Image Description: Four dancers in a cluster in black costumes, looking upward with hands by their sternums.
From Blog Director Jill Randall:
Looking back at 2024, we covered 10 different projects on Life as a Modern Dancer. Thank you to writers Garth Grimball, Sarah Genta, Melissa Hudson Bell, Kimiko Guthrie, and Molly Rose-Williams for your thoughtful contributions. I also was honored to dip my toes into this writing pool, writing this year about three performances.
Molly Rose-Williams: CRUSH (January @ NOHSpace, SF)
The fourth wall breaking is critical to CRUSH’s success. Balloons are tossed into the audience in a peak of celebration. The audience is asked to raise a hand if you’ve ever had a crush, and to shimmy if you’ve been in love. The energy transfer between performer and audience is most alive when Rose-Williams plays with how much of herself she exposes to us. She expertly switches between flirting and withholding, between confessing and listening. The relational tension fuels the momentum of the work. - Garth Grimball
Plus, check out a short interview with Molly before the performances: Five Questions for Molly Rose-Williams about "CRUSH"
Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts: Put Away the Fire, dear (March @ ODC Theater, SF)
Ours is a time of references. The average smartphone user consumes more content in an hour than our ancestors did in their whole lives. Text, images, videos, sounds, and media all swaddle us in competition for attention and influence. Each piece of content begets a reference that begets another piece of content, and so on. Where is the creative signal amidst the referential noise?
On March 8-10, Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts presented “Put Away the Fire, dear” at ODC Theater in San Francisco. The evening-length dance theater overflows with references. Farrish grounds the concept in the visual language of film and cinematic references, but literature, music and visual arts are all packed into this kaleidoscopic epic into archives and erasure. - Garth Grimball
Carol Kueffer and ChingChi Yu: Undercurrents (March @ Western Sky Studio, Berkeley)
Both Melissa Hudson Bell and myself shared reflections about this project.
The program had a lot of heart but not a lot of fuss. It eschewed the trappings of fancy lights, projections, sets, or grandiose stage design and instead allowed the viewer to imaginatively fill in the blanks. Each piece was short and distinct enough that, bolstered by the external frame of Haig’s library adventures, this viewer resisted any traps of longing for something that wasn’t there and instead mused at what it would be to inhabit the represented world, and its associate, singular sort of life. Who would I be in that seaside moment of flipper flapping tomfoolery? How would I survive among the critters crawling in the night? What would it take for me to get out of my own head enough to joyfully thrive in movement? And, finally, what undercurrents might connect seemingly disparate environs, temporalities, or embodied states in a manner that could remind us of our interlocked, and yet not already written, fates. - Melissa Hudson Bell
Reflecting back on all three of Carol’s works, I appreciate the clarity of the movement, which I think really comes from the musicality in each dance. This clarity is seen through extending arms out into space, locomotor movement sweeping the stage, and gestures with fists and fingers pointing and percussive accents. We journey through water, being in community, and friendship/partnership. I take away from the experience feelings of presence, connection, and a bit of tenderness. I appreciated each dancer's full commitment and generosity offered to the audience. That is always a gift. - Jill Randall
Oaklash in REBIRTH: The Death of Drag (May @ Omni Commons, Oakland)
In one of my favorite transition scenes the ensemble moved through the space as a kind of emotion train. The performers shuffled in a single file line saying “chug-a-chug-a-chug-a” until one by one each shouted out an emotion that they all embodied. Like a Viola Spolin theater game the simple task prompted a wealth of interpretations. As a celebration of an artist and an artform, every emotion and every interpretation was like a mini tribute to the robust and multifaceted art of drag. - Garth Grimball
Emily Hansel: Study Hall (May @ iMPACt Center for Art & Dance, SF)
Coming Together and Connecting
Flexed foot
Smiles
Soft laughter
Gestures - swirling, fists
Dancers clasping hands
Sweepy floorwork on stomachs and backs
One second standing; the next moment smoothly on the floor
Gentle lifts
A return to physical contact, and nearness
Megan Lowe Dances: Just a Shadow (June @ Joe Goode Annex, SF)
Megan Lowe is prolific. In the past three years her company, Megan Lowe Dances, has produced or participated in 10 unique performances. On Friday night, Lowe and collaborators premiered Just A Shadow at the Joe Goode Annex as part of the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s 27th annual United States of Asian America Festival. Just A Shadow is a series of six duets on the theme of loss and healing. - Garth Grimball
Mia J. Chong's Eight/Moves: Season 1 (August @ Z Space, SF)
The three dances are simply stunning, and the dancers give 110% through and through. The craft and intention sweeps you in. Chong clearly has a vision. In our post-pandemic world, we have gotten so far removed from partner work and lifts; we have lived a few long years of isolation and contactless living. The humanness of the choreography - and coming back to partnering, touch, and lifts - helps us rekindle the idea of meaningful connections. - Jill Randall
Check out some audience responses about Eight/Moves here through One Good Quote.
Photo by Maximillian Tortoriello.
Image Description: Seven dancers pose in a group with fog low by their shins and feet.
FACT/SF's Summer Dance Festival (August @ ODC Theater, SF)
Summation Dance and FACT/SF performed excerpts from big-dancing group numbers. When will I be? is a sextet choreographed by Taryn Vander Hoop. The movement vocabulary evoked the workers in the 1927 film Metropolis—direct actions at a brisk, even tempo. The dance began with a voice over saying, “I’m not enough,” and, “I’ll never make it in the dance world.” I don’t know if Vander Hoop is externalizing insecurities, but When will I be? was a highlight of the program for its use of choreographic craft. Counterpoint, canon, unison, solos, and movement motifs were all employed. The dancers formed machine-like tableau, struck power poses, crumpled to the ground in head shaking to then slap the floor. The excerpt ended with a soloist removing their jumpsuit, ready to clock out. - Garth Grimball
SanSan Kwan and dNaga Dance Co: Threshold (October @ Mondavi Studio Theater, UC Davis)
Dancer/writer Kimiko Guthrie was in conversation with choreographers SanSan Kwan and Claudine Naganuma about their October performance, Threshold.
From the interview, Claudine Naganuma shared:
So how do we flip that narrative a little bit? I've been really pondering on what the trajectories are; what is the magic bullet or the antidote? What's the antidote to all of this anti-Asian hate? It’s not just up to Asians and Asian Americans. I feel like it's for all of us. We're in a time right now where we are inundated by so much injustice, and a lot of times I think we are at capacity and cannot actually process all of this.
I feel really privileged to be able to process this through art. One of the programs that dNaga offers is The Girl Project, as well as our Dance for Parkinson's Project. I feel like a lot of what we do with these programs is really about taking up space and giving permission for us to care for ourselves, so that we can have the capacity to care for others. I know I'm not the only person saying that out there right now. We all are really kind of realizing that the grind that we are doing, or the pace in which we are living, is not conducive to our personal freedom and liberation. So when we can care for ourselves and grow that gratitude and capacity to care for ourselves, I think then we can work in unity with others, in solidarity, making grassroots change. The seeds of that change are liberation and freedom and care and love–and I know a lot of people don't like to talk about love. It's a weird word for people. But it is powerful.
Molly Rose-Williams and Aviva Rose-Williams: Game Time (October @ ODC Theater, SF)
We’ve always been close, but this process has demanded an entirely new kind of intimacy between us—one that blends the personal, professional, and creative. At times, this looks like unarmoring ourselves even beyond the levels we’d reached before—a kind of rigorous (desperate?) humility and self-reflection. At other times, it’s asked that we build new walls—ones we’ve never needed before—in order to find ways of unlearning what we think we know about each other, and make way for discovering each other as creative colleagues, professional collaborators. - Molly Rose-Williams
Sarah Genta also wrote a post-performance reflection:
Round One. Molly and Aviva head to a 20 ft Chinese pole center stage. They introduce movement styles that will blanket the evening and will increase in complexity and risk. I am lured by the blend of aerial, acrobatic, sporty, and modern inspired movement. They are smooth and circular, floating and jumping around the pole, which is both something to climb and something like a narrow, cylindrical wall, off which they push and pull into back rolls onto the ground or over each other. Here and there licking arms reach in unison for another grab. This circusy intro is followed by a sweet hug and simple counterbalance in low light and hushed sound. They hold hands and lean carefully back. I am reminded how sophisticated, while modest, of an action it is. Ever flowing and ever sensitive, the negotiation of weight feels awfully emblematic of the greater activity of being together on a team.
Image Description: Four dancers clump together in a full-bodied group hug in a spotlight on an otherwise dark, blue stage.
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