ODC/Dance Reveals Program for its Summer Sampler Taking Place in July

ODC/Dance has revealed the program for its annual SUMMER SAMPLER. Summer Sampler offers audiences an opportunity to experience ODC/Dance in the company’s intimate, historic theater. 

Highlights include a world premiere by guest choreographer Catherine Galasso plus the revival of Brenda Way’s A Brief History of Up and Down and other signature company works. Summer Sampler takes place at ODC Theater July 18 – 21, Thursday - Saturday, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 5 p.m. Tickets, starting at $29, are now on sale at odc.dance/summersampler.

Catherine Galasso has earned a reputation for stunning avant-garde collaborations performed at venues including Danspace Project and La MaMa in New York, the Bibliothèque National in Paris, and MoCA Santa Barbara, as well as underground bank vaults, grand marble staircases and apple orchards. But her connection to ODC goes back to the beginning of her professional career when she participated in the organization’s Pilot Program straight out of college, followed not long after by a three-year ODC Theater artist residency. The culmination of her residency was an evening-length work, Bring On The Lumière! (2011), that was nominated for an Izzie Award and is now featured in the Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies.

Most recently, Bay Area audiences will remember Galasso for Alone Together(2018). By flipping the orientation of the proscenium and placing the audience on the stage and the performers in the seats, the piece playfully dissects the relationship between viewer and subject. The cast won an Izzie Award for outstanding achievement in performance, and the San Francisco Chronicle likened the work to “a treasure chest so packed with jewels that the lid won’t stay down." Galasso later turned the work into a film which screened at ODC Theater’s 2021 summer dance festival.

This year’s Summer Sampler marks Galasso’s first collaboration with ODC’s flagship dance company. Titled 10,000 Steps: A Dance About Its Own Making, the work is built on the self-imposed constraint of exactly 10,000 steps, investigating the “liminal theatrical space between locomotion and dance.” While giving a nod to the 10,000-steps-a-day fitness trend, 10,000 Steps: A Dance About Its Own Making ultimately casts its attention on itself. “My dances are always about the actual people inside – the performers – and the conditions that surround them, while also revealing something deeper: grief, remorse, joy and wonder,” said Galasso.

In February this year, ODC Founder and Artistic Director Brenda Way was inducted into the California Hall of Fame for her history-making contributions to the state and for embodying California’s spirit of innovation. And her newest work, which premiered last month at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, was immediately viewed through the lens of her long life in the arts. 

Representing the two poles of her artistic formation – part classical values imparted at New York City Ballet’s elite school under the direction of George Balanchine, part postmodern dance’s repudiation of virtuosity and spectacle – A Brief History of Up and Down offers “a kind of biography,” said Rachel Howard for the San Francisco Chronicle. She went on to describe it as “lush and substantial,” evincing a “beautifully light touch” and “tender, joyful partnering.”

For her part, Way says she was inspired by “the evolution of beauty” that she has witnessed in dance over her 55-year trajectory at ODC. A Brief History explores questions about ways of seeing, listening and moving – from the simple to the virtuosic. “When does walking become dancing? Does music make the meaning? How does movement re-interpret a mood?” she asks.

Additional works to be performed will be announced later this spring. For more information visit odc.dance/summersampler.

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