ODC/Dance Reveals Program for DANCE DOWNTOWN

ODC/Dance has announced the program for DANCE DOWNTOWN, the company’s annual home season at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Dance Downtown runs Thursday, April 10 through Sunday, April 13, 2025. In conjunction with Dance Downtown, the company’s annual Gala will take place on Friday, April 11. Tickets, starting at $30, are now on sale.

Headlining next year’s event is a world premiere by guest choreographer Sidra Bell, which will have showings on April 10, 12 and 13, plus an excerpt from a new work by ODC Founder and Artistic Director Brenda Way slated for premiere in 2026, which will have only a single showing at the Gala on April 11.

Bell’s work for full company, currently untitled, will be set to music by avant-garde jazz composer and MacArthur genius Mary Halvorson and performed live by local musicians. Additional collaborators include set designer Cass Calder Smith and projection designer Yuki Izumihara. Former ODC/Dance company member Mia J. Chong returns next season as staging director.

“I was drawn to the work of Mary Halvorson because it’s this rare combination of formal, free, peculiar and very beautiful,” said Bell. “For me, jazz has a lot of love in it because of its responsiveness. You really have to listen and be in the moment. It’s a practice of attention. And as the daughter of a jazz musician, I was brought up to appreciate how this music fosters a kind of mutuality with the people we’re working with.”

Bell's career has spanned 20 years, and she is the artistic director of her own self-named company based in New York. The recipient of numerous awards, notably a 1st Prize for Choreography at the Solo-Tanz Theater Festival in Stuttgart, Germany in 2011, Bell has also created over 100 commissioned works for companies and institutions including New York City Ballet, St. Louis Dance Theatre, Whim'Whim, BODYTRAFFIC, Ailey II, The Juilliard School, Harvard University, Boston Conservatory, River North Dance Chicago, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Sacramento Ballet, Ballet Austin, Alonzo King's LINES Ballet School, Springboard Danse Montréal, Uppercut Dansteater (Denmark) and Motto Dans Kolectif (Turkey), to name a few.

Next year’s Dance Downtown marks Bell’s first commission with ODC/Dance, though her relationship with Way goes back to 2012 - 13 when the two were paired as part of a mentorship opportunity sponsored by LEVYdance, with funding from New England Foundation for the Arts.

“Since our time working together 12 years ago, I have always appreciated her brainy and exuberant approach to movement-making, as well as her craft and feminist sensibility,” said Way. “Her process and her work demand a high degree of physicality and input from the dancers, and I look forward to seeing what she pulls from them.”



For her part, Way is making a new dance for full company titled After the Deluge, a response to melting glaciers, mudslides, flooding and other aspects of entropy and radical changes in nature.

Rounding out the program will be Unintended Consequences (A Meditation) by Way and Inkwell by ODC founding member and associate choreographer Kimi Okada.

Unintended Consequences (A Meditation) premiered in 2008 set to music by renowned performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson. Commissioned by the Equal Justice Society, an Oakland, California-based organization working to transform the nation’s consciousness on issues of race and social justice, Unintended Consequences “offers a cutting critique of human relationships, and of how easily we become isolated” (The New York Times). The work considers the effects of America’s fetish of individualism and its perversion into “every man for himself.”

Inkwell, which premiered at Dance Downtown earlier this year, draws inspiration from the cartoons of Max Fleischer and his black-and-white universe of oddballs, misfits and maniacs. “A terrific vaudevillian romp,” hailed Fjord Review. “Okada spins the great unifying element of humor as she effectively takes on a dark theme from current culture.”

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