Abhinaya Anniversary: Abhinaya Dance Company of San Jose, Celebrates 30

2010 marks 30 years of performances and instruction in the Bay Area by Mythili Kumar, who founded the company in 1980. Abhinaya’s performances showcase the ancient living tradition of classical […]

Deep Roots, Many Branches: Black Choreographers Festival, Jan/ Feb 2008

It is 1992 and Katherine Dunham, the renowned dance artist and anthropologist has begun a hunger strike. The woman whose performing career is synonymous with theatricalizing African dance for the […]

To Be A Traveler in Your Own City, Oct 2008

Where would you take out of town visitors if they arrived today? What’s “interesting” about San Francisco, something tourists travel the world to see? How would you compose an insider’s […]

Finding the Way: Kumu Hula Makuakane Choreographs the Story of Ancestral Navigation

When World Arts West executive director Julie Mushet approached Patrick Makuakane with the idea of commissioning a dance piece based on Hawaiian astronomy and Maui, the ancestral Polynesian navigator, the […]

Moving Arts is Moving Up: New Space in the East Bay

A drive through the industrial parks on Whitman Road in Concord looks, frankly, unpromising. But dance has a way of making a home in the unlikeliest of places, and out […]

Working in The Garage: Tools to Help Carve Out Space for Contemporary Dance

Contemporary dance has a long history of being developed on the fringes of the cultural landscape. Choreographers have traditionally found space to make new work in basements, lofts, parking structures […]

Intimate Revolutions: The Choreography of Anne Bluethenthal

Persistently, Anne Bluethenthal (pronounced Bleedenthal) has been making dances in San Francisco for 24 years. In a series of email exchanges and telephone conversations I tried to excavate the evolving […]

What Inspires You?

Wanting a bit of winter inspiration, Dancers’ Group sent a request to a variety of dancers, administrators, choreographers, designers, artistic directors, funders, and even some politicians, asking them to respond […]

Improvising the Change We Need

Dancers who improvise together are onto something. We muster every bit of social intelligence and multidisciplinary craft to invent new worlds. The Bay Area is rich with improvisational forms. Among […]

Dance Theater on the Eve of the Election

“It’s just been very intriguing to me, I didn’t plan it this way: it always seems as if the support and the interest of the venues seem to come forward […]