Jill Togawa’s Dreams and Driveways

On July 28 Jill Togawa, Director of Purple Moon Dance Company, and I held a conversation in my Berkeley home regarding her upcoming site specific performance work, When Dreams Are Interrupted. Although I’ve never been audience to Purple Moon Dance Company, Jill and I were mutually interested in each other’s work and began a friendship […]

The Trinity of Souls and Mother Pine

The 14th Episode of House/Full of BlackWomen: New Chitlin Circuitry: Reparations Vaudeville The Trinity of Souls and Mother Pine Installation and Song/Poem/Prayer Circle. An installation for public meditation for breathing new life into Deep East Oakland in the form of the divine black fem/mother and the phases of the moon who reminds us of our rooted […]

In Conversation: Maurya Kerr and Alaja Badalich

You are reading excerpts from Maurya Kerr and Alaja Badalich’s recorded conversation. Listen to the conversation. Transcript of the full conversation

Exploring Visible Intimacy with Ben Levy

With major support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Dancers’ Group has commissioned Benjamin Levy, artistic director of LEVYdance, to create a dance-video performance installation in San Francisco later this month. Levy has been awarded the honors of “Top 25 Choreographers to Watch” by Dance Magazine, and a Goldie Award by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. […]

Feminist Space in Dance: hers and hers asks questions with little seismic’s Katie Faulkner

Hey, We’re hers and hers. A new queer feminist dance collective in San Francisco We (Courtney King and myself) craft dance-theater with strong woman-identified performers, we write epic poems that make their way into our dances, we blog, we interview our local communities as fieldwork, we conduct an ongoing 35mm film portrait series, we Instagram, […]

Crossroads: Part I: dancers

This article is the first in a three-part series on the transformative experiences of Bay Area dancers, choreographers and dance teachers. WHILE A FRESHMAN IN COLLEGE, I found myself at a crossroads, trying to decide whether to stay in school or drop out to dance. I sought advice from one of my beloved teachers, asking […]

Curating a Collision

“It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determine the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.” —Jacques Rancière What are the terms of art making? What are the terms of its presentation, performance and reception? What are the […]

The Symmetry Project: A non-linear, graphic embodiment of our performance process

LINEAR NARRATIVE INTRODUCTION JESS: Over the last three years Maria and I have created a series of studies we collectively named The Symmetry Project. They have been developed and performed in the (mostly unfunded) nooks and crannies of our dancing lives: studios, residencies and other altogether unimportant-sounding situations in San Francisco, Copenhagen, Budapest, Dublin and […]

CRITICAL DIALOGUES: Rachel Howard and Scott Marlowe

What if, rather than writing a review, a critic sat down with a choreographer to have a two-way conversation about the work? That’s the experiment behind Critical Dialogues. For this first installment, LEVYdance associate director Scott Marlowe met for coffee with critic Rachel Howard to talk about the June 26, 2014 performance of his first work, Soar. RACHEL […]

SPEAK: To Witness and Re-member: Movement Practices with Elders

As dancers over 65, we have been leading free movement and dance explorations in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery for the past four years as part of our project Walking in Witness to Life and Loss. Our collaboration continues to evolve as we mine the complex intersections of life, death and dance within the vibrant natural life […]