Life as a Modern Dancer

One Good Quote: Ciarra D'Onofrio + Dancers in "Heart String"

Back in Fall 2017, Life as a Modern Dancer launched a new concept for post-performance discussion and writing. The goals were multi-fold:

• What are new ways to invite post-performance writing (since so few publications now print dance reviews, and there are fewer and fewer dance critics in the United States)?
• How can choreographers hear and read more from audience members about their impressions and experiences of dance events?
• Can we offer new mechanisms for choreographers to gather language about their work, to further their work and to promote their work? 

The premise is simple, and 7 years later, still offers a valuable platform for artists and audience members alike. If you experienced the live performance of Ciarra D'Onofrio + Dancers in Heart String, May 30-June 1, 2025 at Zaccho Studio in San Francisco, please take a few minutes to leave a comment. Write down images, impressions, appreciations, and questions from the performance. These can be words, phrases, or a few sentences. 

We thank you for your time, support, and thoughtfulness. Here's to more dialogue, more reflection, and more writing on the dance performance experience. As choreographer Mariah Steele noted, we are "democratizing dance criticism."

 

Reflections on "Heart String" by Ciarra D'Onofrio

Ciarra D'Onofrio in "Heart String." Photo by Bruce Patt.

Reflections on "Heart String" by Ciarra D'Onofrio

By Molly Rose-Williams

Three days after watching Heart String, a few images still swim in my mind:

• Kriss Rulifson caressing a shatteringly bright spotlight with their bare arms, moving around the light’s rounded edge as their body begins to shudder. Small shakes at first, and then heaving undulations. Bass drum breaths punctuate the still air; Kriss’s face is smooth and clear, as if gazing upon the face of someone they love.
  
  
• A migrating mass of light blue bodies, shuffling quietly from a sea of chairs to reassemble in a clump upstage left. Shoulders, lips, and hands settle in the unselfconscious way of people getting ready to do something they’ve done a thousand times. The first notes emanate from their throats like birds in the night. And then they’re singing.
  
  
• Hannah Westbrook and Devon Chen whirling around one another against a white wall, suspended by lines that allow them to push against the vertical concrete as if it were a floor. Jumping and flying, pressing and curving in an ever-growing flurry of movement—towards and away from one another. Towards and away from the wall, never touching the ground. 
  

  Devon Chen (left) and Hannah Westbrook (right) in "Heart String." Photo by Bruce Patt.

In the program notes, director Ciarra D’Onofrio writes that Heart String was “born out of a journey with grief and death.” The intimacy of this journey is clear in the tones of reverence and profundity that permeate the work. Movement, poetry, and song weave together to compose a richly-tapestried, deeply-felt piece full of images of death, grief, and searching.

The work hangs together with a kind of fractured inevitability—each section is distinct, separated by clear transitions, but together they build towards a whole that speaks to me of an emotional journey through grief. I find myself tracking the “grief journey” at first, as if it’s a literal narrative being written in movement. In the first section I see the moment of death, and the agonizing surrender of someone left behind. In the sections that follow, I see listlessness, heartache, numbness, shock, disorientation, nostalgia, and sorrow. I have heard that grief is love unspent, and the full-bodied commitment of the performers to their movement and songs ring out with love.

The movement is mostly a hybrid of ground and aerial dance enabled by harnesses that attach the performer’s waist to ropes suspended from the ceiling. This enables a movement vocabulary that is both airy, but bounded. Performers are able to flip, swing, and turn in unexpected ways, but the ropes also tether each performer to a certain circumference in space, literally pulling them off their feet if they try to stray beyond the reach of the rope. The surrealness of the gravity-defying maneuvers and the inescapability of the rope combine to create a physical language that feels metaphorically appropriate for the states of grief the work explores—disorienting, ethereal, and impossible to escape.

One motif that appears again and again is when the performers swing parallel to the floor in a laid back position. The first moment this happens nearly takes my breath away—Ciarra D’Onofrio swings in a sweeping arc across the space, inches from the ground, their head thrown back in gentle supplication. Their feet reach through the air as if the sky itself might become a cocoon and carry them away. The image returns as they swing solo, duo, and even as a synchronized flock of five dancers, all hanging from the sky. The swing is generally preceded by a moment of surrender, as the dancer throws themself into the whim of the rope, and then an immediate full-body tautness that keeps their limbs from brushing the ground. This motif captures, for me, a sense of shock and powerlessness familiar from experiences of profound grief, as if literally stunned by the brightness of the world.

Choral music performed live by the Threshold Choir—a group that specializes in singing at the bedsides of those passing away—accompanies the show. In the program, the director of the choir writes that this is the first time these songs are being performed for “an 'alive' audience.” The music offers a gentle underbelly to the words and movement, and helps support the emotional tenor of the work, like two hands cupped around something precious. It also creates a profound canvas that, at moments, falls away into stretches of silence, leaving a void that just underlines how small one human life can feel. 

A few more images come to me as I write: Liv Schaffer sprinkling handfuls of dust on the stage, over and over and over, like a prayer that eventually becomes material and covers her from head to toe. Olallie Lackler at the microphone speaking with a halting intentionality, as if the words are revealing themselves at the very moment they emerge. Three dancers writhing under a sheer cloth that stretches over their forms like a see-through womb. Their struggle to escape gives way to an overwhelming potency of exposure when the cloth falls away.

Dancers in "Heart String." Photo by Bruce Patt.

At times, the consistent emotional tone of the piece created a certain flatness in my viewing experience. I noticed that towards the end of the work, moments of silence offered a welcome variation from the stunning, but somewhat unchanging energy of the songs. I was also thrilled in the last section of the work when Liv Schaffer broke out for a few phrases of pure dance without a harness, which allowed her to express an entirely different state of dynamism than the constraints of the harnessed movement allowed. This consistent tone prompted me to consider my own experiences of grief even more deeply—where and when had I felt flavors of the emotions evoked by the show, and what textures had I experienced in grief that weren’t captured in this particular work? I imagine the answer might be different for everyone watching. I appreciated the space that was created by the work to sit with these questions, and felt invited to soften into my own experience of grief around a recent loss. 

Overall, as the audience rose in a standing ovation, I was struck by the generosity and candor of the piece, and the open-hearted commitment of all the performers. They took on a beast of a topic in creating this work, and managed to do so with beauty and authenticity. 

Liv Schaffer (left) and Ciarra D'Onofrio (right). Photo by Bruce Patt.

Ciarra D'Onofrio + Dancers in Heart String
With the Threshold Choir
May 30-June 1, 2025
Zaccho Studio, San Francisco
Featuring: Devon Chen, Derek DiMartini, Olallie Lackler, Kriss Rulifson, Liv Schaffer, and Hannah Westbrook


Molly Rose-Williams is a dancer, performer, writer, educator, and audio producer. Learn more at www.mollyrosewilliams.com.

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Related post:
One Good Quote: Ciarra D'Onofrio + Dancers in "Heart String"

Barbeque Bacchanal: "forever failing" and the Perversion of America

Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainlsey e. tharp. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

 

Barbeque Bacchanal: forever failing and the Perversion of America
By Marlena Gittleman

It started with hot dogs, grilled outside the performance venue and served for free. As the audience licked ketchup and mustard off their fingers, Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley e. tharp came onstage in classic americana but oh-so-gay uniforms: denim jackets, baggy denim jeans and Carhartt work pants over American flag string bikini and deep V-cut one-piece bathing suits. It started again underwater, maybe in a womb, with muffled currents playing over the speakers. tharp and Dyas took turns shining a flashlight towards one another, more an imperfect source of illumination than a spotlight. 

Over the course of about 70 minutes, forever failing unfolded into a wild romp through (American) genres and everyday performance sites: the game show, the political speech, the beauty pageant, the military exercise, the strip club, the western, the music video, the open field, the karaoke room. As the duo traversed these spaces through overlapping movement vignettes, they also pushed them to their limits, teased out, exaggerated, and perverted them. 

From the outset, the two showed their dynamism and versatility as dancers, moving from off-axis tilts and inversions into athletic lifts and backbends. They stood on opposite ends of the stage and sprinted towards each other, sometimes colliding and falling. They breathed heavy. They embodied a startling range of figures and affects. And, simply, they were two friends putting on a show to an audience seated right on the edges of the stage, an un-elevated wooden dance floor in the middle of an old power plant. There were slow, grotesque, obscene facial expressions with tongues lolling and licking, there was orgasmic grappling and silly yelps of pleasure.

ainsley e. tharp and Clarissa Rivera Dyas. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

tharp and Dyas played with iconography, willfully profaning a sense of “everything we hold dear,” and it was delightful. The two stood side-by-side in the corner against flowery and gold glittery backdrops, and they quickly cycled through a series of arm and hand gestures: military salute, hands in prayer, hands in vulvar triangle, sign of the cross, waacking arms, finger guns. After a few repetitions, one slipped a tongue through fingers in a V-shape—you know the one.

These types of quick shifts drove the work, like when tharp stood so closely behind Dyas that they became nearly one body (a recurring motif): comic vaudevillian arms through the other’s arms behind their back. Then something else: tharp pulled out a thin woven American flag scarf and started to lasso it around Dyas’s head. Dyas grabbed it, knotted it on as a headscarf, the tail past their knees. tharp glanced over, then dropped to her hands and knees in submission. Dyas put the end of the scarf in tharp’s mouth, a kinky gag and perhaps a re-configuration of racialized power dynamics. Then they became—yes—cows, crawling across the length of the stage, Dyas chewing cud and tharp’s eyes dazed and glassy. 

Throughout, I found myself laughing: at the absurdity, at the parody, at my own bewilderment, at their gall. And I found myself surprised and amused: how did we even get here? Like when the duo moved from sexily vying for the attention of red and blue strobe lights at the foot of the stage to sleeping to leading a dance party line where the audience was invited up to step-touch around the stage. Peeled-back curtains revealed a tropical projection with karaoke lyrics for (that other all-American duo) Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’s “Islands in the Stream.” Dyas and tharp once again became almost one being as they tied the American flag scarf over each other’s heads, covering faces entirely. The music sped up faster and faster until it sounded nasal and buggy. Dyas and tharp made a limbo bar with the knotted scarf stretched taut between their necks, and audience members arched lower and lower. The two held each other and spun fast, and audience members followed suit. I thought it was over, an ecstatic culmination, but forever failing continued, eschewing an easy reading of democratic participation in favor of more delightful, remarkable chaos. 

As Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” (the rendition that caused a sensation at Woodstock) played, the pair cradled a bedraggled blond babydoll, wrapping it in the American flag scarf. Red roses fell down from somewhere. The two ran over to the bar area, jumped up on top of it, and performed what I can only call a Fourth-of-July-barbeque-girls-gone-wild routine. Dyas, still holding the doll, twerked into a whipped cream-frosted strawberry layer cake, while tharp, on her knees, nicked open the side of a beer can and shotgun sucked. She licked frosting off of Dyas’s star-spangled ass and sultrily off of her own fingers. Not long after, on the other side of the space, tharp shrieked and shrieked and blasted bills out of a money gun and tucked them into Dyas’s string bikini bottom. 

forever failing continuously tested the limits of the representation of “America” in pop culture and media. It didn’t do this through heavy-handed symbolism or urgent political messaging, but rather through much more interesting means: experimentation and play. Throughout the performance, the American flag becomes a wedgie you pick out of your ass, a majestic headwrap, a saliva-soaked gag, a threadbare blanket. It reminds us: things have been fucked for a long while in this country. My girlfriend said, “it’s as much about the founding fathers as it is about Trump,” and it’s also about all the cultural and social ways that concepts of “America” circulate.

Dyas and tharp moved from performing a conservative’s nightmare of queer parenting—gasp, they are indoctrinating this blond American baby!—to stripped-down questions of queer temporality. Covered in clear plastic tarps that suggested prophylactics, wedding veils, or childhood sleepover forts, each hobbling in one high Pleaser heel, they spoke into microphones from the mezzanine balcony. They asked each other, “how do you feel about babies?”. Dyas spoke about “pre-grieving” milestones they may or may not reach: a partner, a child, a long life. I’m tempted to read this final scene as a callback to the opening womb/underwater moment: they’d in fact made a kind of baby together throughout the performance, and so on. But that would be too straightforward, and too singular, for a work that seems more interested in trying on and trying out than in giving us a neat takeaway. “forever failing” includes the mess: strewn dollar bills, sweat-soaked hair, cake frosting on skin, beer dripping down chin. And all those feelings reflections thoughts desires drives that don’t take neat pathways or timelines—in short, all the unruly excess that gets sanitized out of normative American “success.” No better ending, then, than Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” coming to a crescendo and tharp brightly announcing, “Okay, that’s it, you’re free!”

Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley e. tharp. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Marlena Gittleman (she/they) is a dancer (recently: NACHMO SF) and freelance writer (recently: In Dance) and translator (recently: Critical Times, The Common) based in Oakland, CA on Ohlone land. @mar_glitterman

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Related articles and PDFs:

improvising with ghosts past/present/future: the remaking, reshaping, recentering of FRESH/ROT By Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley e. tharp

Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley tharp press release 2025

 

Crossing the Threshold: SanSan Kwan’s "Two Doors" at Dance Mission this April

Photo by Robbie Sweeny

Crossing the Threshold: SanSan Kwan’s Two Doors at Dance Mission this April

By Megan Lowe

SanSan Kwan is a pillar of the San Francisco Bay Area dance community, especially when it comes to uplifting the embodied experiences of Asian Americans through movement. I’ve known SanSan for more than a decade—as a Professor in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley where we work together, as a fellow dancer in Lenora Lee Dance, and now as a choreographer in her latest work, Two Doors. I had the privilege of witnessing Two Doors in a rehearsal showing and at its premiere at The Mondavi Center at UC Davis, and soon, Bay Area audiences will have the opportunity to experience it in Portals—a multibill evening of dance featuring six Asian American femme choreographers at Dance Mission Theater, April 25-27.

What does it mean to witness? What does it mean to act?

Two Doors is a gripping meditation on the weight of inaction, the pain of invisibility, and the sovereignty reclaimed in the aftermath of violence. Inspired by a real-life incident in New York City—where doormen shut their doors just after seeing an attack on an Asian woman outside their lobby—this work does not linger too long on the viscerality of harm. Instead, it leans into the complexity of response, responsibility, and resilience.

Through a series of vignettes punctuated by blackouts, Two Doors unfolds in a non-linear, poetic fashion. In an early scene, a glass door opens to the hum of street sounds. Iu-Hui Chua lies on the floor, breath heavy, while others pass by, witnessing but not intervening. The simple act of closing a door becomes a powerful metaphor for the ways in which society chooses—or refuses—to see. In another moment, a quartet forms—interwoven, tender, urgent—and Kwan’s voiceover rings out: “We want to keep her safe, by keeping her invisible.” Two Doors is a true ensemble piece, with brief solos (such as Frances Teves Sedayao’s emotive solo contrasted by the sharp gestures of dancers behind her, and Stacey Yuen dancing to the point of exhaustion before being helped up by another). The dance really focuses on the collective, with unison that is deeply felt—not mechanical or rigid, but textured with breath, individuality, and shared strength. Gestures of care, support, and connectivity are a motif of the work, evoking a feeling that no one should be left to navigate pain alone.

Throughout the piece, surreal interruptions jolt us back into the present: a stuffed shark, a squishy pizza, a blow-up cow—absurd yet potent reminders that in life, anything can happen at any time. Melancholic vocals and the sound of knocking reverberates through the score created by Lawrence Tome, a haunting reminder of choices made on the threshold between action and avoidance. The show’s kinetic heart is a moving door structure—both barrier and passage, weight-bearing yet fluid. Doors open and close. They are looked through, moved through, shut in our faces. But Two Doors asks: What if we do not close the door and ignore? What if we open the door and help? A closing image lingers—Tatianna Steiner now lies on the ground (instead of Iu-Hui, suggesting that this could happen to anyone), but this time, the dancers help her up, and they all walk through the door together.

Two Doors is not a passive experience; it is a deeply embodied reckoning. It reminds us that in the face of violence and erasure, movement—whether physical or societal—is always possible. Alongside Two Doors, Portals will feature work by Iu-Hui Chua, Lily Gee, Frances Sedayao, Stacey Yuen, and Tatianna Steiner—each exploring themes of transition and transformation. These artists bring forward urgent, deeply personal stories, making Portals a must-see evening of dance that speaks to our collective moment. Don’t miss the chance to witness these powerful works at Dance Mission Theater, April 25-27.

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SanSan Kwan presents:

Portals

A multibill evening of dance, showcasing the work of six Asian American femme choreographers at the crossroads of change.

 

April 25-27, 2025

Friday and Saturday at 8pm

Sunday at 7pm

 

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St

San Francisco, CA 94110

 

Click Here for More Info and Tickets

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Megan Lowe (she/they) is a dance maker/performer/teacher, aerialist, and singer-songwriter of Chinese and Irish descent, creating in the SF Bay Area, situated on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. Her creations through Megan Lowe Dances explore complex identities and experiences by tackling unusual physical situations and inventing compelling solutions. Megan is an Izzie Award recipient, and her recent choreographies have been seen at ODC, Fort Mason, Joe Goode Annex, de Young Museum, and Legion of Honor Museum, as well as in SF Aerial Arts Festival, United States of Asian America Festival, CAAMFest, SF Trolley Dances, and on KQED Live.

Website: MeganLoweDances.com | Instagram: @MLoweDanceKitty

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Related post:
Kimiko Guthrie, Claudine Naganuma, and SanSan Kwan in Conversation

 

 

“Super Nothing” Is Super, Nothing

"Super Nothing" by Miguel Gutierrez. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of New York Live Arts.

“Super Nothing” Is Super, Nothing

By Garth Grimball

Titles and endings are notoriously difficult to produce. How to articulate in a word or phrase the concepts in a work? How to wrap up all the preceding ideas into a satisfying summation? So many endings can disappoint because they feel like an afterthought, like the artist wasn’t sure how to finish so why not just try this. So many titles compete in the attention economy while bumping into existing trademarks or intellectual property issues that they may seem like a last resort.

ODC Theater presented Super Nothing by Miguel Gutierrez on Feb 28-Mar 2, and it is a work that triumphantly does not succumb to the difficulty of titles and endings. Its title is so precise that I have continued to chew on it. Its ending is so cogent that it made me wonder if maybe Gutierrez, like the author John Irving, knows the ending before he begins.

The 70-minute long quartet is supercharged with dancing but, perhaps, unconcerned with having “something” to say. What does it mean to have “nothing” to say, to have “nothing” as a meaning? I don’t think the dance should be described as a dance for dance’s sake, as there is more there than people dancing on stage. But, the choreography, the performance qualities, and the sound and lighting designs all seem to be purposeful in their absence of a graspable meaning. It’s not an evasion. It’s a presentation of nothing as something. A nothing that was certain and full.

Justin Faircloth walked onto the stage with a cloud-like mass hanging above it as an automated voice gave instructions:

Please give attention.

Pay attention…It’s something.

A line is not…

If you can surrender, you must.

Wendell Gray II (left) and Justin Faircloth in "Super Nothing." Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of New York Live Arts.

Wendell Gray II, Jay Carlon, and Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez joined Faircloth in a series of duets and solos that moved through spoking arms and legs, whip turns, hitting poses, stomping, leaping, vogueing, dabbing, conducting, and, most frequently, humping or gyrating. Pelvic thrusts and spasms punctuated the dance like tactful commas to elicit brief pauses, or like parentheses that contained whole conversations. Sometimes the grinding was playful and exploratory like when a kid discovers that rubbing against objects can feel good. Twice Carlon layed on top of Faircloth in the upstage corner, dual thrusting ensued, the first time was horny, the second was conciliatory. 

The foursome met in the center collapsing into each other, intertwining limbs, palming sweaty flesh. Later they returned to center and formed a tableau: one dancer prostrated on the floor, another checking for a pulse, the remaining two flanking the body as if waiting for news. Narvaez left the group and walked into the seated audience, jangling her bracelet as she climbed through a row of seats.

The music and lighting were equally as referential and abstract as the choreography. Wind chimes, medicine bowls, and explosive sounds were interpolated by samples from Ellie Goulding and Justin Timberlake pop singles in Rosana Cabán’s composition. Carolina Ortiz’s lighting design kept the dancers in soft hues until the final third of the dance when planet-like circles were lit onto the back wall and a rectangular special scanned the floor, searching or collecting.

Super Nothing climaxed in big unison choreography of claps, lunges, swipes and pushes that devolved into high-octane solos. The quartet calmed into a line with arms stretched out to the sides. They slowly receded backward and drifted off stage. The ending wasn’t a bang or a whimper. It was a trail to something, to nothing.

"Super Nothing" by Miguel Gutierrez. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of New York Live Arts.

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

Robert Moses’ KIN 30th Anniversary Season: A Conversation with Choreographer Nol Simonse

Robert Moses' KIN in rehearsal for the 30th anniversary season. Photo by Steve Disenhof.

Robert Moses’ KIN 30th Anniversary Season: A Conversation with Choreographer Nol Simonse
By Garth Grimball

If you’ve attended a dance class or performance in the past 30 years and heard a gentle welcome of “Hi, honey,” you’ve likely met Nol Simonse. Simonse has been a staple of the Bay Area dance community as a dancer with Garrett+Moulton Productions, Sean Dorsey Dance, and more; as a choreographer of his own works and collaborations with Christy Funsch; as a dance teacher and class taker. No matter the context he brings a generosity of spirit to dancing and dance making.

On March 14-18, Simonse will premiere Before The Storm as part of Robert Moses’ KIN 30th Anniversary Season at Z Space. Simonse’s new work is being produced as part of RMK’s New Legacies program that commissions artists of varying disciplines to create together. Simonse is collaborating with musician Lawrence Tome and playwright Jim Cave.

Moses has given the artists complete freedom to explore the idea of legacy, said Simonse. The collaborative trio considered dance lineages and political movements before deciding on environmental legacy. “What kind of world are we leaving behind?” is the foundational question in the work.

“How do we balance the anxiety and anticipation with care? How do we take care of each other?” said Simonse. “We have to keep going even though the storm is coming.”

Simonse, Tome and Cave were active in the rehearsal process, giving each other feedback, “disrupting” each other’s work, said Simonse. Before The Storm is a trio danced by Eden Magana, Giulia Sales, and Mitch Stone. Part of the creative process included interviewing the dancers. “If it was your last day on earth, how would you spend it?” “What would you pack to leave earth?” Their answers influenced movement and sound score.

While creating a new work in the two weeks allotted for the commission was a “pressure cooker,” Simonse immediately felt a sense of freedom in the project. “Robert [Moses] would say, ‘you create, don’t worry about anything else,’” said Simonse.

While the environmental legacy currently being perpetuated is cause for alarm, Simonse is sanguine about the Bay Area’s dance legacy.

“How many dance companies in the Bay Area are celebrating anniversaries?” asked Simonse. “These are huge milestones of pillars in the community. I know that we are still rocking it. How lucky are we that we have a community that supports 50 years of choreographic work. Where else is that true?”

Robert Moses' KIN 30th Anniversary Home Season: The Kennings

March 14-16 at Z Space, San Francisco
Purchase tickets here

Nol Simonse. Photo by Anna Simonse.

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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Related post:
Artist profile: Robert Moses

 

More Than Just a Shadow: Megan Lowe Dances at ODC This April

Megan Lowe Dances in "Just a Shadow." Megan Lowe, AJ Gardner, Frances Teves Sedayao, and Josh Icban. Photo by Vita Hewitt.

More Than Just a Shadow: Megan Lowe Dances at ODC This April

By SanSan Kwan

As a longtime fan of Megan Lowe Dances and as someone who has experienced the death of a beloved, there was no way I was going to miss Just a Shadow. The show, an evening of duets exploring personal stories of loss, premiered May 31st to June 9th, 2024, at the Joe Goode Annex. Lucky for all of us, MLD will be remounting the work at ODC with a few new additions this April 4-6, 2025.

Let me tell you why you should go see it! Just a Shadow was a sweet, poignant, thrilling offering that showcased Megan Lowe in partnership with six different artists. Each artist brought their distinct movement language to their pairing with Megan, while Megan displayed her usual expansive range of talents: as a choreographer, singer, aerialist, climber, and, in a virtuoso piece, contact improviser. Just a Shadow was touchingly mournful, but it was also a gift of collective healing, honoring, and celebration.

The evening opened with the expressive grace of Frances Teves Sedayao in partnership with Megan. A white screen that the pair spun across the stage evoked the eponymous shadow that the dead leave behind and also, at moments, the separation that cleaves us from our lost loved ones. Next, Megan’s duet with Sonsherée Giles displayed both dancers’ acrobatic chops while their manipulation of large knotty tree branches invoked fragility, pain, and gnarled beauty. Megan’s duet with turf dancer AJ Gardner offered a refreshing pairing. The piece began with Gardner’s poignant voiceover as he glided across the floor with intricate turf dancing feet. Megan entered and the piece evolved into a friendly exchange of dance vocabularies and tender moments of mutual partnering. Next, was an exhilarating duet that had me gripping my seat with excitement and anxiety. Megan and Shira Yaziv displayed their fearless, but also deeply attuned, skills in contact improvisation. Blindfolded – sometimes one, then the other, then both! – they lifted, rolled, leaned, shouldered, and caught one another in a series of improvised feats. It was truly an example of deep trust and incredible dexterity. In a lovely shift, the long and lithe Roel Seeber was next in a vertical duet with Megan consisting of frictionless arcing, spinning, and skimming that, in its literal uplift, instilled a spirit of graceful release. The final duet showcased Megan’s songwriting and singing talents. Harmonizing with guitarist and singer Josh Icban, Megan sang several sweet songs, including a charming ballad addressed to a lost beloved. The finale was a substantial piece in itself. Honoring the diversity of movers, but also offering moments of satisfying unison, dancers lifted one another up, giving and receiving support, catching one another just before falling, climbing a structure of bodies, walking across a chain of accommodating shoulders. It was an appropriate way to show the mutuality of grief and the importance of interdependence in the mourning process.  

All in all, Just a Shadow was a beautiful ride across multiple stages of grief. Megan Lowe Dances offered a thoughtfully curated selection of unique and personalized choreographies that also managed to coalesce as an integrated evening celebrating the resilience of the human spirit in the face of our shared mortality. The 2025 iteration promises a few additions, including a new live music set with Marica Petrey of Girl Swallows Nightingale, and a new venue for Megan to work her climbing, dancing, singing, tumbling, flying magic!
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Megan Lowe Dances presents:
Just a Shadow
A performance journey that celebrates life, and honors memories of lost loved ones

Adapted to ODC Theater with New Site Specific Elements and a Brand New Live Music Set

April 4-6, 2025
Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm; Sunday at 3:30pm

ODC Theater
3153 17th St
San Francisco, CA 94110

Click here for more info and tickets

Roel Seeber and Megan Lowe. Photo by Vita Hewitt.

SanSan Kwan is chair in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Performance: Lenora Lee Dance, Chingchi Yu, Chen and Dancers, Maura Nguyen Donohue, among others. SanSan will remount her piece, Two Doors, as part her curated show, Portals, in April 2025 at Dance Mission Theater. SanSan is also a dance scholar. Books: Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration, Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces. Articles: Dance Research Journal, TDR, Performance Research, and more.

A Bed of One’s Own in Flyaway Productions’ "If I Give You My Sorrows"

natalya janay shoaf. Photo by Brooke Anderson.

A Bed of One’s Own in Flyaway Productions’ If I Give You My Sorrows

By Garth Grimball

Opposites attract. But opposition alone thwarts attraction. To attract, to synthesize into something unique and fecund demands an openness. Flyaway Productions’ If I Give You My Sorrows, performed Jan 31 - Feb 2 at YBCA’s Forum, synthesized seemingly opposing form and content with an openness that led to deeper consideration.

From 2017-2023 Jo Kreiter’s aerial dance company created The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time. This new work builds on the trilogy with an explicit focus on women in prison. At face value the form of aerial dance and the content of incarceration may seem too opposite to succeed. How can aerial dance, a form that frees the body from the constraints of gravity, address so totalizing an anti-freedom content as imprisonment? In If I Give You My Sorrows, Kreiter and collaborators synthesize this opposition in one object: a bed. 

The program book includes the prose poem “My Bunkbed as an Antidote” by Tomiekia Johnson, who is currently experiencing incarceration at the Central California Women’s Facility. Johnson writes, “I’ve been giving it some thought about how the only door I can open in prison is an invisible one leading to my bunk bed.” The poem, in print and in voice over excerpted in the musical score by Carla Kihlstedt, Kalyn Harewood and Pamela Z, is the entry point and focal point of the production.

Matt Antaky lit the YBCA Forum space in cool hues that ranged in intensity. Set designer Sean Riley created bare, almost brutalist, bed frames of varying sizes, several remained upstage and others served as vertical ladders or were lifted swinging into the air like a cradle for safekeeping or a pendulum relentlessly measuring time.

If I Give You My Sorrows has seven discrete sections and the cast of six dancers progressively unbound themselves from gravity as it developed. Dressed in blue separates, the dancers entered with miniature models of the bed frames, moving them around their bodies, in control of their relationships to the object. Jhia Jackson climbed onto an elevated bed frame that faced the audience so it looked like she was lying down as she was standing up. Megan Lowe and Sonsherée Giles wove themselves into the elevated catwalk’s railing. The viney, shifty choreography contorted the bodies in their restless efforts to fit and find comfort.

Later, the beds became islands of solace when Jackson, Giles and natalya janay shoaf abstracted the meeting of prayerful hands into swipes and reaches, or, when MaryStarr Hope was swinging through the air on the rigged bed platform in convulsions evocative of labor pains.

The movement vocabulary was limited by the restraints of the form—rigging, harnesses, set pieces—but within the conceptual container it is a feature not a bug. The limited movement and the isolation of the dancers reinforced the physical realities of incarceration. In the final section the whole cast ran in waves through the space, diving under the swinging bed platform, leaping onto it, rolling off it, weightless for milliseconds. The voice over returned: “My weaknesses get ironed out up here.” If I Give You My Sorrows invited the audience to see a familiar object in greater detail, to consider people experiencing incarceration with openness, not opposition.

Jhia Jackson. Photo by Brooke Anderson.

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

One Good Quote: MoToRING ON

MoToR/dance. Photo by Kevin Adams.

Back in Fall 2017, Life as a Modern Dancer launched a new concept for post-performance discussion and writing. The goals were multi-fold:

• What are new ways to invite post-performance writing (since so few publications now print dance reviews, and there are fewer and fewer dance critics in the United States)?
• How can choreographers hear and read more from audience members about their impressions and experiences of dance events?
• Can we offer new mechanisms for choreographers to gather language about their work, to further their work and to promote their work? 

The premise is simple, and 7 years later, still offers a valuable platform for artists and audience members alike. If you experienced the live performance of MoTORING ON with MoToR/dance, Corposonic Trio, and the Westlake Tap Division on Saturday, February 1 at Ashkenaz Music and Dance Community Center, please take a few minutes to leave a comment. Write down images, impressions, appreciations, and questions from the performance. These can be words, phrases, or a few sentences. 

We thank you for your time, support, and thoughtfulness. Here's to more dialogue, more reflection, and more writing on the dance performance experience. As choreographer Mariah Steele noted, we are "democratizing dance criticism."

2024 on the Blog, and Beyond

From Blog Director Jill Randall:
Thank you for another year engaging with and supporting Life as a Modern Dancer. At the time of publication of this piece, there are 1,526 pieces on the site!

Today I wanted to spotlight a few articles and projects from the year.

Aviva Rose-Williams and Molly Rose-Williams in Game Time. Photo by Hillary Goidell. Read Sarah Genta's review/reflection here.

 

National Coverage of Performances
Thank you to colleague Garth Grimball, who writes throughout the year about both Bay Area based events as well as performances throughout the country. Early in the year he covered Shamel Pitts | TRIBE in Touch Of RED in New York City. (Congrats to Shamel for being named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow!)

In August, Garth shared "Dancing from Fog City to the Big Apple" about numerous performances experienced in Summer 2024 in various cities.

Bay Area Dance Coverage
In 2024, the blog covered 10 different Bay Area performances. Writing took several forms - reviews/reflections, previews, first-person essays, and One Good Quote.
Spotlighting and Celebrating Ten Performances in 2024 in the SF Bay Area

Soft Skills & Essential Understandings for a Life and Career as a Modern Dancer
I have been working on this piece for the past year and shared it just the other day. I have a passion for talking about careers in dance and supporting the next generation. Check out the 33 ideas highlighted in it.

In Defense of "Under Rehearsed"
Colleague Jeanne Pfeffer offered this great essay on the blog about artmaking, time, and funding.

For the Bookshelf
2024 was a robust year for new books on dance and somatics. Check out the list of 33 new titles here.


And beyond the blog, in 2024 I shared seven articles on Stance on Dance, Medium, and Dance Teacher:

We Have Stories to Tell and Share: A Conversation with Joti Singh of Duniya Dance and Drum Company (Stance on Dance)

This Magical Experience We Are Having Together: A Post-Performance Interview with Danny Nguyen (medium.com)

5 Questions for Suhaila Salimpour (medium.com)

5 Questions for Dance Educator and Children's Book Author Sara DeGennaro (medium.com)

The pieces on Dance Teacher can be accessed if you have a DanceTeacher+ account:
12 New Dance Books for Every Educator’s Bookshelf
10 Wonderful Children’s Books as We Wrap Up 2024
8 New Dance Books to Soak Up This Summer

If you enjoy reading Life as a Modern Dancer or use it within a college course, please consider making a contribution of any size via Venmo. 100% of these funds go towards paying writers in 2025. (If curious, writers' fees vary from $50-$150 a piece depending on the length of the piece/writing project.) Thanks much!
Venmo: @Jill-Randall-6

 

Spotlighting and Celebrating Ten Performances in 2024 in the SF Bay Area

Left to right: SanSan Kwan, Chi Chi Chang, Johnny Cox, and Catalina O’Connor in "Convergence" by ChingChi Yu (March 2024).
Image Description: Four dancers in a cluster in black costumes, looking upward with hands by their sternums.

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

Looking back at 2024, we covered 10 different projects on Life as a Modern Dancer. Thank you to writers Garth Grimball, Sarah Genta, Melissa Hudson Bell, Kimiko Guthrie, and Molly Rose-Williams for your thoughtful contributions. I also was honored to dip my toes into this writing pool, writing this year about three performances.

 

Molly Rose-Williams: CRUSH (January @ NOHSpace, SF)

The fourth wall breaking is critical to CRUSH’s success. Balloons are tossed into the audience in a peak of celebration. The audience is asked to raise a hand if you’ve ever had a crush, and to shimmy if you’ve been in love. The energy transfer between performer and audience is most alive when Rose-Williams plays with how much of herself she exposes to us. She expertly switches between flirting and withholding, between confessing and listening. The relational tension fuels the momentum of the work. - Garth Grimball

Plus, check out a short interview with Molly before the performances: Five Questions for Molly Rose-Williams about "CRUSH"

 

Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts: Put Away the Fire, dear (March @ ODC Theater, SF)

Ours is a time of references. The average smartphone user consumes more content in an hour than our ancestors did in their whole lives. Text, images, videos, sounds, and media all swaddle us in competition for attention and influence. Each piece of content begets a reference that begets another piece of content, and so on. Where is the creative signal amidst the referential noise?

On March 8-10, Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts presented “Put Away the Fire, dear” at ODC Theater in San Francisco. The evening-length dance theater overflows with references. Farrish grounds the concept in the visual language of film and cinematic references, but literature, music and visual arts are all packed into this kaleidoscopic epic into archives and erasure. - Garth Grimball

 

Carol Kueffer and ChingChi Yu: Undercurrents (March @ Western Sky Studio, Berkeley)

Both Melissa Hudson Bell and myself shared reflections about this project.

The program had a lot of heart but not a lot of fuss. It eschewed the trappings of fancy lights, projections, sets, or grandiose stage design and instead allowed the viewer to imaginatively fill in the blanks. Each piece was short and distinct enough that, bolstered by the external frame of Haig’s library adventures, this viewer resisted any traps of longing for something that wasn’t there and instead mused at what it would be to inhabit the represented world, and its associate, singular sort of life. Who would I be in that seaside moment of flipper flapping tomfoolery? How would I survive among the critters crawling in the night? What would it take for me to get out of my own head enough to joyfully thrive in movement? And, finally, what undercurrents might connect seemingly disparate environs, temporalities, or embodied states in a manner that could remind us of our interlocked, and yet not already written, fates. - Melissa Hudson Bell

Reflecting back on all three of Carol’s works, I appreciate the clarity of the movement, which I think really comes from the musicality in each dance. This clarity is seen through extending arms out into space, locomotor movement sweeping the stage, and gestures with fists and fingers pointing and percussive accents. We journey through water, being in community, and friendship/partnership. I take away from the experience feelings of presence, connection, and a bit of tenderness. I appreciated each dancer's full commitment and generosity offered to the audience. That is always a gift. - Jill Randall

Oaklash in REBIRTH: The Death of Drag (May @ Omni Commons, Oakland)

In one of my favorite transition scenes the ensemble moved through the space as a kind of emotion train. The performers shuffled in a single file line saying “chug-a-chug-a-chug-a” until one by one each shouted out an emotion that they all embodied. Like a Viola Spolin theater game the simple task prompted a wealth of interpretations. As a celebration of an artist and an artform, every emotion and every interpretation was like a mini tribute to the robust and multifaceted art of drag. - Garth Grimball

Emily Hansel: Study Hall (May @ iMPACt Center for Art & Dance, SF)

Coming Together and Connecting

Flexed foot

Smiles

Soft laughter

Gestures - swirling, fists

Dancers clasping hands

Sweepy floorwork on stomachs and backs

One second standing; the next moment smoothly on the floor

Gentle lifts

 

A return to physical contact, and nearness

- Jill Randall

Megan Lowe Dances: Just a Shadow (June @ Joe Goode Annex, SF)

Megan Lowe is prolific. In the past three years her company, Megan Lowe Dances, has produced or participated in 10 unique performances. On Friday night, Lowe and collaborators premiered Just A Shadow at the Joe Goode Annex as part of the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s 27th annual United States of Asian America Festival. Just A Shadow is a series of six duets on the theme of loss and healing. - Garth Grimball

Mia J. Chong's Eight/Moves: Season 1 (August @ Z Space, SF)

The three dances are simply stunning, and the dancers give 110% through and through. The craft and intention sweeps you in. Chong clearly has a vision. In our post-pandemic world, we have gotten so far removed from partner work and lifts; we have lived a few long years of isolation and contactless living. The humanness of the choreography - and coming back to partnering, touch, and lifts - helps us rekindle the idea of meaningful connections. - Jill Randall

Check out some audience responses about Eight/Moves here through One Good Quote.

"Steam," choreographed by Mia J. Chong and KT Nelson.
Photo by Maximillian Tortoriello.
Image Description: Seven dancers pose in a group with fog low by their shins and feet.

FACT/SF's Summer Dance Festival (August @ ODC Theater, SF)

Summation Dance and FACT/SF performed excerpts from big-dancing group numbers. When will I be? is a sextet choreographed by Taryn Vander Hoop. The movement vocabulary evoked the workers in the 1927 film Metropolis—direct actions at a brisk, even tempo. The dance began with a voice over saying, “I’m not enough,” and, “I’ll never make it in the dance world.” I don’t know if Vander Hoop is externalizing insecurities, but When will I be? was a highlight of the program for its use of choreographic craft. Counterpoint, canon, unison, solos, and movement motifs were all employed. The dancers formed machine-like tableau, struck power poses, crumpled to the ground in head shaking to then slap the floor. The excerpt ended with a soloist removing their jumpsuit, ready to clock out. - Garth Grimball

SanSan Kwan and dNaga Dance Co: Threshold (October @ Mondavi Studio Theater, UC Davis)

Dancer/writer Kimiko Guthrie was in conversation with choreographers SanSan Kwan and Claudine Naganuma about their October performance, Threshold.

From the interview, Claudine Naganuma shared:
So how do we flip that narrative a little bit? I've been really pondering on what the trajectories are; what is the magic bullet or the antidote? What's the antidote to all of this anti-Asian hate? It’s not just up to Asians and Asian Americans. I feel like it's for all of us. We're in a time right now where we are inundated by so much injustice, and a lot of times I think we are at capacity and cannot actually process all of this. 

I feel really privileged to be able to process this through art. One of the programs that dNaga offers is The Girl Project, as well as our Dance for Parkinson's Project. I feel like a lot of what we do with these programs is really about taking up space and giving permission for us to care for ourselves, so that we can have the capacity to care for others. I know I'm not the only person saying that out there right now. We all are really kind of realizing that the grind that we are doing, or the pace in which we are living, is not conducive to our personal freedom and liberation. So when we can care for ourselves and grow that gratitude and capacity to care for ourselves, I think then we can work in unity with others, in solidarity, making grassroots change. The seeds of that change are liberation and freedom and care and love–and I know a lot of people don't like to talk about love. It's a weird word for people. But it is powerful.

Molly Rose-Williams and Aviva Rose-Williams: Game Time (October @ ODC Theater, SF)

We’ve always been close, but this process has demanded an entirely new kind of intimacy between us—one that blends the personal, professional, and creative. At times, this looks like unarmoring ourselves even beyond the levels we’d reached before—a kind of rigorous (desperate?) humility and self-reflection. At other times, it’s asked that we build new walls—ones we’ve never needed before—in order to find ways of unlearning what we think we know about each other, and make way for discovering each other as creative colleagues, professional collaborators. - Molly Rose-Williams

Sarah Genta also wrote a post-performance reflection:

Round One. Molly and Aviva head to a 20 ft Chinese pole center stage. They introduce movement styles that will blanket the evening and will increase in complexity and risk. I am lured by the blend of aerial, acrobatic, sporty, and modern inspired movement. They are smooth and circular, floating and jumping around the pole, which is both something to climb and something like a narrow, cylindrical wall, off which they push and pull into back rolls onto the ground or over each other. Here and there licking arms reach in unison for another grab. This circusy intro is followed by a sweet hug and simple counterbalance in low light and hushed sound. They hold hands and lean carefully back. I am reminded how sophisticated, while modest, of an action it is. Ever flowing and ever sensitive, the negotiation of weight feels awfully emblematic of the greater activity of being together on a team.

Emily Hansel's Study Hall. Photo by Natalia Perez.
Image Description: Four dancers clump together in a full-bodied group hug in a spotlight on an otherwise dark, blue stage.