New Visions in Korean Dance: Kyoungil Ong and Hearan Chung create community and dances that inspire

Two major choreographic forces in the Bay Area’s Korean dance community offer their work to honor the 30th Anniversary of San Francisco’s Ethnic Dance Festival this month. Weekend One presents […]

Dynamic Adaptability: Change Management, Design Thinking, Failure, Power and the Participatory Ghetto

However in museums working with artists, the assumption that no one should understand the artist is frowned upon and therefore a different attitude about how to build the engagement. With […]

Major celebrations and successes meet the usual challenges of presenting new work

This past year was a time of big birthdays, initiatives, celebrations, and rebuilding in Bay Area dance. Outshining all in historical import, ambition, publicity, and yes, hype—some perpetuated by this […]

In Practice: Stephan Koplowitz on Making Site Work

When I was living in Naples, Italy, I produced a dance series called Site-Specific at Rising South, a cavernous bar in the city’s historic center. I was able to call […]

La Tania: A Flamenco Story

A dancer’s stage presence can be powerful enough to absorb the audience to a point where they forget the notion of time and place. La Tania, founder and Artistic Director […]

Degrees of Dance: Motivations for Pursuing an MFA or PhD

As university dance departments require that applicants for teaching positions hold terminal degrees, artists and writers are negotiating different paths to obtaining MFAs and PhDs. Interviewing five artists and scholars who […]

Teaching Honestly, Teaching Fearlessly: Two Decades of Luna

About halfway to this 20th landmark of Luna Dance Institute, I was asked to speak on a panel about careers in dance. During the Q&A, my mentor and teacher, June […]

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 […]

Giving Momentum to Community: Artistic Residency Programs in San Francisco

Choreographers are not alone in the search for space and time to work on their craft. The unique challenge for dancers, however, becomes finding organizations that “get it”—the creative process […]

Going Bicoastal: RAWdance Does a Triple Take

Photo by Hillary Goidell For fifteen years, under the banner of RAWdance, Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith have been teaching and producing work in San Francisco. Their leadership in […]