Garth Grimball
FACT/SF opened its annual summer dance festival at ODC Theater with two premieres and a madcap retrospective that was also a premiere. Before entering the Theater, Joy Davis and Alexander Davis, unrelated (or are they?) were in character as Gloria and Gerald, the elder parents of The Davis Sisters (Joy and Alex), who were scheduled to open the evening with Make (It): ((A) Work In Process) (Working Title). If that sounds confusing, don’t worry, they knew how to bring the audience with them into their self-referential labyrinth.
Make (It)’s three acts was billed as, and consistently referred to or questioned as, “an impromptu mid-career retrospective and potentially their final performance ever.” And the work succeeded in never fraying the emotional thread of wistfulness-cum-celebration. Act one was a series of seven vignettes of previous works from 2017–2024. The duo promenaded in fur coats; Alex danced with a golf club while Joy read the definition of entropy; Joy took apart a sandwich with the exactitude of Jeanne Dielman. Joy and Alex have the chemistry of true friends and their jokes never felt inside but invitational, as in one vignette when they described what it means to perform a PostModern (or PoMo) dance; or, when they shared one pair of tights and rolled away from the audience with a non-erotic intimacy that comes from never having to say “TMI” in a friendship.
The second act, “PORTAL (an earnest attempt to create something new),” was the most “process” part of Make (It), both in content and in delivery. The props and costumes of previous vignettes were swept into piles and eventually tossed into the air as the duo moved in syncopated rhythms familiar to contemporary dance or engaged in light contact improv-style partnering.
“The Davis Sisters Start a PODCAST” closed the performance in a delightful summation. Joy and Alex sat in the downstage right corner discussing their creative partnership and the realities of being independent dance artists: “We have more reasons not to do this than to do it.” Maggie Costales, dressed in a t-shirt with the number 8 on it, entered the chat, a.k.a. the stage. As The Davis Sisters mused on making, Costales reassembled the sandwich and took a bite. It was like a human Magic 8 Ball signaling “outlook good.”
Jenna Riegel’s duet on Charles Slender-White and LizAnne Roman Roberts reverberated like a finely tuned chord. to the marrow opened with the duo lying face-down on the floor in a line. They each ushered an egg sized ball forward with their forearms while slowly crawling. As the dance developed into full-bodied movement that embraced Slender-White and Roberts’s shared language of Countertechnique, the music of Silver Mt Zion and Sufjan Stevens was ceded to interview excerpts between Krista Tippet and the poet Clint Smith on parenting and its resulting embodied responses. Without the program to clarify that the dance was a tribute to the dancers’ friendship and evolution as artists since becoming parents, I admit that I paused on the content of this dance curious if it was somehow a pro-life message? Slender-White and Roberts were dressed in flowy white separates and the delicate protection of their eggs in combination with the content of the interview gave off a certain trad-life aura. But, that aura evolved into a platonic love that exuded from the duo’s performing. Slender-White and Roberts are beautiful dancers. They drop their weight, turn off balance, and sweep across the floor like two sharp quills tracing over a shared story.
Slender-White closed the evening with his premiere Maelstrom. Roberts, Erin Coyne, Keanu Forrest Brady, and Jon Kim thundered onto the stage to the beats of Royksopp. Watching the tightly crafted unison and counterpoints of the quartet was like being washed out in a rainstorm or caught in swirls of a tide pool. The dancers never seemed to stop turning or rotating to the point that I forgot that I was watching a dance and felt beholden to the intensity of a weather event. In the last third of Maelstrom there were moments of stillness and pauses that gave way to slower tempos. Coyne surprised with her ability to stop and start. Kim’s clear extensions made the fastest choreography available to intake a fraction longer. When Maelstrom ended I had the equal desire to dry off as applaud.
Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC Dance Stories.
FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Is Rich With Premieres was originally published in ODC.dance.stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.