ODC/Dance presents: Dance Downtown

• Inkwell Choreographed by Kimi Okada

  Inspired by the dark cartoon world of Max Fleischer in the 1920s and 1930s, Inkwell explores the power of a demagogue over an unwitting human and the path from seduction to indoctrination.

  

  Kimi Okada (Associate Choreographer, Director of ODC School)is a founding member of ODC. Her work includes more than 26 choreographed works for ODC/Dance, as well as commissions and collaborations with Geoff Hoyle, Bill Irwin, Julie Taymor, and Robin Williams. She has choreographed productions for the American Conservatory Theater of San Francisco, Yale Repertory Theater, the New Victory Theater in New York, the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis, Theatre for a New Audience in New York, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the American Music Theater Festival, the Santa Fe Opera, Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Los Angeles Theatre Center, the Pickle Family Circus, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

  She was nominated for a Tony Award for the Broadway production of Largely New York, which she co-choreographed with Bill Irwin. She received a 2014 Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Choreography for ODC’s Two If by Sea.

  Since 1996, Kimi has served as director of the ODC School, which she has brought to the forefront of international and national dance education for youth and adults. She has been honored with a California State Legislature Assembly Resolution for choreographi

• Unintended Consequences (A Meditation) Choreographed by Brenda Way

  Unintended Consequences (A Meditation), 2008, set to music by renowned performance artist/ musician Laurie Anderson, was commissioned by the Equal Justice Society, an Oakland-based organization. Unintended Consequences “offers a cutting critique 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.”

  
  Founder, Artistic Director

  Brenda Way received her early training at the School of American Ballet and Ballet Arts in New York City. She is the founder and artistic director of ODC/Dance and creator of the ODC Theater and ODC Dance Commons, community performance and training venues in San Francisco’s Mission District. She launched ODC and helped create an inter-arts department at Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music in the late 1960's before relocating to the Bay Area in 1976.

  She has choreographed more than 100 pieces over the last 53 years. Among her commissions are Unintended Consequences: A Meditation (2008) Equal Justice Society; Life is a House (2008) San Francisco Girls Chorus; On a Train Heading South (2005) CSU Monterey Bay; Remnants of Song (2002) Stanford Lively Arts; Scissors Paper Stone (1994) Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; Western Women (1993) Cal Performances, Rutgers University and Jacob’s Pillow; Ghosts of an Old Ceremony (1991) Walker Art Center and The Minnesota Orchestra; Krazy Kat (1990) San Francisco Ballet; This Point in Time (1987) Oakland Ballet; Tamina (1986) San Francisco Performances; Invisible Cities (1985) Stanford Lively Arts and the Robotics Research Laboratory. Her work Investigating Grace was named an NEA American Masterpiece in 2011.

  In 2024, Way was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and is being featured in the NY Public Library’s Jerome Robbins’ Dance Division Oral History Project. Her work was selected by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2010 to represent the US in a tour of Southeast Asia, as part of the inaugural DanceMotion touring program sponsored by the US Department of State. She is a national spokesperson for dance, has been published widely, has received numerous awards including Isadora Duncan Dance Awards for both choreography and sustained achievement, and 40 years of support from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a 2000 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2009, she was the first choreographer to be a Resident of the Arts at the American Academy in Rome, and in 2012, she received the Helen Crocker Russell Award for Community Leadership from the SF Foundation. She is currently involved in helping to reimagine the future of the San Francisco Arts Institute campus. Way holds a Ph.D. in aesthetics and is the mother of four children.
   

• Areas of Relief by Sidra Bell

  Areas of Relief moves from sheer dynamic forms to an exploration of intimate emotional states and relationships. The dancers will inhabit a uniquely crafted world designed by architect Cass Calder Smith and the music of MacArthur Genius Mary Halvorson.

  

  Bell has been a frequent guest in the Bay Area since 2011. She has been a guest artist and adjunct professor at Alonzo KING Lines Ballet Program (Training Program, Dance Center, and B.F.A.) where she created many works for stage and conducted embodied master classes and community workshops. She was the inaugural choreographer for the NEA-funded AMP Project with LEVYdance where she created twin works for the SF-based company and her own company. The two ensembles performed at LEVYdance’s home season at ODC with support from a Rainin Technical Residency at ODC. The bi-coastal ensembles also toured to Dance Place D.C. and Chutzpah! Festival Vancouver, B.C. Bell was the choreographer for the feature film TEST directed by Bay Area film director Chris Mason Johnson. The film premiered at Frameline Festival in the Castro in 2013 and went on to receive nominations and awards at LGBTQ festivals worldwide. The film was workshopped and filmed at Joe Goode Studios and The Cowell Theater. She has created new work for Robert Moses’ KIN which premiered at ODC Theater. She was a movement consultant for the music theater work “BABA” for Slovenian director Karmina Sîlec and the Bay-Area Kitka Music Ensemble which was created in residencies at Berkeley Repertory Theater and Mills College. It premiered at Z Space in 2022.

  Bell has toured with her company in self and co-produced seasons at ODC and Dance Mission Theater with Greg Dawson’s Dawson Dance SF. She has taught master classes at ODC, Axis Dance Company, and at many youth schools in the Bay Area. She has given solo guest talks at SafeHouse Arts with Kinech Arts and at Shack 15 with Djerassi Resident Artist Program. She was a Djerassi Artist in Residence in 2022.

Dinner, drinks, dancing, and one fabulous party!
 

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