Life as a Modern Dancer

In Defense of “Under Rehearsed”

In Defense of “Under Rehearsed”
By Jeanne Pfeffer

Recently I attended a dance performance in the Bay Area that was critically reviewed in the local paper as “under rehearsed.” This is not the first, nor frankly, the last time we read such critique of dance performances in the Bay Area and otherwise. And it continues to be an odd point for me, to be made in critical contexts, because today, what could it even mean?

To be well rehearsed is to be well resourced. Let us be clear on that point. Excellence is directly tied to economics and when we talk about works being under rehearsed, what the reviewer implies is that it does not measure up to the oppressive standards of excellence the white/western/patriarchal artistic canon has prescribed for hundreds of years. Because when we discuss dance performance in terms of excellence and perfection, create an arbitrary, tyrannical standard of “well rehearsed” for the historically abused dancer class to have to follow, we continue the cycles of oppression and inequity that haunt our field. Of course, artists would prefer their work to look more polished, precise, practiced – if that is indeed the point of the work. But, when it already costs artists all the money they don’t have to create the work they want to make, in the “best” conditions we can create for them, speculating over how much “better” a work might have looked with 20 more hours of rehearsal is a moot point. It was never an option to begin with so perhaps we can accept the realities of the dance making economy and move on.

How might it serve our field to consider performance readiness separately from the economic strictures of “well rehearsed?” Because I can take out my phone and see excellence, perfection. It is so nauseatingly available to me at my fingertips. When anyone can edit, filter, cut, and paste our lives together, stylize our brands, present our best angles to the world at all times, the artist’s object perhaps becomes the imperfect. The forever quest of our human fallibility, our true shared humanity. Everybody fails and in doing so must learn to make choices and here is where it is interesting, at least for me, as an audience member and performer. What occurs in those beautiful fuck-up moments? How is the performer able to make choices and regroup? Where do their faces go? Their hands? These are the imprecise moments of the show that no one will ever see again and that is their exact, precious power.

Perfection is boring. It is a tool of oppression. Let’s be real about the situation and help foster a field of dancers who feel empowered in their bodies, minds, and spirits and able to take responsibility for their abilities and choices in performance separately from hitting the counts. I always believe those dancers on stage are doing the very best they can and there’s no reason to critically remark on the amount a rehearsal a work can afford in relationship to one’s ability to appreciate it in a time that is especially tough for many artists and institutions.

Sure, I like flawless routines too, but for me, that’s not where the art is. It’s not where the heart is.

 

Jeanne Pfeffer is a dancer and writer with a 15 year career as an arts administrator and producer in the SF Bay Area. Currently the Development Director of BANDALOOP and President of the Board for FACT/SF, she is a stalwart member of the local dance community. She is lucky to do what she loves.

 

Kimiko Guthrie, Claudine Naganuma, and SanSan Kwan in Conversation

Photos Credits: Two Doors by Robbie Sweeny | Unbound by Matt Haber

By Kimiko Guthrie

Last week, I was thrilled to sit down in person with artists Claudine Naganuma and SanSan Kwan to discuss their upcoming project, Threshold. Our conversation explored a wide range of topics, from re-examining the Asian American trope of passivity to the political activist Yuri Kochiyama to the need for both anger and radical love in healing ourselves and our planet. Catch a performance in Davis at the Mondavi Studio Theater on October 18-20, 2024. Purchase tickets here.

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Kimiko Guthrie (KG): I thought it might be great to start with each of you talking about these new pieces of yours, Unbound and Two Doors, and to share what inspired you to make these works.

Claudine Naganuma (CN): I'm really honored that we were invited to work with the Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories project. SanSan, maybe you want to talk a little bit about what that is?

SanSan Kwan (SK): A group of researchers across UC campuses got together to write a grant proposal. They were awarded this grant, which is a UC wide multi Campus Research Grant, to study anti-Asian violence, origins and trajectories. It was a big grant. The main purpose was to get a group of scholars together, host symposia, host panels, and publish a special issue of the Amerasia journal. But the principal investigators thought that it would also be really important, especially given the subject matter, to have some kind of creative and embodied response to the topic of anti-Asian violence. So, they put out a call for choreography and sought out other genres of art. Claudine and I both applied and we were selected.

CN: When I think about origins of anti-Asian sentiment and violence, it is so easy for me to go back to my own personal traumas and all of the dances that I've created before, around the incarceration of my father at Gila River Reservation when he was 12, and my mom's experience of being locked up in Angel Island and being separated from her mother from Hong Kong, then living here and that whole passing on of that generational trauma. Anti exclusionary laws have fueled this face of yellow peril that just keeps changing. I think for me the work is really informed by some of those earlier explorations. How do we get set up to deal with these things if we ourselves are holding ourselves back, in some ways, to like these ideas of “three obediences” and all of these - like being a good daughter and a filial daughter…And that doesn't really set us up necessarily for dealing with anti-Asian violence very well. 

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.

KG: We talk about hate a lot, right?

CN: We talk about hate a lot, right. But I love what I was talking about with Akemi Kochiyama, who is Yuri Kochiyama’s granddaughter, when we did our pilgrimage to a Japanese American incarceration site with Tadaima -  we were like, you know, we're not connected because of our common oppression. We are connected because of our common love.

KG: Mmm, right. SanSan, can you talk a little bit about your piece and what it’s about for you in relation to our current time?

SK: I first want to say how much I love what Claudine said and I agree with the sentiment that it's just such a privilege to get to process this serious phenomenon of anti-Asian violence through the work. I feel it's been a really enriching journey for not just me, but the dancers as well, and the other folks involved in this process to get an opportunity to think through our experiences and our relationship to the phenomenon of anti-Asian violence.

I'll first frame this by saying that my other identity is as a dance scholar. I had been writing about Asian American dance and Asian American performance for a long time, but parallel to that I have also been dancing, mostly with Asian American choreographers, including Lenora Lee Dance for the last 13 years. This has been the first opportunity for me to stretch into choreography, and it just made so much sense when I learned about the call. I don't know that I would necessarily have as organically transitioned into choreography if it weren't for a call for a work about anti-Asian violence. It just felt so present and so meaningful for me. Immediately I had ideas about what I wanted to do.

So in my scholarship, I have been thinking about passivity as an Asian American trope that tends to get negative connotations, but wondering how we can think of a politics and an aesthetics of passivity that might recuperate the term and help us understand it in a more nuanced way. When I initially saw the call, I started to wonder, could my research on, my theorizing about passivity as an Asian American aesthetic be something that I could also put into practice myself as a choreographer. That was my initial impetus. 

I don't know yet in a really direct way whether that's happening in the piece. The piece explores the range of responses and emotions that we have in the aftermath of violence. It's called Two Doors and it's inspired by the incident in New York City during the pandemic, in which an Asian American woman–a Filipina woman–is caught on a surveillance camera from the lobby of a building. She's caught on film being attacked on the sidewalk. What was so striking about that incident is that the doormen are in the lobby and you can see them watching the attack. After the attacker leaves, the doormen go and close the doors to the building rather than go out to help her. Eventually they do go to help her, but obviously the striking moment is when they close the doors. I decided to work with that incident as a way to think through how we respond to incidents of violence. How do we see ourselves in those situations especially as Asian American and Asian American femme folks and what is the aftermath? What are all the feelings that we have had over the last few years in this spike of anti-Asian violence? What are the range of emotions that we feel, from fear to grief, to defiance, to healing, to resilience–all of those things. So the piece explores all of that.

KG: You both spoke about the “three obediences” and passivity, these tropes, but you also talked about…maybe like reclaiming, or I forget the word that you used, it was great.

CN: Did you say recuperate? 

SK: Uh-huh. Yeah.

KG: Recuperate! I love that because you can get a sense of healing in the body. I would love to hear just briefly your thoughts about how much of these ideas you think are projected onto us from mainstream American society, and how much are maybe genuine issues from our own various Asian cultures? That space between stereotypes and tropes and then things that are actually true, but maybe selectively viewed in order to justify certain legislature and racist structures. And what we do need to work on from the inside. 

SK: I think I'm still struggling with all of the different valences that passivity can have. I think that imagining Asian Americans as passive is what allows us to be attacked, which is what makes us targets of violence. And it's the sort of place that we hold within a kind of larger, like racial taxonomy in the United States. I think that the research I was trying to do in my scholarship was to think about other ways in which passivity might not be a negative valence, but actually a politically efficacious one. And to think about passivity hand in hand with things like hospitality, generosity, compassion, and care. So that's what I mean by recuperating a notion of passivity, about obediences.

KG: There can also be wisdom and strength in passivity, like you can think of maybe an older person being less reactive.

SK: Right? Right, exactly. How might practicing passivity actually be a good thing, instead of a negative? With the piece I'm working on, I decided not to actively try in some literal way to think about passivity because I didn't want my piece to be super avant garde. In other words, I didn't want nothing to happen on stage. So I'm still working through whether I'm actually employing an aesthetics of passivity in this piece in particular, maybe in a future piece. But certainly, yes, I think that passivity can have all of these different valences.

KG: Right, like a mountain could been seen as passive.

SK: I'm not saying that there are not problematic ways in which passivity does not serve us, but I'm just wondering whether there are other ways that we can think about it.

KG: You want to speak to that at all, Claudine?

CN: I don't know. I mean, I really love thinking about it. I think for me, and this is maybe not in response to that, actually, but I feel like all of those things that happened to my family got handed down to me like ghosts. So we didn't really talk about it. And those things, in some ways, also kind of have made me really angry, especially when I was younger. I was very, very angry. Also the injustice of always being told, go back to your own country, even though I was born in San Francisco. So that kind of reaction.

And then how do I deal with the anger that's coming towards us, as well? Both of us have references to assault. And then, just the tremendous amount of grief in that, and I know that we're both taking very good care of our dancers because we don't want to re-traumatize them as we're working on this. So what’s some trauma stewardship -  like just trying to figure out ways to process that trauma, metabolize it and then be able to move on. And that, like you were saying these different stages, right, of this grief and anger that happens and I was told not to be angry quite a bit, you know that a good person really doesn't really get too angry. It's not one of the things we aspire to do. It takes us down. 

I am enjoying being able to explore that I think that especially women need to be able to express aggressive, not necessarily angry, but aggressive movement vocabulary. And so that's kind of a fun thing to do. I think in dealing with that anger and grief on the other side of that is breath, which we both are really incorporating quite a bit, using breath as a way to heal. It's such a valuable commodity to have clean air right now. And all of the stuff about breathing and folks who are not allowed to breathe or have a challenge breathing. It's a giant metaphor for me that this country is choking. The world is choking.

KG: This brings me to two other questions on my mind right now. Maybe one a little more personal. I really admire, SanSan, that you're doing something new. I was surprised when I saw in your biography that it’s your first time as an Artistic Director. My mom is almost 89 and she just learned how to swim recently. She's always trying new things and I think it's so important. So you've been deep into your work as a dance scholar for a long time now. Could you talk about the differences between the more intellectual thinking about ideas (that you’ve been doing) versus the more corporeal, somatic experience of making this dance? It sounds like your work is really looking at that. Claudine’s talk about breath reminded me of that difference.

And then Claudine, even though you've been choreographing for decades, I was also interested in how you came to so clearly center your work around issues of marginalized voices and Asian American identity. Did you come to dance as a way to express the issues you care about, or did you come to it separately, with more choreographic concerns, like time and space and other elements of dance? Or has your work as a choreographer always been tied to your Asian American identity?

CN: I think that probably even my very first piece that I did, which actually Wayne Hazzard produced at Dancers’ Group on 22nd and Mission back in the day, was called Trash. It had to do with the enormous amount of plastic that we were having, and I started collecting plastic like a crazy maniac and made enough to create a backdrop. Another time I just collected so many papers, and it was about unhoused people. So I think that it's really interesting that you asked that because you know when I think back on it, it does tend to be some issue that is bothering me or that I need to understand a little bit better and pick apart and the dancers always inform that process so much. 

In this particular process, I'm so excited because many of the dancers that I've been working with trained with me at Danspace. I think Catalina started when she was around five years old with me. And so now they're in their, what, 20s and 30s? It's really amazing to have them–It feels like coming home. It's the same old movement vocabulary, but just amped up, times two squared. They're really leading me now because they're asking questions and they didn't really learn about Camp, and they didn’t really learn about immigration. “Who is Yuri Kochiyama?” So it's really great to relearn it through their eyes. 

I also hired an actress, Sharon Shao –I've always wanted to have my narrative a little bit tighter. I usually work in such an abstract manner and sometimes people get out of there and go, “Well, what the heck is that about?” I really don't expect or want everyone to understand absolutely everything that’s happening. But I think that for this particular piece, knowing that it was going to be performed for mostly students, I really created a piece that hopefully they'll be able to really sink their teeth into, and hopefully go away and think about some of these ideas and hopefully influence the way that they're looking at different faces.

KG: And then back to the question for SanSan.

SK: I think it was a question about my transition or my stepping into the role of choreographer. I've been a dancer almost my whole life and I've been a dance scholar for half my life. So in some ways, it felt very organic and natural. What I learned is that composing writing is not dissimilar from composing a dance piece. The vocabulary is different. The tools are different, but still a lot of the same rules apply. So I feel like in some ways, it just made so much sense. It was like I was drafting a chapter. And then of course, as dancers in contemporary dance, we're always making phrases; we're always contributing to the actual choreography, so that part was not at all difficult to step into. The thing that I had never done myself was actually do the composition and think about all of the other components, the design components and stuff like that. But again, I feel like I've been in the world enough that it wasn't so weird, and it really felt like I was drafting a composition the same way that I do a journal article.

KG: Right, right. What's the biggest difference to you, and what do you feel like you're getting from this process, that you couldn’t have gotten from, say, writing a paper?

SK: Well, it's more collaborative, which I think is exciting and fun. I'm really finding that when I map out my day, I would much rather be thinking about my piece than thinking about scholarship right now. So it's been really rewarding and fun. I think the collaborative aspect of it is really rewarding. Because when you're doing research, you're just sitting there by yourself.

KG: Your words don’t talk back to you (both chuckle).

I had a question about your relationship. I would love to hear how you met and have you collaborated before or is this the first time? And now that you've probably seen each other's pieces and processes, how do you feel your work complements each other and how is it different in an interesting way for an audience?

CN: I don't usually hang out in the world of scholarship, and so it's been very, very interesting to get a chance to talk to all these scholars, and I have been really digging it. Like a lot of times, I'll be having a conversation and then, I’m like, I don't know what they just said! And then I go away and I'm like, “Hmm, and I've been noticing that we're all seeing things using different words, but it seems to me that we're pretty dang aligned.” And I'm not just talking about science. I'm also talking about the researchers and their work and their descriptions of their classes in the syllabi; it feels like we are all trying to do the same thing.

SK: Yes.

CN: We're trying to really make a change and inspire people to not only learn about the past, but to take responsibility and ownership of their future. I really love that. And I actually really adore them; they probably don't even know that! SanSan is awesome! And, I really love your piece. A lot.

The other day you said Suzette asked if we wanted to meet together and talk about it, but actually our pieces are quite aligned in that we are both dealing with some kind of an assault, but then somehow that healing breath is there. It really does feel like we're doing a transformation together and also a ritual of some sort. 

KG: And you didn’t talk about it - you didn’t say, “Let’s both use breath?”

SK: Yes, that was Suzette's question. She was like, “Did you collaborate and decide how your pieces were going to align with each other?” But we didn't at all. So we met basically through this project. I'd certainly known about Claudine, and we have a lot of people that we know in common, but I've never seen her work before and she obviously had never seen mine. 

KG: So you all did a show. Was that in July?

CN: July – I did a workshop.

SK: Yes, a work in progress kind of thing. So I went to see that and I remember walking away being like, oh, so complementary. What I love about it is that aesthetically they're different. But I think putting them together on the same program, they're working on the same project. And there are some things that are threads, like the breath and ritual. 

What I love is that Claudine is thinking on a broad scale about origins and trajectories. And mine is kind of more of a moment in time, I think. But I think that that's great. So you have the kind of broad scale and you have the large and the small. So yes, I think it's going to be a really cool program. I think the order of that makes sense. I think it will be really, good especially for students in Asian American studies.

KG: I guess your publicity images and descriptions are working really well because I got that sense of the kind of expansive explorations of your piece, Claudine, and then the heightened moment of SanSan’s, really going into the idea of that moment of the body.

I think you've said somewhere in the publicity about looking at anti-Asian violence through a feminist lens, and I feel like maybe that’s sort of a given with both of your works and careers, but I’d love for you to talk a little bit about why you want to tell audiences that this is from a feminist perspective.

SK: The recent spate of attacks have been mostly targeting femme folks and older folks. So for me, it felt really important to speak from that perspective about the phenomenon. It's the perspective that I know. I do feel like Asian American femme experiences are distinct from Asian American male experiences, so it just felt right to speak from a feminist lens. And think about especially if I want to be asking questions about the possible efficacious valence of passivity. I think passivity is a trope that's more ascribed to Asian American femme folks than it is to Asian American men. I mean not exclusively…

KG: Yes, it has its own flavor.

SK: And I wanted it all to be femme dancers. So many of the conversations we had in the making process were about “Oh, my husband wants me to go take self defense classes.” There was a certain kind of shared set of experiences.

KG: Thinking again about Yuri Kochiyama - in part, she’s famous for her work with allies, like with the Black community during the Civil Rights Movement. And there's a phrase somewhere in your publicity about “collective liberation.” Do you want to speak to how you feel anti-Asian violence fits in with the struggles of other groups of color in this country?

CN: I guess I'll just say that the incident of the assault that I am inspired by, is actually based on Yuri’s son getting assaulted near Oakland Chinatown. So, the fact that this wonderful activist who has inspired so many people, her son was attacked - what happens when someone you know is actually attacked by somebody? And then the media portrays that it is mostly African Americans who are perpetrating these things, when actually 70% of anti-Asian violent crimes are actually conducted by white people. So, for me, it's a little skewed how the media continues to manipulate the story. 

This idea of this constant rebranding needs to happen, just like they call it the relocation center when we know that they are concentration camps, and when they say it's the ICE detention center, we know that they're actually cages. So it is really important that we blow that myth out of the water. 

I think we're lucky in Oakland, right? I live in Oakland and work in Oakland, and we're in a unique place, I feel. I have a lot of folks in my community that are a development of intergenerational and interracial sisterhood that I'm falling back on. And in some ways, I think that this is kind of a key for how we level up as a global community, right? To me, Yuri really represented that, right? She always said, “Build bridges, not walls.”

KG: Did you have anything to add onto that, SanSan?

SK: I think that what Claudine is saying about this myth, that we need to blow out of the water, I think it's all part of a kind of larger white supremacist taxonomy of race that gets built where it's a kind of divide and conquer mentality. We have to not succumb to that kind of thinking where it's one marginalized group against another marginalized group instead of thinking about how white supremacy makes it bad for all of us but in different ways. I know in particular that this research project we are a part of really wants to think about abolition hand in hand with thinking about the origins and trajectories of anti-Asian violence. And to move away from the kind of more knee jerk or easy kind of blame game or cries for more policing or punitive measures and think more systematically about what is white supremacy doing. How is it operating such that anti-Asian violence is a phenomenon? 

KG: Is there anything else you want to add that I haven't asked about? What’s next for each of you?

CN: I don’t know what’s yet. There's a lot. I always have seven dances every time I do one! So for example, my character goes to Tule Lake and then it was like, oh, the Modoc Nation was there. Then they eventually got displaced because of racist laws, and then ended up moving to Oklahoma. It's like, I just don't have the time and space to explore that. 

I was like, oh, that might be the next dance. Like, of these locations of these camps, who was living there first, then who was living there second, and then when they got moved, then the Japanese, and then what happened?

So these layers and layers and layers and really it's about also caring for the land. These are all feminine ideas, right? Caring for the land, caring for each other, mothering ourselves, mothering each other. This kind of quality of care and kindness and love and compassion and generosity. Where is that now when it is very much needed?

KG: I loved that you talked about embracing anger and aggression and love. I see those as connected. If you shut off one part of yourself, how are you going to access the others?

SK: Yes, that’s a good point. That’s great.

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Download a copy of the interview here:

Kimiko Guthrie Claudine Naganuma and SanSan Kwan in Conversation (October 2024)

Preseason Play-By-Play: “Game Time” In Process

Aviva Rose-Williams and Molly Rose-Williams. Photo by Ezra Weill.

Preseason Play-By-Play: “Game Time” In Process 

By Molly Rose-Williams

When it comes to making shows, my sister and I are on the same page in lots of ways. (Yes, physical effort and slapstick humor! No, pulling audience members onstage! Sometimes words! Aspirationally props!)

Of course, when you’re in rehearsal with someone for eight hours a day though, and sharing a single tupperware of leftovers at lunch made from the dinner you shared the night before in the tiny apartment that you’ve been sharing for a week already that doesn’t have any air conditioning but a single fan that you use when the August heat gets unbearable, and someone forgot the second fork—then, as you’re passing that tupperware back and forth in the moments before you peel yourselves back into rehearsal, the similarities aren’t the things you notice. 

Photo by Ezra Weill.

When Aviva and I started working on Game Time back in 2022, we had no idea what the project might become. All we knew was that we wanted to make a show together, and that we wanted it to include the Chinese pole. Aviva’s based mostly in Brussels and I’m in the SF Bay Area, so our creation process has necessarily taken place in weeks-long periods of intensive full-day rehearsals.

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. 

In this brackish zone of relationship, I’ve discovered that my sister is both the same and different from the person I knew before. So am I. Most tangibly, I’ve learned a lot about how we each work as artists.

For example, Aviva likes to start with physical pathways. She wants to plan, explore, practice, and perfect precise ways of getting from point A to point B with the body. The best pathways are ones that feel novel and satisfying to her body. They generally involve some degree of upside-down-ness, feet-off-the-ground-ness, or weight-transfer. She wants to train these pathways until they’re smooth. It should feel hard and look easy.

I want to move without a plan. As I move, I follow my intuition to find the physical states, gestures, and movements that feel right today—the ones that make me smile, or cry, or go “oh yeah,” and you want to do it again and again. Then I want to mine these little starting points like hooks in a larger fabric of sense that can be discovered thread by thread. The final product should look and feel like something you always knew but didn’t know you knew, emerging organically through physical action.

Photo by Ezra Weill.

Aviva craves fidelity in interpersonal and emotional interactions on stage. “But why would you be that sad all of a sudden?” she’ll say when I collapse to the ground in a fit of faux despair. “I don’t think what I did could merit that big of a reaction.”

I’m obsessed with the big-picture narrative of a thing. “But then what prompts the magnitude of the celebration that comes next?” I’ll ask. “We need a turning point—if we don’t get all the way to the depths of despair, the turnaround doesn’t make any sense.” 

Aviva wants to practice our counterbalances like acrobatic tricks. 

I want to practice how we listen to one another physically so that we don’t need to perfect the counterbalances, just the skill of attuning to one another’s shared weight.

Aviva wants me to tighten up then. Stop being like a noodle.

I want her to relax, and stop gripping my hand so hard.

She wants me to actually give her my weight so that she can relax.

I want her to notice that I am giving her weight—but I’ll give her more if she wants. 

She wants me to, whoa, not give her that much weight unless I want her to drop me. 

I want her to stop gripping my hand so hard.

She wants me to notice that if I gripped her hand a little harder she wouldn’t have to grip my hand so hard.

I want her to notice that—oh, that is true.

She relaxes her grip. I drop infinitesimally back towards my heels. She rolls her head, gives a big sigh, and shakes some of her tension from her shoulders down through her ankles, sinking into the ground. 

Balance descends like a bird on our off-kilter form. Like we’re suspended in time, like the world is supporting us from below and all around. I hold my sister’s hand and notice that she is holding me and I am holding her. And I remember that this is actually exactly where I want to be. I notice that she is looking at me and, judging from the shape of her smile, she feels about the same.

 

Come see Game Time! Oct 4 & 5 at ODC Theater (3153 17th Street, SF). 

Doors at 7p, show at 7:30p. Tickets $18-50 (NOTA) @ https://odc.dance/gametime

See more at mollyrosewilliams.com/game-time

 

FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Keeps The Conversation Going

FACT/SF in "Extra." Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Keeps The Conversation Going

By Garth Grimball

On the opening night of the second weekend of FACT/SF’s 5th annual Summer Dance Festival, artistic director Charles Slender-White spoke about the importance of dialogue as a mission for the festival. Dialogue between artists and artistic dialogue between places. In addition to an excerpt of the previous weekend’s work by FACT/SF, 5 other artists were on the evening’s program, 3 local to the Bay: Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş, Zoe Huey, and Erin Yen; and 2 touring in: Summation Dance from Los Angeles, and Sophie Allen from Chicago.

Zoe Huey and Rose Huey in "sister score." Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Huey and Yen each created works that delved into one simple idea with repetition. In sister score Zoe Huey was joined by their sister Rose in a duet dictated by four prompts: regular, interlocked, flat, pinkies. Dressed in pink or blue separates, the sisters walked downstage in silence and emphatically whispered the four words. Their hands clasped and moved into the corresponding relationships. Hand holding developed into full body attaching and detaching as the siblings rolled on the floor saying the four words at increasing velocity to the point of abstraction.

Yen’s Run-On began with her inviting a member of the audience to sit at a table on the stage. Once the volunteer was selected the two had a brief check-in before they sat with their back to the audience and she walked upstage right to face them on a diagonal.  The fun in watching this dance was guessing how Yen instructed the volunteer. She danced an accumulation of gestures and mostly stationary weight shifts and they responded with shrugs, looking right and left, and banging rhythms on the table. Like a run-on sentence, the dance didn’t so much conclude as resign to an ellipsis.

Erin Yen and an audience member in "Run-On." Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Flasher-Düzgüneş and Allen shared high concept works. Allen’s solo Hot, live and otherwise is inspired by anti-nuclear protests in England. Flasher-Düzgüneş was joined in performance by Maddy Bullard and Tamara Chu in ends of Axis, a trio highlighting the experience of mental illness.

Allen began dancing with a cinderblock. In a high ponytail and evening gloves, she cradled the block like a baby before spinning with it, at one point with only one hand, letting the centrifugal force command her relationship to the prop. A large hourglass was stationed downstage and a train of red ribbon layed horizontal upstage. The first half of the work had a sense of ritual before Allen removed her gloves, let down her hair and rollicked into spiraling floor work and deep second position plié. Del Medoff’s lighting design flashed red and Allen wrapped herself in the ribbon before returning to the cinderblock.

Sophie Allen in "Hot, live and otherwise." Photo by Robby Sweeny.

In ends of Axis the dancers sought and avoided light and visibility. They embraced and separated from each other. One dancer carried a lamp but rarely seemed to see the others. A projection of a body in outline danced across the cyc. After removing their baggy clothes the fluidity of the dancers’ spines anchored movements that were previously shapeless. A projection of trees seen through 3 windows illuminated the space and the trio exited together.

Summation Dance in "When will I be?". Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

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.

Slender-White is committed to having a brat summer. Extra is danced to Charli XCX. And, the new FACT/SF merch is a replication of her album cover, replacing the title “brat” with the dance company’s name on the signature brat green in brat text. In this context, Extra reads less a dance choreographed to favorite music than fandom writ large via dance moves. Slender-White, Keanu Brady, Katherine Neumann, and LizAnne Roman Roberts entered in gold sequined jackets and red socks, paddle-stepping into formation. What followed seemed to be a collection of phrases from Slender-White’s Countertechnique classes interspersed with accumulating gestures. The dancers were beautiful. But as is common when choreographers are in their own work, Extra needed extra eyes on it that weren’t performing too. With extra eyes the ambitious unison work could race past the finish line.

In regards to a dialogue between dance scenes in different cities, I was struck by how the internet has collapsed time and space into one stream, at least sonically. Trends in every art form come and go. Fifteen years ago every other modern dance piece used klezmer music if the dance was aerobic or drones if the movement was minimal. But EDM/electrobeats has had contemporary modern dance in a chokehold for about a decade. Four-on-the-floor is the go to for dancey dances. More theatrical works rely on soundscapes of unceasing synth syncopated by bass throttles. Is its staying power a testament to an electronic primacy in modern dance? Or are we in an ouroboros of seeing dances online to electronic music, and responding in kind by uploading ourselves dancing to electronic music, feeding the pairing continuously back to itself no matter where we live?

Maybe answers will be found in next year’s Summer Dance Festival. The conversation continues.

"ends of Axis" by Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

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 posts:

FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Dances Through Genre (Summer Festival 2022)
FACT/SF & DISCO RIOT Dance On Making (Summer Festival 2022)

Wholeness in "Split"
An Afternoon Walk and Dance Through Glen Canyon Park: FACT/SF’s “Diffusion”

Artist Profile: Charles Slender-White

 

Dancing from Fog City to the Big Apple

Dancer Lindsey Jones in the work of Pam Tanowitz. Photo by Liz Devine.

Dancing from Fog City to the Big Apple

By Garth Grimball

The night before I left for a two-week trip to New York City I met the choreographer Rena Butler at a work event. She was in San Francisco for her commission with EIGHT/MOVES, Mia J. Chong’s new company. During our brief conversation she expressed how much she was enjoying the dance scene in the Bay, going so far as to say she felt like there was more going on here than in New York. I was surprised. Rarely does anyone compliment the Bay Area for anything as greater than NYC’s “fill-in-the-blank.”

When I told her I was leaving for Manhattan the next day, she quickly confirmed that it was still great and there was good work to see.

Over the ensuing fourteen days I saw Pam Tanowitz’s Day for Night at the Little Island; a lecture-demonstration on deciphering Nijinsky’s dance notation for Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, led by scholar Claudia Jeschke and dancer Rainer Krenstetter at the Morgan Library; Cole Escola’s perfect, campy play Oh, Mary! on Broadway; the Lincoln Center Dance Festival featuring New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Ballet Hispanico, American Ballet Theatre, and Dance Theatre of Harlem; the new immersive dance-theater production Life & Trust; and the many casual dances one sees while walking, commuting, and being in the city that never sleeps: vogueing at Jacob Riis beach, groups of twenty-somethings in parks across Manhattan practicing line dances for the big Stud Country events, buskers bending and gliding through subway cars, kids recording themselves on street corners doing TikTok dances. New York City was bursting with dance.

The Tanowitz premiere and the Nijinksy investigation could be chapters in the same dance text. My biggest takeaway from Krenstetter’s performed excerpts of the iconic choreography was his emphasis on doing less, not over-performing the movement, especially the ending that has been infamously (incorrectly?) performed as explicitly sexual. In Krenstetter’s body, under the direction of Jeschke, the faun’s movements are rooted in naturalism not exhibitionism. Tanowitz’s Day for Night could have been titled “Interlude to the evening of the sprites.” The dance was performed against the backdrop of the Hudson River and the Jersey City skyline. In Reid & Harriet’s flowy, translucent costumes the dancers existed just outside the sartorial norm; as if they were hovering between reality and illusion. But the highly technical movement was affectless in performance. Grounded, like Nijinsky’s faun, in its own internal naturalism.

Oh, Mary! is not a modern dance performance. Life & Trust is mostly a dance performance within the form of immersive theater. Both productions center physicality over language to tell period-specific stories. Oh, Mary! takes place during Lincoln’s presidency, Life & Trust on the day before the 1929 stock market crash. As loose narratives seem to be gaining in popularity, usually in the form of an artist interpreting their autobiography, it was enlivening to see performers in very different productions embody specific characters. While Escola’s physical comedy is broad it always felt rooted in their unique rendering of Mary Todd Lincoln. Life & Trust is based on Faustian stories (while being Sackler family coded) but the devil is in the details and each character was distinct in the way they put on a coat or offered their arm to a companion or bargained to meet their desires.

The Lincoln Center Dance Festival was produced to fuel the desire of dance fans. Seeing the skills of the companies’ dancers back-to-back is an embarrassment of riches. The collectivist playbill was born out of pandemic survival. In 2020, the 5 dance companies formed BAAND Together as a way to support each other with the disappearance of revenues and opportunities. The one night performance was pay-what-you-can with tickets starting at $5. I would love to see something similar happen in the Bay. What if the War Memorial Performing Arts Center produced an evening of a collection of Bay Area dance companies with the same ticketing model? If it happens, consider me seated.

I returned home to catch the final day of ODC Theater’s State of Play Festival, which kicked off a packed month of dance in the Bay. I saw 4 festival artists that day; the following weekend I saw Ballet22’s seventh season. I then attended the opening night of EIGHT/MOVES’s inaugural season. I finished the month with the second weekend of FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival. 

Rena was right. It is an exciting time for dance—here, there, and in places I hope to be an audience to in the future.

 

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.

 

Big Yes: Mia J. Chong's Eight/Moves, Season 1

Steam, choreographed by Mia J. Chong and KT Nelson. Photo by Maximillian Tortoriello.

Big Yes: Mia J. Chong's Eight/Moves, Season 1

By Jill Randall

 

Opening Thoughts: a poem

Dancing - 
Virtuosity, strength, range, power, whole body-ness
Small gestures
Big commitment
Fog
And satin shirts
And socks
And partnering
Effort exertion commitment endurance
Lift and uplift.

Gratitude
Yes, dance performances can be transactional. But beyond the dollars, can we note gratitude for the offering? The invitation into an experience, to a moment together. To see, feel, imagine. To witness vulnerability, a reveal, a statement, a stance. To see time and care and craft in front of us. 

To sit together
To be in a space
To seek solace, connection, and possibly HOPE

I was incredibly grateful to witness the opening night and first season of Mia J. Chong’s new company, EIGHT/MOVES. I have not felt this way in a long time - joy, exhilaration, and inspiration. I felt alive in a way I have not for a while. 

Common Gradient, choreographed by Mia J. Chong and Keerati Jinakunwiphat. Photo by Maximillian Tortoriello.

Trio of Dances
The dancing was just incredible. As I said to a few friends over the past few days - the cast had such strong technique and a palette of embodied skills. But it was not gratuitous. The vocabulary and training was grounded and used so skillfully by Mia Chong and collaborators to express the ideas. And quite simply - the dancers’ whole body-ness and aliveness was palpable to me in the audience. 

The first dance - Common Gradient choreographed by Chong in collaboration with Keerati Jinakunwiphat - cycled through coming back to a posed portrait with the 6 dancers, gazing down stage left. There are swirls of attitude turns and round arms carving in space. The choreography kaleidoscopes between duets, two dancers lifting a third, and solo highlights. There are moments of unison. The costumes are satiny jewel tone tops and black pants. Common Gradient is a piece exploring connection - seeking connections and building connections. Most of all this dance sets the stage for an evening of bold physicality and showing off a cast of spectacular contemporary dancers with skill, subtly, and clearly a wholehearted commitment to Chong’s vision. 

Themes of Remembering… is the second dance on the bill. Here Chong collaborates with Rena Butler. There are two casts for the dance, and I got to witness on Friday night a trio with Crystaldawn Bell, William Brewton Fowler Jr., and Kira Fargas. We head more into the underbelly of experience here. The dance begins with a lighter tone, with quick snapshots of dancers in a circle of light, seated, in a state of thinking of someone else. The song has lyrics to accompany this idea of another person. There are smiles and expressions of affection, remembering. “I’m very much in love with you.” Then the energy shifts into a world askew. How do memories haunt us, taunt us, rile us? We feel this with the tone in the music and use of body rolls, ripples, and head actions. While some dancers are on stage, others become shadowy figures upstage behind the cyc. The last piece of music appears to be the first one but played in reverse. The words are garbled and unrecognizable, yet the melody still offers a hopefulness.

There is a short intermission and then the longer piece of evening, Steam. Chong and KT Nelson collaborate on this journey. We enter into a new environment with heavy use of fog. It is otherworldly. The full cast participate in this dance. The choreography is big and full, taking my breath away. Two moments linger with me. One is in the middle of dance; the fog is low. The ensemble is in the clouds. They are in flux yet somehow held too in this moment. Second, there is a duet with Lani Yamanaka and Colin Frederick. The relationship is heart wrenching to witness. I feel transition, loss. I come back to Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking multiple times throughout the piece. Liminality. Whether the piece is about personal loss or climate change, Steam’s beautiful rolling soundtrack of numerous pieces of music - and a strong sense of musicality, rhythms, and punctuation in the choreography - created a multisensory world to see, hear, feel, and think from my seat in the audience. 

—

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. 

Celebrating the Logistics
I also want to celebrate the whole event of Mia J. Chong launching her new company. In a post-pandemic time, and a particularly hard moment for arts organizations in the SF Bay Area to sustain, Mia J. Chong comes from a place of beautiful optimism. She has launched a company, with 7 dancers and a board of directors. She has secured funding. Chong said yes to collaboration and invited in three colleagues to participate in the journey. This was not the easy path or the fastest path for Season 1, but the choices offer a little window into Chong’s bold hope and what is driving her (which I feel is: vision, curiosity, story, and connection). 

Every detail was so thoughtful - from her curtain speech to the casting to the order of the dances, to the 8 guiding principles of the company (create, uplift, build, expand, inspire, honor, care, and push). 

I say a big yes to all of these ideas. I see and feel them already in action with EIGHT/MOVES. Congratulations on Season 1, and I cannot wait for the next opportunity to be a part of the work. 

Themes of Remembering...choreographed by Mia J. Chong and Rena Butler. Photo by Maximillian Tortoriello.

 

Jill Randall (she/her) is the founder of the site Life as a Modern Dancer, co-director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, and an adjunct assistant professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

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Related links:

One Good Quote: Mia J. Chong’s EIGHT/MOVES in Season 1

 

One Good Quote: Mia J. Chong's EIGHT/MOVES in Season 1

Kira Fargas. Photo by RJ Muna.

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. This month if you experienced the live performance of Mia J. Chong's EIGHT/MOVES (Season 1) at Z Space in San Francisco on August 16, 17, or 18, 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."

Coming Together and Connecting: "Study Hall" with Emily Hansel and Collaborators

Study Hall. Photo by Natalia Perez.
Image Description: Three dancers, wearing blues, oranges, and pinks, are caught walking in different directions. A mirror effect on the image causes blurry, duplicate images of their bodies.

 

Coming Together and Connecting: Study Hall with Emily Hansel and Collaborators
By Jill Randall

Introduction

I am a big fan of Emily Hansel - her performing, choreography, dialogues on the field, and writing. I have held space for numerous pieces by and about Emily’s work over the past few years (see links below). 

As Emily and I talked a few weeks ago, I am curious about the idea of “consent” even in the writing process. I wanted Emily’s permission to write about Study Hall. I was honored to be asked to attend the performance in San Francisco on May 16 and to be invited to write about the experience of viewing it.

In addition, I opted to share this piece with Emily prior to publication. I am thinking about consent, power dynamics, and purpose these days with dance writing. 

 

Why write about dance? To document and honor the work. To reflect back what we saw, heard, thought, and felt. This is feedback, validation. And for readers who missed the show - hopefully a little taste or picture painted.

 

Movement Words

Sometimes I read a review of a performance, but I don’t gain a sense of what the actual movement was. Here I offer a quick snapshot in poetic form to describe this 50 minute quartet with dancers Rebecca Fitton, Jocelyn Reyes, gizeh muñiz vengel, and Erin Yen:

 

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

—-
It is kaleidoscopic - melting from quartet sections to duets to trios to a few moments of solo time. It is like a slideshow with distinct images and ideas, yet they are sequenced and linked together.

Props are utilized throughout - computers, a big air mattress, little shaggy rugs, coffee cups, an armchair.

 

A common question I have is: What is set material, and what is improvised each day? 

 

Another detail to share with the reader is that the costumes are simple. I imagined a discussion centered around “pick what feels good to you and makes you feel good.” The colors pop - blue, fuschia, and orange. Pants and shirts. (I love that in their letter of agreement there is language around costumes. Read more here.)

Study Hall. Photo by Natalia Perez.
Image Description: Four dancers are captured in various positions of laying, sitting, and kneeling on the floor, which is covered in kaleidoscopic, multi-colored light patterns.

Before, During, and After

Emily is giving weight and time to each part of the choreographic process. She hosted numerous conversations in the SF Bay Area over the past year about artistic process, care in collaboration, voice, and ownership. These conversations informed and fed the project. The dancers spent time discussing process and coming up with community agreements and a dancer contract. 

 

As Erin Yen shared in their preview article on Substack before the performance, “We have imbued community care into our rehearsal process, and this is evident in the relationships we have cultivated throughout movement scores and sections.”

 

I think this quote helps me bring into focus what I saw that Thursday night, as an audience member joined with others in the round:

-I saw care and consent in action

-I saw process made public

-I was invited into the experience and one of the stops of a multi-stop journey for Study Hall

-The performance was one aspect but not the apex; every component had value, weight, and time (and money put towards it).

 

Gratitude

I share gratitude with Erin, gizeh, Jocelyn, Rebecca, and Emily. Thank you for helping us imagine new worlds for dancemaking. Thank you for transparency and curiosity. Long live curiosity and hope, for new work cultures & care & processes. Thank you for your presence & the live experience & laughter & beautiful movement. 

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.

 

Jill Randall (she/her) is the founder of the site Life as a Modern Dancer, co-director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, and an adjunct assistant professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

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Related links:

Transparent project budget for Study Hall

Study Hall Substack articles

 

Prior posts on Life as a Modern Dancer (by Emily Hansel or about Emily’s work):

Relearning Agency: A Dancer’s Call for Collective Action

Cultivating Healthy, Equitable Workplaces for Dancers

Empowering Dancers through Contracts

Contingency plans that support dancers’ mental and physical health

“Four by Four” by Emily Hansel: Reflections on Product as Process

 

 

Megan Lowe Dances Finds Partnership In "Just A Shadow"

Josh Icban and Megan Lowe. Photo by Vita Hewett.

Megan Lowe Dances Finds Partnership In Just A Shadow

By Garth Grimball

 

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. 

 

Lowe dances in every duet as collaborators rotate in and out, each bringing their own creative/dance modality: contemporary dance, site specific, vertical dance, turf dance, contact improvisation, and live music. Unfortunately the variance in form doesn’t equate to a variance in dynamic. All of the duets live within a similar moderate tempo. An issue common when choreographers perform in their own works. Being in the dance feels differently than watching the dance.

 

Lowe and Frances Teves Sedayao opened the program with Silhouette accompanied by 4 songs performed live: two original Lowe compositions, one by Sade, and one by Doris Day. Sedayao and Lowe were separated by a mobile semi-opaque screen. Ray Oppenheimer’s lighting design blended silhouettes and shadows creating a sense of liminality. Sedayao and Lowe mirrored each other in reaches and weight shifts before abandoning the screen to make contact and sing together.

Frances Teves Sedayao and Megan Lowe. Photo by Vita Hewitt.

Sonsherée Giles began There’s a Storm Inside walking along the cross beam of the Annex as Lowe scattered branches on the floor. After a brief duet on the beam, Lowe sang “There, There” by Radiohead, much of it while balancing a long branch on her head. Giles danced a solo that was the one breakout moment from the evening’s moderate tempo. Enclosed in a circle of the branches, she collapsed and regenerated at exceeding velocity like a timelapse of a fallen tree composting into fresh growth.

 

Living in the Now with AJ Gardner and Us with Shira Yaziv were playful in tone. Gardner is a turf dancer, and his clean glides across the floor juxtaposed Lowe’s modern dance weight shifts, creating a stark relief in the relationships to the floor. Yaziv and Lowe were blindfolded, alternating and together, while doing advanced contact improvisation lifts, falls and rolls. All the while talking casually as friends as if throwing oneself into another person is as common as sharing a laugh.

 

A Quiet Space to Dance With with Roel Seeber upped the ante in defiance of gravity. Lowe and Seeber were harnessed to lines attached to the ceiling. They soared through space, remarkably avoiding collisions but still wrapping and unwrapping as counterweights. The duet began and ended with a motif of the dancers passing each other like two pendulums. Their grace made the measure of time velvety.

 

Lowe was joined by Josh Icban in the performance of their original song “Vendor of Dreams” and “Because” by The Beatles. The full cast came together for a reverence that referenced the previous duets with a sincerity germane to the overall elegiac theme.

 

Having had many opportunities to see Lowe’s work in the past three years, I am of the opinion that her most successful choreography exists outside of the traditional proscenium theater. Lowe is a tackler of obstacles. Her choreography looks at gravity and says, so what? In site specific locations, she can make you see familiar objects and relationships as springboards of untapped potential. In a theater, in the absence of physical obstacles, the invented challenges cannot offer the same glimmer of insight. 

 

No matter the location, to see Lowe perform is to witness a performer with an abundance of trust, trust in herself, trust in the environment, trust in physics, and trust in contact.

The cast of "Just a Shadow." Photo by Vita Hewitt.

Experience Just a Shadow yourself during its second weekend at Joe Goode Annex June 7, 8, and 9. Tickets are $0-50, with no one turned away due to lack of funds.

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.

 

Drag, Modern Dance, and REBIRTH

Hollywood Texas. Photo by Sloane Kanter.

Drag, Modern Dance, and REBIRTH

By Garth Grimball

“Since I don’t have any pee, will someone spit in my mouth instead?” performer Hollow Eve requested midway through REBIRTH: The Death of Drag. Fellow castmates obliged.

On May 17-19 Oaklash celebrated its seventh year of bringing drag and queer performances to the Bay Area at venues in and surrounding downtown Oakland. Friday night kicked off with the O-SNAP! party at the Nectar Social Club; on Saturday Oaklash took over four blocks of Old Oakland with vendors and two stages, featuring recent Rupaul’s Drag Race winner Sasha Colby, followed by the Afterkii party at ForTheCulture; Sunday’s closing event at Omni Commons REBIRTH: The Death of Drag was billed as a funeral followed by performances.

Mama Celeste, one of the festival’s organizers, pitched coverage of REBIRTH as being more performance art-leaning than the rest of the programming. Color me intrigued. In 2022, I published a piece for Dance Stories on trends in the field. One trend being the influence of drag on modern dance, specifically the aesthetics and the theatricality of confidence. In the Bay Area there is a lot of crossover between drag and modern dance. Many of the performers lip syncing at the monthly Clutch the Pearls drag cabaret in San Francisco, you have likely also seen leaping, turning and partnering on sprung floors across the Bay.

After spending Saturday at the block party, both for pleasure and gearing up to write about a drag performance for LAAMD, I began to identify quartets of words like I was playing the NYTimes game Connections.

DRAG & MODERN DANCE COMMONALITIES

Reactionary    Open Definition     Big Tent     Faces

Both drag and modern dance share an evolution with roots in the reactionary. The Mothers of Modern Dance (or THE Modern Dance as it was once known) were reacting against the aesthetics and tropes of ballet. Inherent in drag is a reaction to the gender construct and its prescribed and totalistic performances. As those reactions have refracted and iterated each form has become increasingly inclusive to the point of blurring a unified definition. 

Modern dance is easier to describe as what it isn’t than what it is: it isn’t ballet, it isn’t hip hop, it isn’t folk dance, it isn’t performance art; yet it may incorporate any and all of those forms and more. As Rupaul says, “You’re born naked, you die naked, the rest is drag.” By that dictum drag is not exclusive to a specific type of gender commentary; it is inclusive of infinite transformations.

The multiplicity of styles and interpretations in each means both forms continue under a big tent. To the evolution of drag and modern dance diversity is necessary.

Re: Faces, modern dance and drag’s utilization of the face are opposite sides of the same coin. Modern dancers are (in)famous for their lack of facial expression in performance. Drag performers elevate the elasticity and expressiveness of the face to High Art.

All of this is to say that REBIRTH: The Death of Drag was a drag performance in equal parts reverent and anarchic. And within the performing of reverence and anarchy were commonalities with modern dance forms.

The installation and performance were a celebration of the life and death of Phatima Rude of the House of Rude, who died in 2021. The OMNI Commons was festooned with swaths of textiles and floating gates that resembled a circus tent meets the inside of Jeannie’s lamp from I Dream of Jeannie. An altar to Phatima Rude had four monitors each broadcasting unique footage from video of the artist to Pride parades past to gay pornography and John Waters films.

After Hollow Eve toasted Phatima in a sincere tribute, the audience was ushered into the inner sanctum of REBIRTH to witness a celebration brought to life by Hollow Eve, Jillian Gnarling, Kochina Rude, Pseuda, Aya Dapt, La Chucha, Krimm, Uphoria Glitter, Dvvsk, and Hollywood Texas. The ensemble began in a line of trios and duos; set to the melancholic “I’ll Be Your Mirror” by Nico and The Velvet Underground, each group held an empty frame through which one performer would put makeup on another. What followed was a deeply felt and sublimely irreverent melange of solo performances and interstitial group numbers.

Hollow Eve performed the first solo number to Bjork’s “Freefall.” It had a clarity that veered closer to elegy than camp as they contorted or held stillness on the runway. A delightful ping ponging between high-tech and low-tech followed. One transitional group scene had all the performers throwing balls of bright yellow yarn back and forth across the space creating a web. Solos became joyful dance parties. A leaf blower played a guest role. Pseuda took the audience into the future during their solo. Standing on a rotating platform uplit by black lighting, they had sci-fi looking gloves on that radiated light at each fingertip. When caressing their body each fingertip left green trails under the light. 

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.

REBIRTH ensemble members. Photo by Sloane Kanter.

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.

"Undercurrents" with Carol Kueffer and ChingChi Yu

ChingChi Yu and Carol Kueffer in "Veil of Water." Photo by Aileen Kim.

From Blog Director Jill Randall:
Both Melissa Hudson Bell and I got to experience the "Undercurrents" performance a few weeks ago, a shared weekend with choreographers ChingChi Yu and Carol Kueffer. Melissa reflects on the first half of the program, and I share here about the second half. Together we reflect on a rich program with 6 pieces.

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"Undercurrents"

By Melissa Hudson Bell

I have just finished reading the book The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. In it, the main character makes an attempt at taking her own life and ends up in a place suspended between life and death. From here, with the help of her beloved childhood librarian, she selects books from the library shelf that transport her into wildly varied versions of her own life which, she is told, all exist simultaneously. In one life she is a glaciologist confronting polar bears, in another she’s a former Olympic swimmer in recovery, in yet another she exists as a happily wed mother living a small-town life with her hunk of a husband. She stays in each life just long enough to get a sense of what is happening and what is expected of her, and to come to terms with how the choices she has made have affected those around her, be it neighbors, siblings, lovers, or friends. In each, naturally, she comes to realize something about what is essential in her, and about what there is that is left to live for.

It is no doubt because I have been immersed in this text for the past week that I delighted in the dance show “Undercurrents,” as a sampling of simultaneous and seemingly disparate worlds one could inhabit. Designed as a showcase of shorter works by Carol Kueffer and ChingChi Yu, “Undercurrents” created small glimpses into movement universes, each with their own affect, cadence, and character. The program opened with a woman (Taylor Bazile), clad in athleisure wear, venturing out on a fitness journey. Imagine a Peloton commercial come to life and you’ve about got it. She dramatizes overcoming minor setbacks in the pursuit of movement that challenges and fulfills her. The narrative was linear - dancer laces up, warms up, branches out, stumbles, recovers, figures out what she needs to thrive, embodies her best self, self-actualizes, hooray! BUT, if seen with the fresh eyes of someone being dropped for the first time into this world, the dancer brought enough youthful freshness and earnest embodiment of physical experimentation to render the piece enjoyable. It was a pleasure to watch Bazile navigate the space, to articulate her struggle, to lean vigorously into the shapes and contours of what her body could accomplish.

From there, the audience is dropped into an entirely different, more formalistic and somewhat mischievous duet entitled “Veil of Water,” performed by choreographer ChingChi Yu and collaborator Carol Kueffer. The duet had a cat and mouse quality to it, and a fairly rich unfolding of movement. The dancers seemed to tease and cajole one another subtly, concealing and revealing, folding and unfolding, advancing and retreating in playful harmony. I would imagine from the way the movement unfurled, that these two have danced and trained together somewhat extensively over the years. Their movement was beautifully aligned, despite their distinct characters. It was a lovely example of a duet where both individuals perform the same general steps, occupy the same general space, but somehow let their individuality shine. 

The next piece was another abrupt departure from the last, this time dropping the viewer into a dystopian landscape with ghoulish creatures whose movement vocabulary was idiosyncratic, whose mannerisms were somewhat feral, and whose relationality was tense even to the point of violence. “Convergence” by ChingChi Yu - danced by Chi Chi Chang, Johnny Cox, SanSan Kwan, and Catalina O’Connor - was set to music that was eerie and dissonant, creating a world that invoked images of apocalyptic scavenging. The dancers’ angular movement and vocalizations made them seem both predator and prey in unpredictable surroundings. They moved largely as a pack, climbing over and amongst each other with an air of aggressive hyper vigilance and of a fierce, if not ferocious, need to survive.

Left to right: SanSan Kwan, Chi Chi Chang, Johnny Cox, and Catalina O’Connor in "Convergence" by ChingChi Yu.

In subsequent pieces we continued to jump to entirely new times and places. A particular favorite was an amusing fish-out-of-water character piece by Kueffer, clad in a retro one piece open-water swimsuit and extremely large fins that was entitled “The Swim.” 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 is a dance nerd - she likes to think about, discuss, and create dance in a variety of forms. She has an MFA in Experimental Choreography and a PhD in Critical Dance Studies, and has written about dance for numerous publications. When not engaged in dance-related endeavors, she runs an Oakland-based media production company with her husband, and channels all her creative and logistic might into mothering her three amazing kids. When she needs restoration, she heads to the ocean.

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"Undercurrents," Part Two
By Jill Randall

Watching "Undercurrents" on March 9, 2024, my experience begins by going through a catalog of dance memories.

I have known Carol for 25 years now. Her class was one of the first ones I took in the San Francisco Bay Area in the summer of 1998. Her physicality then - and as seen in "Undercurrents" now - is about full expansion through the limbs, a whole bodied presence and “yes” to the dancing moment, and fluid level changes up and down and in and out of the floor. 

Sitting in Western Sky Studio, I am reminded of Carol performing here about 20 years ago in Sima Belmar’s project "Palimpsest," with a commanding solo. I love the embodied memories contained within a space. 
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Carol Kueffer in "The Swim."

Kueffer’s first piece is a solo entitled “The Swim,” performed by Carol herself. I know that Carol is a swimmer, and this solo is a delightful exploration weaving together two of Carol’s physical languages.

“The Swim” begins with the sound of waves. Carol moves quickly, interspersing suspended actions. Is she in the water, or is she the water? I am thinking of the porousness of water - and of water qualities - into and around the body. 

Carol’s costume is a one piece swimsuit (tank top/shorts). As the second section shifts into music by Southside Aces, Carol puts on socks and flippers. Her movement is now stable and weighted. Her agility while dancing in flippers is impressive.

As the third section begins, someone throws onto the stage an even larger and longer set of flippers. (Maybe they are for scuba diving or water skiing?) The largeness leads to exaggeration and humor - big steps, lunges, and jumps. 

The final section brings back the sound of the waves. Carol’s movement is now about freedom and lightness from the limitations. 

“The Swim” leads me to reflect on the questions: When do we feel grounded? Bound? Free?

Lisa Bush Finn, Robin Nasatir, and Laura Marlin in "Open Hands."

Carol’s second piece is a revival of a 1989 piece, now entitled “Open Hands.” There are two distinct sections with two casts, who do not intertwine within the choreography. The two sections are cast with age specific groupings. Section one has dancers in their 50s and 60s; section two has dancers who appear to be in their 20s and 30s. Violist Linda Green wonderfully fills the space with iconic pieces by Bach and Debussy.

Section one (Lisa Bush Finn, Laura Marlin, and Robin Nasatir) fluidly transforms from unison moments to two dancers partnering to trio connections. Partners lean; connections are gentle and easeful. The vocabulary is sweeping, twisting, circling, and swirling. I appreciated the eye contact and connections. The dancers exit with a smile.

Section two (with Rosika Dater-Merton, Clairey Evangelho, and Anna Gichan) shifts the tempo and tone. With increased speed and playfulness, the trio is rolling, leaping, and jumping back. The partner work is about points of connection, leaning, and holding. Section two is reminiscent of my first experience with Carol back in 1998 - that is, the fluid level changes in and out of the floor.

“Open Hands” offers moving images: openness to participation in an intimate, small group; to eye contact; and to connection.

Anna Gichan (courtesy of AXIS Dance Company), Rosika Dater-Merton, and Clairey Evangelho in "Open Hands."

The show concludes with a second duet on the bill with Carol Kueffer and ChingChi Yu, this one choreographed by Carol. “After You” highlights their friendship and rapport. There is comfort and ease in their partnering and sharing the stage. The duet includes walking patterns, body taps, and playful gestures. “After You” is a great example of Kueffer’s sense of musicality. Like “Open Hands,” the choreography seamlessly weaves between unison, symmetrical/mirror image phrases, partnering, and dancers performing separate phrases. I love the kaleidoscopic shifting of the phrasework.
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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 is the founder of Life as a Modern Dancer and also writes for a variety of publications, including Stance on Dance and Dance Teacher. She is the artistic director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in the SF Bay Area and an adjunct assistant professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.