Calendar

Emily Hansel presents: Four by Four

Choreographed by Emily Hansel and co-created by dancers Alex Carrington, Mia J. Chong, Shareen DeRyan, and Chelsea Reichert, Four by Four is a messy attempt at refusing productivity. Since beginning work in November 2021, the artists have been practicing the radical act of not knowing. They’ve been fighting their capitalist tendencies, taking their time, embracing messiness, and prioritizing adaptability. Featuring original music composed by Sophia Cotraccia and Bed Juodvalkis and lighting design by Thomas Bowersox, Four by Four is a contemporary dance that is simultaneously light-hearted, serious, ordinary, and one-of-a-kind.

State of Play Festival: Rosanna Tavarez/LA DANSA DANSA

Piece x Piece presents Tavarez’s mother’s immigration story to explore the challenges of transitioning from one territory to a drastically new one. It toggles between the escapist, rags-to-riches fantasy narratives of telenovelas and the heartbreaking reality of the immigrant experience, utilizing sewing as a metaphor for the deconstruction of “The American Dream”.

State of Play Festival: Kendra Kimbrough Dance Ensemble

The Golden Thread, a multimedia dance production, takes us on a journey through  different worlds wherein unique timing and tempos are essential to the livelihood of its  people. Each world reveals a distinct key that unlocks their barrier to momentum, a  special vehicle on which ease and magical alignment take place. 

State of Play Festival: Megan Lowe Dances

Piece of Peace explores mixed-race Asian American Pacific Islander experiences with an artistic team composed of folks who identify in this way. Through thoughtful text, soulful song, and dynamic dancing, Megan Lowe Dances invites collaborators to share stories of fractured selves and longings to belong, and co-create a supportive environment for connection.

State of Play Festival: Detour

QUAKE is a new live performance that destigmatizes the topic of mental health and promotes community resilience within the Asian American community. The multidisciplinary project fuses new media, experimental performance, and alternative healing practices.

June Lobby Night

Free art openings on the first Friday of every month that add a dash of dance with live performance, open mics, and an open floor for movement artists.

Faces of State of Play
Art Opening

For the month of June, the ODC Theater Gallery will feature self-portraits by the artists of the State of Play festival. Attend Lobby Night to celebrate the kick off of the exhibit and see the faces of State of Play.

State of Play Festival: little house dance

Hour Wolf in the Cavern is a collaborative dance work between Portland, Maine based choreographers Riley Watts and Heather Stewart. An iterative performance on states of mourning through the physical mind and the cyclical nature of madness, Hour Wolf is an arrangement of choreographic concepts, dances, objects, sound, and spatial design. These choreographic elements can be recontextualized, and are available for extraction and recontextualization for each future location of performance. 

State of Play Festival: OYSTERKNIFE

Premiered at Surge, UC Santa Cruz's Afrofuturism Festival, this excerpt of the triptych closing piece m|ou|f aims to reclaim Black iconicity from the maw of celebrity culture. Having explored the legacies of violence and faith for blaQ communities in our prior projects, mouth full of sea and mouth//full, our latest collaboration is a meditation on visibility, opacity, sexuality, and the desire of & for queer(ed) Black stars. Using drag, ritual masquerade, original music, and choreography, we investigate the voices that made us question ourselves in the most delicious and fruitful of ways.

State of Play Festival: little house dance

Hour Wolf in the Cavern is a collaborative dance work between Portland, Maine based choreographers Riley Watts and Heather Stewart. An iterative performance on states of mourning through the physical mind and the cyclical nature of madness, Hour Wolf is an arrangement of choreographic concepts, dances, objects, sound, and spatial design. These choreographic elements can be recontextualized, and are available for extraction and recontextualization for each future location of performance. 

State of Play Festival: Liv Schaffer & the Dance Generators

Big Red House of Rest is a work in progress reimagining paradigms of the nuclear family and enlivening communication pathways between generations. Devised in collaboration with the performers, Big Red examines ingredients of vitality and decrepitation present in our current systems of succession, illuminating what we must ultimately lay to rest.

State of Play Festival: Nina Haft & Company

How do we take measure of the distances between us? The Spaces Between explores the worlds of choice, mutuality, touch and pack behavior in humans/animals. Move closer.

State of Play Festival: Erin Yen/Dragons Dance

Paper Trails is a dynamic exploration of the unique communication pathways adopted by immigrants on Angel Island in the early 20th century. This new dance work features a range of movement drawn from imagination and personal stories, as well as inspiration from Erin Yen’s mixed-race lineage.  Artists Lucia Flexer-Marshall, Abigail Hinson and Sawako Ogo share the stage to research how communities may be built through fragmented interactions. The records have burned. A new history may form and we can write it, one secret message at a time.

State of Play Festival: Dance Monks (Mexico/SF Bay)

Fire in the Mountain is dedicated to Eric Koziol, a beloved San Francisco-based filmmaker who passed away this past year. Working in collaboration with DANCE MONKS for one year, the group and Eric explored the intimacy of working with the camera as another dancer. In this experimental sharing, the mythic characters of the film come to life in a live performance ritual that moves through the thresholds of the seen and unseen.

State of Play Festival: Nicole Peisl

handle is a choreographic look at subtle and not so subtle ways of being active, present and involved. A person calling their dog, a tennis player waiting for the serve, a pedestrian adjusting to the flow of people. Attention and feeling, skillful bodily movement. We sense, we handle.

State of Play Festival: James Graham Dance Theatre

Social Males, a new dance theatre piece, looks at the effects of how males are socialized in our culture. Generally speaking, not being able to cry, to ask for help, or to be taught how to express emotions has a detrimental effect on all of our lives. The goal is to recognize and dismantle these patterns as a crucial step in ending patriarchy and war-focused violent culture.

State of Play Festival: MKArts

Octavia's Brood: Riding the Ox Home (2015) is an immersive, site-expansive dance work inspired by the prophetic envisioning of science fiction author, Octavia Butler, and abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. It borrows its title from the collection of "short stories for social justice movements", co-edited by Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown.

State of Play Festival: Kim Ip/KRIMM'S DANCE PARTY

you don't deserve us is a dance piece about desire, visibility, and age, and how age representation changes when visibility is the goal. Drawing inspiration from collected interviews from Queer and non-Queer elders, Kim Ip will present a dance work that delves into desirability, sexiness, and lust.

State of Play Festival: Bianca Cabrera/Blind Tiger Society

Fever Dreams is a dizzying dance spectacle based on Mexican folk Artist Pedro Linares’ Cartoneria known as Alebrije. Ornate and vibrantly colored costumes decorate dancers as they transform into Linares’ mythical creatures who are as loud and unapologetic as the heat hallucinations that sired them. Wild imagery and sensuous yet eerie movements are the backbone of these birds of paradise and they haunt the space with stories of longing, lust and looming fears.

State of Play Festival: SAMMAY Peñaflor Dizon

How do we move from a perpetual stasis of survival to palpable thrivation? In a world that has forgotten its inherent responsibility to the earth and each other, ritual for thrivation no. 2 poses ancestral reverence, intergenerational healing, and urban-indigenous futurism as urgent and fundamental to alleviating our current climate crisis.

ODC Health: Exploring and Embracing the Mind of a Young Dance Athlete

ODC Health hosts free monthly educational workshops regarding dancer health. The facilitators, topics, and target audiences will vary each month as we hope to provide information to our large range of ODC participants.

How do you react when things don’t go as planned or when life is full of change? In this workshop, resident physicians in the UCSF Department of Pediatrics, Dr. Tiana Woolridge and Dr. Faustine Ramirez, will share their experience with mental illness during their time as NCAA Division I athletes. They will discuss their unique perspective as both physicians and former high-level athletes on mental health and eating disorders among young athletes. Participants will receive concrete tools, strategies, and resources that are tailored for young dance athletes to improve mental wellness, resiliency, coping, and thus performance and life.