“It’s totally awesome!” Lustig said, without a trace of irony. “We’re all really psyched.”. As the Oakland Ballet kicks off its 51st spring season with “A Cappella — Our Bodies Sing,” the company is giving East Bay dance fans plenty of reason to feel psyched. Starting with four performances at Oakland’s Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts April 14-16, the ballet expands its territory with engagements at San Francisco’s Brava Theater Center (April 21) and Chabot College’s Reed L. Buffington Performing Arts Center in Hayward (April 23).

Inexplicably, the accompanying exhibition of WPA art works set up in the Lesher Center’s Bedford Art brass ballet shoe wall hanger Gallery, was locked up for the day just three minutes before the concert intermission, The afternoon’s most thrilling revelation was the music of Ernst Bacon, 1898-1990, An astonishingly prolific composer as well as a teacher, painter and writer, he did much of his work right under our noses here in the Bay Area, Son of an American doctor and an Austrian mother, he studied for a time in Vienna, Although moved by the music of the darkly depressed European avant-garde of the times, he returned to America and began composing music that brimmed with the vitality and optimism of the American spirit..

“I risk my life every night for you (atop the pillar),” she said, adding with her patented sarcastic charm: “But what’s my life compared to your happiness?”. Cher’s between-song, often self-deprecating, banter was as good as, if not better, than her actual songs. “I think that John Quincy Adams was president when I started drinking Dr Pepper,” she said with that million-dollar smile. And she also didn’t miss the opportunity to zing the younger generation of dance-pop divas.

As the daughter of the acclaimed singer and dancer, Isa Mura, brass ballet shoe wall hanger Yaelisa practically grew up in North Beach’s famous Spaghetti Factory, the now-defunct West Coast mecca for flamenco, “I have seen how the passage of time changes everything, and it doesn’t,” she says, “You start out thinking — ‘I’m achieving something in this art form,’ then you get to that place and you realize ‘I have so far to go’, The show is going to feature the four dancers in their own choreographies and in some ensemble pieces, with the idea of the birth and rebirth of ourselves as artists.”..

Contact Georgia Rowe at growe@pacbell.net. Most events at Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium; $30-$65; 831-426-6966; www.cabrillomusic.org. 8 p.m. Aug. 4:  A “Departures” themed program presents Michael Gandolfi’s “Points of Departure: Cabrillo,” Clarice Assad’s Percussion Concerto “AD INFINITUM” with Evelyn Glennie and Aaron Jay Kernis’ Second Symphony. 8 p.m. Aug. 5: The first “Tributes” program features Gabriela Lena Frank’s Three Latin American Dances, James Stephenson’s Concerto for Violin Tributes, David T. Little’s “The Conjured Life Commemorating Lou Harrison’s Centenary” and Cindy McTee’s “Double Play.”.