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 […]

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 […]

Review: Mobu’s “Illusion 2”

A cell phone went off near the end of MoBu Dance Group’s Illusion 2 on February 2, the second-to-last night of its two-week run at SomArts Cultural Center. The audience […]

Laugh and the World Smiles: c(h)ord premieres at YBCA

Humor is perhaps is the most unrecognized aspect in Shinichi Iova-Koga’s existential explorations of human oddities. Ame to Ame‘s immaculately timed encounters between Iova-Koga and long-time partner Yuko Kaseki—and three […]

Hearan Chung’s Eternal Dance: Review: February 23, 2008

I first met Hearan Chung six years ago. The dancer, recently arrived from South Korea, was living with her two children in an apartment in Millbrae, and I drove down […]

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 […]

Behind the Curtains: Everything you need to know about making it into the Ethnic Dance Festival, June 2008

Light jingles from brass bells of Indian dancers merge into the clank of the Philippine’s bamboo sticks, which provide the undertone to bellowing calls of the Congolese drums that resonate […]

KUNST-STOFF Celebrates 10 years

You can pronounce KUNST-STOFF with a little Germanic ‘sh’ added to the stoff and a very oo-sounding kunst, and you’ll still only be half-way in the know. Part-two is its […]

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 […]

What’s in a Name: The Legacy of Everybody’s Creative Art Center

The 1970s were a time in America when black people awakened to their African heritage and were taking on new names more fitting their history and characters. For dancer and […]