As for the packaging, the topicality, the grand theme, the high concepts? They stirred, in this viewer, mixed feelings. Julie Mushet, former director of World Arts West (which used to produce the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival) is to thank for this return of La Tania. Mushet is billed here as “managing director,” but her role seems more akin to producer. It was Mushet who was fascinated by the Temple of Debod, which was built in Egypt in the second century BC and would have been flooded and lost to humanity with the construction of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s, were it not for preservationists who cut the temple into pieces and rebuilt it in Madrid—“a beacon of cultural survival in the face of massive global displacement,” as the program proclaimed.

Mushet saw a connection to La Tania’s life—after an acclaimed thirty-year presence on the San Francisco arts scene, La Tania was forced out by gentrification—and recommended the choreographer take up the theme. And so, “Solaz” began in the outdoor plaza with actor and video artist Adrian Arias wielding a bullhorn in front of a temple arch constructed of suitcases, selecting audience members to carry the suitcases inside. In “Llegada (Arrival),” the dancers in street clothes opened these suitcases to find flamenco costumes inside. Cue the synchronized group dance with wheeled suitcases, followed by a passionate solo with a long ruffled train for Sato, feral in her femininity. All of this was set against beautiful video projections by Arias, of a body curled fetally underwater, of glittery ocean shores, of blooming flowers. That last set of images accompanied a delightful solo for Hall in which she cavorted with two fans.