Life as a Modern Dancer

How many MFA programs in dance are in the United States? (Summer 2025 update)

The Saint Mary's College of California MFA Program

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

In Spring 2016, an online conversation led to me creating this list for the first time. At that moment, there were 48 MFA programs in United States. Today, the list has shifted a little, but amazingly there are still 48.

I want to name and honor the programs that I removed from the original 2016 list: Mills College, UC Davis, UC San Diego, George Washington University, and the University of Oregon. With the University of the Arts program, I believe that Bennington College has fully embraced it now within its own MFA.

Low residency options still exist within 9 programs: Saint Mary's College of California, Bennington College, Montclair State, Hollins University, Jacksonville University, Wilson College, Point Park University, Texas A & M University, and University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

Below, I go state by state with program names. Hyperlinks go to each program's site. If any program has been omitted, please leave a comment below, and I will update the list. Or, sadly, if a program has stopped running, leave a comment below.

Degree titles and areas of focus vary: Dance, Creative Practice, Choreography, Choreographic Inquiry, Experimental Choreography, Performance...to name a few. Some degrees are full-time and others are part-time or low residency. Some MFA programs are intended for mid-career or established dancers. Many are 2 years in length, while quite a few listed 2.5-3 years as the duration of study.

This list is just a starting off point. I wish you the best with your research and inquiries. I myself completed my MFA in Dance: Creative Practice from Saint Mary's College from 2014-2016. I loved the low residency format. I had worked in the field for 17 years and appreciated graduate school as a time of deep reflection about those 17 years as well as new skill building.

I also am in the process of updating my running list on the blog of MA and PhD programs. Stay tuned.

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* denotes a low residency program

Alabama

• University of Alabama

Arizona

• Arizona State
• University of Arizona

California

• CalArts
• Saint Mary's College of California*
• UCLA
• Cal State Long Beach
• UC Irvine
• UC Riverside

Colorado

• University of Colorado Boulder
  

Florida

• Jacksonville University*
• Florida State

Hawaii

• University of Hawaii

Illinois

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Iowa

• University of Iowa

Maryland

• University of Maryland

Massachusetts

• Smith College

Michigan

• University of Michigan
• Wayne State University

Mississippi

• Belhaven University

Missouri

• Washington University in St. Louis

New Jersey

• Montclair State*
• Rutgers (currently listed as "on hiatus")

New Mexico

• University of New Mexico

New York

• Hunter College
• Long Island University
• NYU Tisch School of the Arts
• Sarah Lawrence College
• SUNY Brockport
• University of Buffalo

North Carolina

• University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• Duke University
  

Ohio

• Case Western Reserve University
• Ohio State

Oklahoma

• University of Oklahoma

Pennsylvania

• Point Park University*
• Temple University
• Wilson College*

Texas

• Sam Houston University
  
• Texas A & M University*
• Texas Woman's University
• University of Texas at Austin

Utah

• University of Utah

Vermont

• Bennington College*

Virginia

• George Mason University
• Hollins University*

Washington

• University of Washington

Wisconsin

• University of Wisconsin - Madison
• University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee*

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Searching for a Perspective in DIM3NSIONS

Passion Fruit Dance Company. Photo by Ben McKeown, courtesy of the American Dance Festival.

Searching for a Perspective in DIM3NSIONS

By Garth Grimball

The New York-based Passion Fruit Dance Company performed DIM3NSIONS, a “multimedia journey...exploring perception shifts and critical conversations,” at Meredith College as part of the American Dance Festival on June 14-15. The exploration was rich in movement but lacking in perspective.

Artistic Director Tatiana Desardouin was joined by five dancers and music producer/dj and sometimes dancer, Saadiq “The Last Musician” Bolden, in this full-length production that made liberal use of projection—text, animation, motion capture, photography.

The choreography was a blending of street and club styles, primarily house, breaking, and tutting with other styles and motifs interpolated throughout. The dancers wore denim colored jumpsuits with variations in styling.

DIM3NSIONS brought up many ideas but didn’t develop a clear take on them, and if the point was to remain illegible, that wasn’t clear either. The first section of the dance had two mannequin torsos downstage on carts. Projection was mapped onto each of them and at one point Desardouin and Nubian Néné danced behind them with their arms and heads filling in for the mannequins’ absent appendages. Later, the dancer Lady Ice drew on a downstage canvas as digital images swirled and evolved across the backdrop. Was there supposed to be a tension between what is human/human-made and what is virtual? Or were the combinations an aggregate of creativity and creating?

Photographs of the dancers swathed in fabric, styled and edited like a magazine spread, were projected onto the backdrop and used frequently as interludes between sections. At one point the score included sounds like camera shutters and the dancers crouched down and covered their faces. Were the gorgeous photos and the eschewing of photography meant to elicit an “I contain multitudes” ethos or were they unrelated?

Perhaps most confounding was the intimating towards but explicit avoidance of race. Late in the dance, four dog tags were projected onto the backdrop with the words Identity, Classism, Ableism, and lastly, a bunch of characters like a wifi password or the textual euphemism for a curse word, eg @!X2*. The choreography is not markedly different in this section so it is unclear what perspective shift is meant to be taking place, and what the unwritten word is meant to be. There is one white dancer in the company, Lauriane Ogay, and she is featured throughout DIM3NSIONS, with the exception of a section in which the question What if colonization didn’t exist? is projected behind the dancers. Is she a representative of colonization in the context of her absence? 

While the concepts in DIM3NSIONS were muddled, the dancing was strong. The ensemble never sagged energetically under the demands of 75 minutes of dancing to propulsive hooks and rhythms. The downbeats of the house footwork and the angles in the tutting maintained clarity in unison and solos. Néné in particular shined in her groundedness and ease into the groovier hooks in the score and the technical precision of her isolations. 

As is often the case when a choreographer is in their own ensemble work, DIM3NSIONS would benefit from an editor who is not in the production so the sum equals the parts.

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dancer based in Oakland. He is a regular contributor to Dance Media and SF Examiner/Nob Hill Gazette. He is the editor of ODC Dance Stories.

“Dancing with Bob,” Dancing in Time

“Set and Reset” (1983).
Choreography: Trisha Brown. Performers: Trisha Oesterling, Trisha Brown, and Wil Swanson.
Photographer: © Mark Hanauer

“Dancing with Bob,” Dancing in Time

By Garth Grimball

The Trisha Brown Dance Company has accomplished a heroic feat in producing “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham” with special guest Paul Taylor Dance Company. The project is in honor of Rauschenberg’s centennial and will tour nationally into 2026. Bringing together two dance companies to stage four works from three deceased choreographers with the original (and reconstructed) sets and costumes by one of the most famous visual artists of the twentieth century deserves applause on an administrative basis alone. Fortunately, the dancing deserved equal applause.

Opening the 2025 American Dance Festival season at Reynolds Theater, the program began with Brown’s Set and Reset (1983). Rauschenberg’s set was a UFO-ziggurat of semi-transparent white. Black and white television and media clips projected onto the structure. The side curtains were transparent black fabric with white lining. The set rose into the air and the seven dancers took the empty space like a spark to a fuse.

Describing the action and details of Brown’s dances can be challenging without metaphors. Her signature release technique and choreographic craft of overlapping motion provokes sensations as much as images. Rippling spines, folding joints, thrown limbs coalesce into energy evolving through space. Set and Reset is set to “Long Time No See” by Laurie Anderson, and her grooves and hooks perfectly match the propulsion of Brown’s choreography.

The dance and the dancing were so exciting that the set seemed inconsequential; if it were gone I don’t think it would be missed in terms of the experience of the dance. But seeing Brown’s work under televisual images did make me draw a comparison between her and film directors, specifically Robert Altman. Altman filmed large group scenes with overlapping conversations that blurred and obfuscated the meaning of each speaker, just as we would hear it in real life. In the absence of individual meaning, a sense of group dynamic, of world building emerged. There are solos and duets and trios within Set and Reset, but Brown’s deft sense of timing is Altmanesque: you don’t see everything, everything to see is there.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company shared two early works, 3 Epitaphs (1956) and Tracer (1962). 3 Epitaphs is a delightfully oddball haiku of a dance. Rauschenberg costumed the piece in black full-body unitards. The head coverings had reflective mirrors on the skulls, so the five dancers had no distinguishing features but can reflect like a disco ball. The music was early New Orleans Jazz recordings performed by the Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band. Taylor’s choreography used the sliding sounds of horns to punctuate moments of physical comedy. The dancers plodded forward with the spines curved far over their centers and their arms hanging low, or, skittered sideways with hips cocked back and arms bent like a praying mantis to the side. The dance evoked early American cartoons in its vocabulary and timing. 3 Epitaphs felt like something that wouldn’t be made today. Its oddness was refreshing.

Tracer is classic Taylor. There were parallel side assemblé, sternums lifted, high kicks with tilted torsos and attitude turns. James Tenney’s music was sparse, heightening the scrutiny of the dancers’ technical chops. Central to the dance is a solo Taylor made for himself that demanded a level of strength and technique that I imagine Taylor wanted to show off. Lee Duveneck met the demands well, as did Kristin Draucker, Jessica Ferretti and Payton Primer in choreography that takes the time to make sure you see all the choreography. Rauschenberg’s contribution was a set of one bicycle wheel. I’m not convinced of its impact.

The Brown company closed the program with Merce Cunningham’s Travelogue (1977). It was the dance that most realized the title “Dancing with Bob.” Rauschenberg’s set, Tantric Geography, is “an odd sort of trolley with a row of wooden chairs for seats. These are fixed between upturned bicycle wheels that don’t touch the ground. The dancers ride it as it rolls on hidden wheels, pulled by a rope” (NYT). And that’s just the opening. Two massive, colorful tapestries were dropped into the space. The dancers’ unitards were adjusted and added onto throughout the dance.

Travelogue is from the earlier part of Cunningham’s repertory in which most of the movement comes from the legs with arms that are mostly stationary. It is one of the dances infused with his and John Cage’s wry sense of humor. At one point the dancers enter with fabric hanging from the front and back of their pelvises. They hit a lunge and pulled the fabric wide like a peacock seduction and walked off. Cage’s Telephones and Birds was a score followed by three people who took turns calling customer service phone numbers and amplifying or muting their recorded messages.

The dancers were committed and adept performing Cunningham’s choreography, but as is often the case when companies stage his works, there was not enough time to embody the risk and depth available in his vocabulary. Spencer Weidie stood out in bringing a sense of boundlessness to a style that can feel very bound. Claude Johnson brought a cool calm to the iconic and loud solo in which the dancer has many empty aluminum cans strapped to their legs. The ensemble excelled in Cunningham’s unique style of partnering that is less a showcase of airtime or distance and more a play of limbs and touch.

“Dancing with Bob” is a thrilling time capsule of interdisciplinary collaboration. Time is the ultimate collaborator. In each dance time was changed by the skill of the choreographer. In every step time dissolved between all the dancers who keep these dances alive.

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dancer based in Oakland. He is a regular contributor to Dance Media and SF Examiner/Nob Hill Gazette. He is the editor of ODC Dance Stories.

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"

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."

 

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.