Robert Cole

No person has seemed more valuable this year to lovers of dance in San Francisco than Robert Cole, the conductor-turned-director of CAL Performances, which Cole has led to become the most important arts presenter on the West Coast. He dates the group’s history from Sarah Bernhardt’s “Phedre” in UC’s Greek Theater 100 years ago, and he holds to an international standard of that magnitude.

Robert Cole had the foresight a decade ago to a) make CAL Performances independent of university funding and b) co-commission new work from the likes of Pina Bausch (“Nur du”) and Mark Morris (“King Arthur”). He has made Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley a mecca for the whole Bay Area – that’s where we see the Mariinsky, the Bolshoi, New York City Ballet, Peking Opera, Merce ­Cunningham, Trisha Brown, American Ballet Theatre, Lyon Opéra Ballet, Savion Glover, Hell’s Kitchen, Aszure Barton, The Forsythe Company, Frankfurt Ballet, ­Eifman Ballet, Cloud Gate, Sasha Waltz, Alvin Ailey, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the great dance companies of Jogjakarta, Uzbekistan, Hungary, Mexico, ­Senegal, les Guirivoires, les Ballets Africains, los Munequitos de Matanzas, the ­National Ballet of Cuba ... It is where we go ...