“Tenderness” is the word that keeps coming to mind while watching Alex Ketley’s “An Approximation of Resilience.”
The dance is unfailingly, unflaggingly, extraordinarily tender. This is surprising given the violence that lies at the core of this hour-long quartet, which opened Saturday, March 22 , at City Dance in San Francisco and continues three more weekends through April 12.
Actually, two kinds of violence are at the heart of the production. There’s the violence committed in 1991, when a bystander named Kathy Lee was murdered in a botched computer store robbery in Southern California; three years later a witness for the prosecution, Ardell Williams, was also murdered. Then there’s the eye-for-an-eye violence of the California criminal justice system that sentenced William “Bill” Clark to death for these murders, incarcerating him for more than 26 years on San Quentin’s Death Row without the possibility of parole…