancy for the art and entertainment industry, it's generally inadvisable to look to screen or stage for the critical facts. (This applies to those of you feeling smug about the global warming lesson you got from Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow.) Unless, that is, you can be sure the artists have done their homework. Fortunately for us — and for tree canopy ecosystems around the world — S.F. dance company Capacitor has. To inform its latest piece, biome, the group spent weeks studying canopies in the Monteverde Cloud Forest of Costa Rica with renowned ecologist Nalini Nadkarni. The end result is an elegant tangle of athletic modern and aerial dance, film, fashion design, and metalwork. Dancers in costumes that somehow integrate water, ribbon, and light morph into plants and animals with the use of interactive props.

A pre-show talk by Nadkarni and tables in the lobby staffed by conservation groups ensure audience members receive not only their ticket's worth of conscience-burdening enjoyment, but also enough solid information to actually help the cause.
Jan. 25-26, 8 p.m., 2008