ODC Theater Announces 2022 Season

ODC Theater, part of the most active center for contemporary dance on the West Coast, has announced its 2022 Season fostering new performance by Bay Area artists and serving as a foothold for touring artists from around the globe. The Theater's 2022 Season accompanies ODC's 50+ anniversary celebrations, looking back while making bold new plans for a sustainable future.

Highlights of next year's season include ODC Theater's signature summer festival of performance, June 2 - 11, featuring works by Heather Stewart and Riley Watts of little house dance, MK Abadoo of MKArts, and SAMMAY aka Sammay Dizon, in addition to 13 other solo and group artists. Then in the fall, headliners include Charles O. Anderson, founder of dance theatre X, based in Austin, Texas; Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer Marjani Forté-Saunders of 7NMS; and experimental dance and theater artist Ni'Ja Whitson of The NWA Project who divides their time between New York and Los Angeles.

For the first time in its history, ODC Theater invited a team of guest curators, a diverse group of Bay Area artists unaffiliated with the organization, to collaborate in the selection of artists. The guest curators included Marlene Garcia, Alleluia Panis, Farah Yasmeen Shaikh, Charles Slender-White, Dazaun Soleyn, Amara Tabor-Smith and Leyya Mona Tawil.

Tabor-Smith and Slender-White led the effort to program next year's summer festival and fall season, while the others teamed up to select projects for ODC Theater's 2022 Rentals Discount Initiative, offering 19 weeks of free or discounted space for work-in-progress development, public presentation or both.

"ODC Theater's 2022 Season marks a significant shift towards curation as collaboration," said Slender-White and Tabor-Smith in a joint statement. "Together we talked about racism and privilege in the field of dance, and about wanting to raise the visibility of powerful queer and BIPOC artists who we felt were making incredibly important art. If there is a unifying theme in our curated season, it is that these artists are creating work that we feel will provide much needed breath, hope and inspiration to move through this moment in time that we all find ourselves in."

In addition to the artists renting at ODC Theater and those selected by the 2022 curatorial team are projects by Lauren Simpson and Galen Rogers as well as Larry Arrington and Alexa Burrel. These projects mark the completion of Simpson's and Arrington's tenures as Theater Resident Artists in the 2018 - 2021 cohort, their residencies delayed due to COVID-19. Simpson will workshop a new collaboration with Rogers with public showings January 28 - 29. Arrington will present a film with interstitial live performance made with Burrel, a Bay Area sound and video artist, April 29 - 30.

Finally, in 2022 ODC Theater will host an array of free events. Starting in February, the first Friday of each month will feature regular "Lobby Nights," with a rotating exhibit of visual art, live performance "open mics," drinks and snacks. Each Monday starting in February, the Theater will host experts in the field for a series of panel discussions, workshops, live interviews and more on topics impacting the arts. A separate series of free educational workshops, presented by ODC Health and the Healthy Dancers' Clinic, will also take place in the Theater once a month.

For more information, visit odc.dance/theater.

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