Life as a Modern Dancer

Juilliard’s “New Dances” Showcases Strings and Socks

Juilliard’s “New Dances” Showcases Strings and Socks

By Garth Grimball

Alicia Graf Mack, dean and director of Juilliard Dance, introduced the department’s “New Dances” program with now-familiar caveats: dance rehearsals followed public health guidelines; in-person and Zoom process; casts of no more than 8 dancers; no touching or partnering; lastly, within restrictions creativity flourishes. If only that were true of this program. The dancing is virtuosic and passionate. The dances are bland and long.

Four choreographers, Tiler Peck, Sonyah Teh, Bobbi Jene Smith, and Matthew Neenan, created original works on the students of the Juilliard Dance Department. Are there obstacles this new generation of dancers can’t handle? 

Dancing for camera - check. Creating work under the confines of health precautions antithetical to dance making - check. Ignoring the swamp-face from strenuous activity in a mask to the point of seeming like it’s totally natural - check. Their verve and commitment to dance inspires.

Peck’s “Broad and Free” builds vocabulary out of attitude turns, enveloppé​, and port de bras above the head. The choreography follows Caroline Shaw’s piano and violin composition, never going against the music, but cruising in the wake of its melancholy. The structure and staging have the forward-facing unison common to competition dances. At one point the music slips into a mazurka and Peck quotes Balanachine’s “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.”

For “End, Middle, Beginning” Sonya Teh brings the viewer into the piece with cinema-verite-style filming. The camera moves through the wings onto the stage and out into the audience. For the rest of the piece the viewpoint is mostly static with crossfades as transitions. Group floorwork interrupted by standing solos define the dance. The interruptions lack the punch of creating a ceiling and breaking it, feeling more like a knock on the attic door. The somber music of Son Lux dulls Teh’s creative ideations on the Graham-Gaga lineage.

Speaking of Gaga, Bobbi Jene Smith’s “Ways of Listening” is a parade of solos overflowing with the pelvic floor and energetic mania endemic to the technique. Smith’s choreography and staging is the most dynamic in its use of the theater space. Thankfully she goes against the Nico Muhly cello (more strings) solo played live on stage. “Ways of wanting to be heard” is a more apt description of the dance. Soloists center the action while the rest of the cast stand still observing. The lunges, turns, gestures, and leaps become shouts into the void because of the static listening. Smith breaks the only-8-dancers rule in her climax. Twenty one bodies fill the stage in a tightly structured mix of unison and variations.

Matthew Neenan’s “The Solo 7,” set to String (!) Quintets by Mozart, has the idiosyncrasies of a dance made 10 years ago. Remember between 2009 to 2013 when every contemporary dance had the “flick” gesture (arms unfurl out and snap quickly at the wrist)? “The Solo 7” is of the era when ballet choreographers decided to incorporate the “flick” and other contemporary dance gestures into classical vocabulary. The dance has three costume changes: muted pedestrian, monochrome floor-length dresses, unison brown and black ensembles. The sartorial variation has little effect on the mood or tone of the piece.

Other than being set to strings, all of the dances have one commonality: socks. When did the mid-ankle length sock become the contemporary dance uniform, like pointe shoes to ballet? Each dance used the exact same type of socks, no variation in length or material. I love dancing in socks. It’s comfortable. Socks signify a coziness that contradicts the groundedness of modern dance, the connection to the earth. The Juilliard dancers move with precision and abandon. But through the screen and through the socks, the weight of a body floats away.

New Dances: Edition 2020-21 is available to stream for free on the Juilliard YouTube channel for 1 year.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the Reference Desk podcast and is the co-director of Wax Poet(s) performance collective.

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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.

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

 

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.

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

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

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Together and Connecting

Flexed foot

Smiles

Soft laughter

Gestures - swirling, fists

Dancers clasping hands

Sweepy floorwork on stomachs and backs

One second standing; the next moment smoothly on the floor

Gentle lifts

 

A return to physical contact, and nearness

- Jill Randall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Genta also wrote a post-performance reflection:

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

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

Game Time Brings It

 

Aviva Rose-Williams and Molly Rose-Williams. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Game Time Brings It
By Sarah Genta

Like boxers in their pre-match corner, Aviva and Molly Rose-Williams are commiserating and getting psyched. Aviva chops Molly’s shoulders, pats down her back, gluts, hips. They switch. It’s Aviva’s turn. Reciprocal psych. As folks trickle to their seats and the siblings bounce and shake, pre-show messages set the scene: “Here come the athletes warming up on the pitch! These twins were invited to compete at the last minute today.” The announcers that will carry us through the show (Molly and Aviva’s pre-recorded voices recast as athletic commentators) invite us to cheer at any moment during the event. I, a willing participant, love that. In a track-runner-esque warm-up drill, the twins bop in unison around the stage. Their feet tangle accidentally. They exchange looks and giggle as they regain shared rhythm, voicelessly agreeing that “welp, tonight’s show could be wonky…” It’s one of many moments that punctuates the multipart world we’re in – simultaneously sitting in some far-off arena, cheering for a favorite team, and also right here in the theater, with familiar and favored people. As performers, they are both so completely sturdy and set (they have to be, as they will execute movement that seems to mock gravity). But also they flail, committed to their comedy, both with choreographed humor and with reflexive “winks” to us as they play in real time. 

The pressure and excitement of the match is quickly revealed as the announcers relay the “bios” of each competitor. Molly left her last loss with her tail between her legs. Her confidence is about as stout as, well…a floppy changement and quivering horse lips. Aviva is a “silver brute. Headstrong. But lacking.” She always finishes matches in second place, but she is unwaveringly determined. We are meant to see the duo as honorable, tested, decently formidable. Yet there is welcomed folly in their hypothetical glory. Molly and Aviva gaudily flex, clap, overstate squished up game-faces, and pump their arms, hyping us up for the coming spectacle. “It’s almost game time folks!” 

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.

Though not outlined by the Rose-Williams makers, I experienced the show in three more rounds, plus what can only be read as a half-time banana cabaret…a delicacy I will leave to your imagination and first-hand pleasure someday. The whole evening’s setup presented a constant negotiation of the game itself – complex physical feats – and the sisters’ management of the game. Lights and sound assisted the bounce from external to internal worlds: moving in and out of a bright, full wash of the stage for game time, to a dim blueish black for processing time. Soundscapes of stadium hollers and rock jams would switch to soft, coiling Spanish guitar, for example. The performers shifted so regularly from one to the other that I kept thinking about the proximity of the internal/external ventures in a situation like this: the emotional trial is never won. It is never not a part of the game. Skill and focus, our head, our heart, our relationship(s) are all in a ring of their own, jockeying for prime attention. 

Aviva Rose-Williams and Molly Rose-Williams. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Round Two struck me as Star Spangled Snack Time, where Molly and Aviva’s knack for slapstick physical humor shines. The competitors stand in a ceremonial line. They feign honor for a distant flag, while not-so-sneakily passing a banana between them. I mean, players gotta refuel. Shortly, they release all podium etiquette and stuff their faces with something resembling corn nuts. Their snacking grows into a raucous, earnest game of trying to toss a nut into the other’s mouth, and we cheer when they get it. And cheer again when Aviva tosses one to an audience member who gets it! A condescending “interviewer” (played by Molly) interrupts their merriment by asking Aviva about buried doubts and about her obsessive ethos around winning. Aviva is able to squeeze out a couple meager responses between the food in her cheeks. But the sisters need to get back to the game. A whistle blows, the two shift into a promenade for the fans, blowing kisses, thumbing up, pointing up to the crowd after pounding their chests. 

Ding! Round Three. Perfection and partnership. Molly and Aviva head back to the pole. They take turns nailing labyrinthine stunts with complicated, upside-down entries and dismounts. For this round, they have to stick each and every toe hold, hand placement, and leg crossing. After each trick, they step back to their “on deck” spots, waiting for either a bell (success! whew!) or a buzz (fuck.). A crux of the piece begins to surface. After multiple attempts, Molly doesn’t hit the marks. She gets increasingly down. The lights darken with her. It’s real pain and disappointment. She tried so hard. “I can’t do it.” Molly hunches forward, head down, and leaves the pole to manage this setback. Aviva follows and tenderly catches Molly’s heart, applying just enough pressure to send her back to upright. “No, I’m not good enough. I shouldn’t be here.” Down she goes, shoulders now shivering with theatrical cries. Aviva catches her heart again, righting her to stand. The tug-of-war for Molly’s wellbeing swells into foolery. Plunging down and boinging up goes Molly, faster and faster. She stretches her mouth into hyperbolic “crying shapes” as her shoulders bounce harder and higher. Aviva’s hand is less careful now, more obligatory, and she looks at us with an eye-rolling “seriously?” face. Aviva bounces Molly’s sobbing spine like a basketball. I am chuckling at its silly brilliance. They let us know we can laugh (though they are not right now), after our brief but stinging glimpse into the venomous self-measuring we all do at some point, in comparison to our partners, colleagues, former selves, or our own expectations. 

Aviva shows us, not Molly, her frustration about this extra support, or maybe about how much time it’s taking. She needs to get back to the game. She lets out a full lipped, full cheeked breath. Her palms tightly swipe back across her scalp to scrub away her annoyance. Aviva needs Molly to compete. And Molly needs Aviva to regain composure. Molly is still down, her shoulders rounded, head drooping, arms crossed. Aviva knows what to do. She knows this person and this partnership. She walks over, takes out one of Molly’s tucked away hands, and molds it like play-doh into a fist. She pumps Molly’s elbow back near the side ribs and mutters in Molly’s ear – quietly enough to speak directly to Molly’s inner critic, but audibly enough for us to hear – “yesss.” It’s fabulous. Then the other arm. Peel it out of the slump, mold the play-doh fist, pump the elbow, whisper-shout “yesss!” Molly’s despondence ever so slightly releases its grip. Aviva continues. Molded fist, elbow pump, whisper shout “yeaah!” Fist, pump, shout, raise Molly’s arms overhead this time for “yaahhh!” Aviva appeals to the audience to join in this buttressing. Molly labors through some flexes. This recovery is serious work but, boy, Molly’s really starting to beam again. It’s giving fake-it-till-you-make-it, and it’s working on me too. Woo! You’ve got this! Eventually, our protagonists are jumping and growling and heading back to the pole. They eat up the pitch in a stunningly amoeba-like partner sequence around the pole, bellies invisibly tethered. Tethered. Then taking turns again, climbing and wrapping the pole in impressive configurations. They are encouraged. “This is why we train!” they say. “Always believe!” “Keep dreaming, cuz we’re amazing!” It’s true. And it’s droll and sarcastic. Sour even, scalding. I can feel both the stimulation and the artificiality of these familiar platitudes. That mixture, and the mixture of advanced and absurd movement, and the psychological punches thrown by the interviewers, work together to show the twins’ nimble ability to both celebrate and critique intensely competitive culture. 

In the evening’s final moments, which I’ve deemed the Waning of Winning, prerecorded narratives flood the space. They are stories gathered from the Rose-Williams’ friends and community about experiences with competition, appetizing bits of memories and insights. As the stories float on, Molly and Aviva are coaxed down stage. At a snail’s pace, Molly creeps and climbs all over Aviva, cartwheeling, perching, sliding, and rolling. Eventually planted behind her sister, Molly sends her arms through Aviva’s and around the space they go, in an ambling, leaning sort of tango. It is beautifully interdependent, and seems to declare, “your arms are my arms. We lean on one another, and that is both necessary and precarious.” The pesky and persistent “interviewers” break up the moment again. That external eye. “Aviva” grills Molly this time about humiliation, messing up in front of people, “what makes you sure you can do this?” “Molly” jabs back with questions about obsessive dedication to a task. They snake back and forth with the mic, sparing with bitter inquiries about loss, success, and the meaning of a life so devoted to “just a game.” After this emotional slugfest, they finally have a rift. Molly actually leaves. Aviva stays to prove (to us? To herself?) just how much she belongs in this ring. She pulls off what seem to be the most complicated and confounding maneuvers yet on the pole. Crazy-ass tumbles and stalls, sideways leg whirls, upside down coils, catching herself inches from the ground. Equally forceful as it is fluid and assured. We gasp and cheer. But after a few moments, Aviva feels her oneness. She calls out for Molly, who returns, and with a grin, changes a boom box tape from applauding crowds to a sort of bugle charge. Molly’s departure, in terms of the arc of the story, feels bumpy and squeezed in at the end. And I think an opportunity is missed to explore the richness of return from being apart for the first time all evening. But it does feel something like reconciliation as, apprehensive but together, they step up to the final leg of the big game. 

We don’t know the outcome of the match for our players, and of course we don’t need to. What lingers for me are the saliences of being in extensive partnership. Disappointment in ourselves in the face of our mates, concealed frustration, or herculean encouragement are all smushed inside the mutual benefit of continuation. To stay in “the game” we often have to sharply question, or step to the side for a bit, or sneak over a snack, or catch our other’s chest and ease them upright. We’ve got this. 

 

Sarah Genta is a dancer, teacher, and writer. Sarah spent ten years performing with multiple Bay Area companies, writing about dancers and companies she relished most, and teaching in many Bay Area schools and studios, regularly at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. Though she's relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, Sarah continues to dance with Andrew Merrell's Slack Dance. She is making new material with local dance artist, Elizabeth Luse, and she has begun working for Chell Parkins and the UW Dance Exchange to develop dance education programming in Wisconsin.

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Related posts:

Preseason Play-By-Play: “Game Time” In Process
CriticalMasses: 8x8x8 (January 24, 2019)

 

 

 

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

 

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.