Arts Leadership and a Healthy Arts Community

I think it was sometime back in the ’90s when the arts field first started talking about a crisis of future leadership. We looked around and saw a LOT of […]

When Dance Hits Music: Two choreographers and a string quartet creatively collide in “StringWreck”

“Charlie and I recognize that we might be inviting catastrophe in terms of trying new things with new people in new situations where there’s just very little known ground,” says […]

The Emperor’s Old Clothes?: Reflections on Thirty Years of the Ethnic Dance Festival

Upfront: here is my disclaimer and confession. I owe much to the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival (EDF), which marks 30 years of presenting this June. I have lived on […]

WestWave Dance Festival Artists Speak

In addition to our interview with Joanna Haigood, we asked the 45 artists participating in this year’s DanceWaves and Film Night to offer up a first person perspective—or in grant-speak, […]

Expanding Expressions: Madhuri Kishore brings Kuchipudi to the Landscape of Bay Area Indian Dance

Madhuri Kishore School of Kuchipudi / photo courtesy of school Traversing the landscape of Indian dance forms practiced in the San Francisco Bay Area, it can be easy for the […]

Gaining Perspectives, Changing Perceptions – ARTICLE #2: Our World in Constant Motion

Editors Note: In the December 2016 issue of In Dance Farah Yasmeen Shaikh wrote about her experiences as a Pakistani Muslim-American woman Kathak artist and her work teaching and performing […]

A Red Thread: Creating Dance Across Cultures and Politics, Sept 2008

San Francisco, May 9, 2008 Abby Chen of the Chinese Cultural Center, invited me to create a site-specific improvisation on the bridge that crosses through Chinatown into downtown San Francisco. […]

In The Know: Gaining Confidence with Arts Advocacy

As I sat in the back of an almost-full Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Novellus Theater for the SF Mayoral Arts Forum this past August, I felt a palpable […]

In Practice: Colleague-Criticism

In 2009, I published an essay in this publication (In Dance) about a work by choreographer Randee Paufve, a dear friend of mine. I didn’t know it at the time, […]

Turning Point: Re-Defining Bay Area Ballet

BALLET IS DEAD, bemoans dance historian Jennifer Homans in her latest opus, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. Homans grew up in the Balanchine era and now finds the contemporary […]