Kristen Cosby
The closing show of the fifth annual State of Play Festival, What the Hell Happened in San Francisco?, delivered a nuanced and complex love letter to SF’s dance scene that combined theater and short sequences of dance. A fitting end, to a festival that brough nine dance artists and performance groups from across the US to the Bay for a singular weekend of performance.
Framed as a reflection on the early careers of two San Francisco dancers, the piece begins at the end of the story, with dancers Malinda LaVelle and Emmaly Wiederholt, seated in chairs on stage, facing each other for a dual interview. They are dancers in their thirties with kids and complex lives that only sometimes allow them to train. They interview each other sequentially, and while their answers are scripted, they feel authentic and autobiographical. Neither lives in San Francisco anymore. When they ask each other what dance is, who is a dancer, what is the purpose of dance, their answers are unsure. Time has clearly made them question the form in a mature and nuanced way. The questions they ask each other will haunt the piece and be repeated, again and again.
When they stand up from the interview, they step back in time. The scene they perform will be repeated nearly verbatim in five iterations throughout the ninety-minute show, emulating the repetition required in auditions, rehearsals, and performance. By performing the scene almost identically, its variances, no matter how tiny, become the intrigue. A pink scarf is wrapped around one dancer’s neck, then the other’s in the next iteration, then both. The speed and attitude with which Emmaly rolls her body into Malinda’s after she says, “I build a dance company,” changes over time, changing how we see the dancers’ relationship to each other and to their art.
“Interesting things happen when you repeat consecutively,” an offstage teacher voice announces at one point in the piece. And that is what we are here to see — what changes, what remains?
This scene is always performed stage-right, where the dancers don large white tutus and flop onto a gym mat covered with everything a dancer might want while waiting: nacho chips, a bottle of wine, a book of sudoku, a laptop, a scarf. Behind them stands a dressing rack bedecked with different costumes and a barre.
They’re affectionate and clearly young — twenty and twenty-one, we learn later — best friends who’ve come to SF to become dancers. Emmaly lies on her back, book hovering in air, Malinda sits. They touch feet; when Malinda wants her friend’s attention, she tugs on her tutu.
“Hey Tosh?”
“Hang on I’m playing solitaire.”
“Do you wanna stay in San Francisco forever?”
We’ve already seen their end. We know that they depart. But in the scene, Emmaly is adamant with the certainty of youth: they hate auditioning but they will audition together. If no one hires them, Malinda will start her own company. They will dominate SF!
“Great, I’ll tell my mom I have a job!” says Emmaly, rolling away.
“We should practice,” says Malinda.
“What?”
“The Look,” says Malinda. They stand, remove their tutus, grab hands, and look at each other and inhale, as if jumping into cold water.
When they emerge from behind the dressing rack, they’re in flannel shirts, sweats and socks.
The interview occurs again, this time with each dancer being summoned to a spotlight and answering an unseen interrogator as if at a large audition. Their answers are fueled by nerves. They bounce back and forth on their legs, warming up their feet. Dance is life! They tell us: there is one path forward, ascension through the SF choreographic glitterati (which they list by name). This is what dance success looks like!
This dichotomy of what we are certain of as young performers, and how that contrasts with the narratives we tell ourselves as we age, is at the heart of the story being told. The two narratives dovetail, eventually, revealing that their two women dance company ends with Malinda receiving more awards than she can hold, while Emmaly goes slightly mad as a result. Her body begins by expressing a classical moment of ballet that devolves into a performance of wildly flung limbs and hair. She reaches in a deep lunge towards her friend and falls over, and then slowly bends folds forward upon herself.
In each repetition of the scene, the two young idealists grow a bit wiser and more jaded about the process of audition and rehearsal — about what dance is or does or can do. Each small piece that they “rehearse” after their scene has a different title (The Look, The Work, The Submission, The Dream, The Rupture) and highlights a different, weird aspect of the subculture of contemporary dance, particularly in SF. Perhaps none more hilariously than when dancer Malinda dons a mustache pretending to be a director asking for the same sequence to be performed repeatedly, while Emmaly desperately tries to obey, becoming more and more bound and stressed.
“Make more choices… make choices,” says the director, “but don’t look like you are making choices. I shouldn’t see you think. Dance like you’re old. Dance like you’re the ruins of a Machu Picchu. Have you ever been to Machu Picchu? Dance like you have no training. Like you’re just a pedestrian. No, no. You still have training in your feet… Now put it all together! Machu Picchu! You’re old! No training! ” Emmaly repeats the same sequence: arms in first, a deep lunge, an attitude, a slow walked circle, a flapping of arms… each time with a different intention, as the requests become increasingly ridiculous. The audience, largely dancers and choreographers, found it hilarious.
As the fourth version of the gym mat scene began again, I began to wonder at the piece’s length. By the time the fifth and final iteration arrived, that doubt had turned into recognition: the piece’s real gift was to make me realize that real life is also often a series of repeated patterns with small variations that are grueling and at times absurd, and that noticing the pattern, staying attentive inside the repetition, is a skill dance teaches as much as anything else. What the Hell Happened in San Francisco? doesn’t just tell us that; we feel it. The piece makes its structure argue its point. Knowing that we still need to pay attention, knowing how to, is something most of the audience that night had learned from dancing, and, on this closing night of State of Play, from watching two women perform it back to me until I finally understood.
Kristen Cosby is a freelance writer, editor, educator, and performer whose work has been supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, earning the Normal Prize in Nonfiction and a Pushcart Prize special mention, while her recent storytelling performances have been featured at The Moth, Redwood Nights, Bawdy Stories, StageWerx, and La Cocina: Voices from the Kitchen.
“What the Hell Happened in SF?” They’re Still Figuring It Out was originally published in ODC.dance.stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.