Capacitor

When planning our company holiday party, I was looking for something very unusual and interesting, a performance that would make the guests crane their necks, wanting to see more, asking themselves — what in the world is she doing??? I found that through Capacitor.
Working with Jodi Lomask, the Artistic Director, was such a great experience, she really understood my vision and worked very hard to make it happen.
Inka, the amazing performer who transformed into a magical octopus for the evening, was a sight to see. This part of the evening would set the tone for what was one of the most memorable parties I have ever planned. Everyone had an amazing time!
I cannot thank Jodi and Inka more — if ever there is an opportunity to use their services again, I will do it in a hearbeat.
If you ever have the chance to see a Capacitor performance, I highly encourage you to try them out!

Great show. I’ve seen it with my wife. We both were truly impressed. That was great!

I’ve seen Capacitor’s Okeanos at the Aquarium of the Bay twice. I expected the dancers to be amazing– and they were. I also learned some science, and that was a surprise. But, the biggest surprise was the children in the audience, seeing how captivated they were by the performance. Not many shows offer so much for all ages.

A fantastic performance! Okeonos was beautiful and imaginative. The dancers move gracefully, playfully, and thoughtfully, transforming themselves into creatures of the sea. It was a great peak inside life underwater, and at the same time, an amazing reminder of the movement potential of the human body. Excellent!

Okeanos is a mesmerizing cirque nouveau journey into the heart of the marine world. And tickets to the show also give you free admission to the main Aquarium, so its a spectacular bargain.
As a marine biologist myself, I was amazed at how Capacitor was able to make the creatures of the marine realm come to life on stage; as well as how they were able to convey the issues the ocean is currently facing — empowering people to take action.
Why do I feel Okeanos is so important? Youth have consistently been identified as a critical constituency for environmental communications and recent findings from The Ocean Project indicate that young people trust local aquariums as their primary source for information about ways to protect the ocean. Okeanos is a dance/​cirque portrait of the ocean as body, environment, resource, metaphor, and force. It is a performance to inspire and educate audiences, including young people, about the ocean and connect them deeply to ocean conservation.
Baba Dioum put it right: «In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.» It’s all about love (isn’t everything :) and Okeanos helps emotionally connect people to the sea.

Capacitor is a phenomenal dance and circus arts troupe, with an amazing vision and exquisite delivery. Artistic Director Jodi Lomask executes mind blowing imagery with her creative choreography and incredible imagination for invented apparatus.

What’s Capacitor’s show Okeanos like?
The house lights go down. In the first dance, we become immersed a wet world of undulating bodies, music, and (very occasional) narration, all against a screen of filmed underwater dancers and pulsating marine life. Rolling toward and away from each other with the tides, gently supporting each other, the dancers transmit a feeling of grace and interdependence. You can feel the enormous weight of their watery home.
In another really memorable dance, the music morphs into submarine-​like sounds and vocalizations (very Yoko). The sinuous movements of a contortionist (the amazing Inka Siefker) in a dark reddish leotard echo the movements of the octopus on the screen behind. The octopus/​contortionist slowly feels her way into and out of the shell’s openings, creating shadows on the screen that interact with the projections. You hear sucking noises as she flows and pulls and pushes her way over, around, and through the holes in the surfaces. Finally she slithers offstage…
All throughout the evening, the performers become many things: sharks, kelp, and, in one of the best, a pair of seahorses. The performers are super skilled and really embody the creatures in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’re there. Here’s a little intro to some of it:
Afterwards, there’s a Q&A, and then we get to meet everyone, including the performers!
I’m an arts educator and I love science, so I was really curious when I heard that Capacitor was a science-​based dance troupe (what??). But I found out that a performance like this can make a real difference in how people feel about the ocean and the life in it. And if we FEEL what it’s like, we will care about protecting it.
Right before the performance, artistic director Jodi Lomask introduced the scientist for the week. When I went, it was Dr. Tierney Thys, the lead scientific advisor for Okeanos. Dr. Thys said that «conservation hinges on one simple word: empathy.»
I was relieved to see that Okeanos is never preachy or depressing. In fact, there is very little narration and few «downers» of any kind. Instead, it’s a really thoughtful experience filled with love and appreciation for the ocean and its creatures.
To tempt you a little more, here’s another link, to a short talk Lomask gave at TEDxBerkeley (
). Oh, here’s information and tickets:
Go!

Okeanos is a delicious treat for all your senses! I took my boyfriend and although I had a hard time explaining to him ahead of time what we were going to see, he couldn’t stop raving about it afterwards! What could be better than intelligent art? I haven’t watched TV in years because I was so tired of the endless parade of junk out there. THIS is exactly what I was looking for. Go, you’ll be happy. Plus you get to see the Otters for free!

Capacitor is an artistic experience like no other. There’s really nowhere else you can see technically impressive modern dance merged with a scientific theme wrapped in a double dose of ecstatic beauty. Their current show «Okeanos» is currently at the Aquarium of the Bay near Fisherman’s Wharf, and with a small stage Capacitor has created an entire ocean of beauty and captivating movement. There’s hardly anything I would recommend to pretty much everyone, but whether you come as a fan of modern dance, the ocean or just beautiful entertainment, you’ll be captivated as the dancers transform themselves into Octopi, kelp forests and other denizens of the sea. What Capacitor does in Okeanos can’t be done by just anyone, it’s done really well, and until you see it, you would probably doubt it could be done at all. Just go.

I took my husband and daughter to see the Okeanos performance which is this amazing amalgam of Jacque Cousteau meets Cirque du Soleil but less flashy and more elegant. My 8-​year old daughter said, «Mommy, I did not blink the whole time!» Needless to say, she was mesmerized. As were my husband and I. I highly recommend seeing this local SF Bay Area dance company anytime they stage a showing. They are currently (August and I believe September) doing so at the Aquarium of the Bay. Pier 39 after hours is much less frenetic and the restaurant across the way from the Aquarium that specializes in fish and seafood (as well as other dishes) is really good. Make an evening of it! Parking is steeo but park further down the Embarcadero or across the way in the neighborhood and walk a bit. These beautiful late summer evenings in the Bay Area lend themselves to an evening walk.

I’m not really a big modern dance fan myself, but I was entranced by the performance of Capacitor. What really strikes me is the amazing talent, the gorgeous costumes, the grace of movement, and most of all, the way they tell a story about our natural world in a fresh and unexpected way, seamlessly joining art and science, the joy of movement and awareness of the world we move in. Seeing Capacitor is seeing part of essential San Francisco — not to be missed if you want to understand what the Bay Area is really about.

When dance expresses a story filled with human joy, suffering, growth, love, death, loss, you can be transported to another time and place. When dance is combined with science, you can be connected to the world we live in in a beautiful, transformative way.
Capacitor is a one-​of-​a-​kind dance company that successfully marries art and science to create something entirely new. They work directly with scientists to explore concepts, whether it be the rain forest, the ocean, down to flower reproduction and inter-​species relationships. They then create a unique view of these concepts, so that each petal, each stage of growth, and every movement is expressed in costume and dance. Their shows often leave the stage to hang suspended from the ceiling, with bodies winding around a huge metal movable sculpture like tendrils of a plant exploring their environment for the first time. It is as if you are looking through a microscope and observing entire living worlds being created before your eyes.
Jodi Lomask, who is the founder and artistic director as well as a performer, presents her audience with a vision that will feel almost wholly new, yet at the same time very natural and familiar. Recently she and her company gave a preview of their current project Okeanos to an audience at Night Life at the California Academy of Sciences with an introduction by marine biologist Tierney Thys, and the crowd was mesmerized, me included. I sat transfixed as seaweed swayed in ocean currents, and colorful bodies became aquatic organisms flowing together in a vast water world. The dancers touched on everything from modern dance to Cirque-​de-​Soleil worthy acrobatics, with no shortage of expression and passion.
Capacitor has reached many different types of people, both those looking for culture and those interested in science. They performed at the TED conferences in 2009, as well as at Burning Man, the opening of SFO Terminal 2, and science museums around the country, just to name a few venues. The company is in constant flow and evolution, just like nature, and I can’t wait to see which part of the world we can explore with them next.

Seeing a Capacitor performance is a mind opening experience. The venues are small and intimate with beautiful choreography and highly imaginative costumes. In contrast to the intimacy of the setting, whether at Theater Artaud or a warehouse event, the themes explored by Jodi Lomask are huge, abstract, and more often than not, based in science, anthropology and industrial scale ponderings.
There is always a wonderful balance of technical and artistic collaboration, serious dance and humor.