Walking Distance Dance Festival-SF Returns in June

ODC Theater's fourth annual smorgasbord of dance, the Walking Distance Dance Festival-SF, returns for a fourth year with samplings of dance from around the Bay Area and the nation. Over two days, Friday, June 5 to Saturday, June 6, ODC will present three programs of paired artists and a free, site-adaptive performance. Featured artists include Amy Seiwert/Imagery, Gerald Casel Dance, Jess Curtis/Gravity, Namita Kapoor, ODC/Dance, RAWdance and Gallim Dance in its Bay Area debut.

"ODC Theater's 2015 season explores the theme of home and finding one's place in the world," says ODC Deputy Director Christy Bolingbroke. "I'm proud that this year's Festival includes several artists who call ODC home -- not only our flagship dance company ODC/Dance, but ODC School teacher and choreographer Namita Kapoor, and current as well as former Artists-in-Residence Amy Seiwert and RAWdance. Of course, it's always exciting to introduce a new company to Bay Area audiences, and this time that's Brooklyn-based Gallim Dance. Finally, the festival's program includes Jess Curtis and Gerald Casel, two artists who raise pertinent questions around feelings of dislocation, and the ways in which making a dance is related to making a home."

In easy walking distance of one another, the B.Way Theater inside ODC Theater, Studio B in ODC Dance Commons and St. Charles School of San Francisco serve as the venues for the Festival. On each program, works will be performed twice, with some members of the audience starting in the Theater, and others in the Commons. Tickets are $30 per program; a Festival Pass to all three programs is $65. The performances by ODC/Dance at the St. Charles School are free. Tickets may be purchased online at odcdance.org/wddf or by calling 415-863-9834, Monday through Friday from 12 - 3pm.

PROGRAM A| Friday, June 5 | 8:00 pm
Since 2012 RAWdance has been commissioning short duets from a group of accomplished choreographers all working on the West Coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle. Company directors and former ODC Theater Artists-in-Residence Wendy Rein and Ryan Smith have collected the pieces under the name Double Exposure, and ODC will premiere the completed project in summer 2016. In the meantime, a series of six duets will be on view at the WDDF-SF this year. Smith and Rein will perform works by Seattle-based Kate Wallich, Los Angeles-based duo casebolt and smith, as well as works by Joe Goode, Amy Seiwert, Shinichi and Dana Iova-Koga, and Ann Carlson. In an earlier showing, the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed the work in progress a "hit...carried...off with tremendous enthusiasm."

Joining RAWdance on the Festival's opening program is Gallim Dance, and ODC is proud to present the New York-based company's Bay Area debut. The company has been praised for its "voluptuously polyglot choreography" (The New York Times) and its "lush, fierce dancing punctuated with thrilling bouts of kinetic wit" (Arts + Culture (Texas)). For WDDF-SF, Gallim will perform Pupil Suite by company Founder and Artistic Director Andrea Miller. Performed to the music of Israeli band Balkan Beat Box, Pupil Suite is a joyous romp for eight dancers that, in the words of the company, "plays with the madness of imagination and the ecstasy of movement."

PROGRAM B| Saturday, June 6 | 4:00 pm Among the outstanding qualities of Amy Seiwert's choreography are "a purity, an honesty, and a deep swell of emotion" (Huffington Post). An artist-in-residence at ODC Theater since 2012, Seiwert will restage a work titled Static that premiered to audience acclaim at the 2009 Left Coast Leaning Festival in San Francisco. Set to a rich soundscape by Zoe Keating, Steve Reich and Gyorgy Ligeti, Static explores the polarizing forces and interpersonal friction that lead to isolation. Imagery company dancers Rachel Furst, Annali Rose, Jessica Wagner, John Speed Orr and Brandon Freeman will perform. Namita Kapoor wowed audiences at ODC's Music Moves Festival last summer. Back by popular demand, the Bollywood teacher and choreographer returns for another engagement of Hindu Swing, paying homage to the legacy of the father of theatrical Jazz dance, Jack Cole. Hindu Swing illuminates the historical relationship between Indian and Western music and dance as they were ingeniously blended in the choreography of Cole, a student and principal dancer of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, who went on to study the Indian style of Bharatanatyam before going to work for Broadway and Hollywood. An ensemble of almost two dozen dancers and musicians will perform Hindu Swing.

PROGRAM C| Saturday, June 6 | 8:00 pm A relatively new transplant to Santa Cruz, Gerald Casel has in the last few years been inspired to make dances on the theme of dislocation. After 23 years in New York and a year in Germany, the choreographer knows something about what it means to be uprooted. Dwelling, which originally premiered in 2012, is a highly stylized dance that ruminates on feeling disoriented in a new home. In an effort to simulate that disorientation, Casel employed chance procedures such as word and number generators in the making of the piece. Performed by Arletta Anderson, Christina Briggs-Winslow, Peiling Kao, Parker Murphy and Joey Navarrete to live music by avant-garde composer, Tim Russell, Dwelling "transcends Casel's personal history and is as much about humanity's relation to space as about his geographical predicaments" (Urban Milwaukee Dial).

Jess Curtis/Gravity's The Dance That Documents Itself offers an apt counterpoint to Casel's Dwelling. Both works examine the theme of dislocation, though Curtis' aims to illuminate the set of conditions that either support or weaken communities of artists. Curtis, who has for several years divided his time between two homes, San Francisco and Berlin, explores the relationship between digital technology and live, embodied art and culture, in the process tracing a history of San Francisco's lost performance hubs. A collaboration between director and performer Curtis, video artist David Szlasa, sound artist Sheldon Smith and performers Abby Crain and Rachel Dichter, The Dance That Documents Itself premiered at CounterPulse last fall. "The Dance That Documents Itself is more than a bit of nostalgia; it asks us to question the vulnerability of artists in the city's new economy" (SciArt in America).

FREE EVENT| Saturday, June 6 | 3:00 pm and 6:00 pm Bookending Program B is a free performance by ODC's flagship dance company, ODC/Dance. The company's ten dancers will reprise KT Nelson's Transit (2012), adapted for the parking lot at St. Charles School of San Francisco, located at the end of the block and across the street from ODC Dance Commons. Incorporating three custom-built bicycles by mechanical engineer and artist Max Chen, and a restless score by Nico Muhly, Transit celebrates the chaotic pulse of our urban centers -- where high and low technology exist side-by-side -- walking, biking and high-speed transit. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mary Ellen Hunt praised Transit as "packed with the kind of lovely flashes that any urban dweller will recognize -- that instant when you find yourself moving in unconscious synchrony with a crowd, or when you turn to a total stranger to share a particularly surprising moment."

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