Kristen Cosby
On Saturday night, August 15, six choreographic groups presented short works followed by a brief talk-back from the artists as part of the second night of the FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival, which continues the following weekend at the same venue.
The FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival was established in 2018 by choreographer Charlie Slender-White as a way to de-isolate the San Francisco dance scene, bringing Bay Area artists and out-of-towners to the same theater so that they might become future collaborators. The festival is part of FACT/SF’s larger programming of bi-annual dance labs, which have been held since 2013.
Slender-White has said his inspiration for creating a festival also arose from a desire to provoke and as an act of civic duty: “I missed having opportunities for friction, or a little bit of provocation, or a little bit of push from people who have artistic, or aesthetic, or philosophical perspectives that are different than mine. I think with any small region that is contained and has an inward-looking view, the openness to those alternate ideas becomes less and less. I don’t think that’s good. I don’t think that’s good for our civic society.”
If a diverse, highly professional, show of unexpected delights was what he dreamed of, he succeeded mightily.
The night opened with Returning, a solo work by Tibetan-American dancer Sonam Tshedzom Tingkhye. The dancer began the piece alone at a microphone swathed in the Tibetan flag trying to sing a Tibetan folk song. Behind her was an open suitcase, a large old-fashioned one, over-filled with crumpled pieces of paper that trailed across the stage. Tingkhye’s voice was high and clear, so it was shocking when she began to stumble and choke as if she didn’t know the words or was suddenly unable to sing. She looked at the lyrics from a piece of paper, and then eventually shoved the papers into her mouth and tried to sing through it. Behind her a still image of Tibetan women’s skirts and feet flash across the backdrop. Though clearly a trained body, what Tingkhye wielded best, was stillness. The starkness of the piece and the lack of movement defined it. At the heart of Returning is the notion of losing the ability to speak in the language of one’s ancestors and one’s family. Namely, the silencing of Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, either through force or diaspora.
Half-way through the performance, information about Labgo, the first Tibetan to self-immolate in the continental United States appears across the backdrop. Tingkhye lied down prone, facing the message of his death. Still singing, she spun across the stage and eventually climbed into the suitcase. Her beautiful and choked song wavering slightly as she closed the case of words upon herself. Labgo, one of 170 Tibetans who’ve self-immolated in protest of the actions of the CCP against Tibet, died during the making of the piece. For Tingkhye, that changed the nature of how she felt about forgetting Tibetan. Whether lost or taken, her work returns voices to the voiceless.
By contrast Primal Rhythms, choreographed and danced by the Ishami Dance Company, blended tradition with modernity and humor. The five members of Ishami’s ensemble — Akhil Joondeph, Akshay Radia, Ekta Doshi, Ishika Seth, Sakshi Prabhu — opened Primal Rhythms with a turf war over chairs. Dressed in blood red shirts, they begin snaking around a single chair, until one dancer climbed atop it and began to hiss until all others retreat. Then standing atop four chairs, the hisser began to arrange and re-arrange them under himself in different patterns all at once using all four limbs. The ensemble returned, surrounding him, squishing inward until he’s “dethroned.”. Ishami is known for creating moves that blend hip-hop, club, Bollywood, and Kathak. In Primal Rhythms, they utilized big gestures, standing on chairs and rolling to the floor, to create tension and a sense of societal critique. They feign looking in hand mirrors or at their phones as mirror — and are led around the stage by regarding their own image in their “phones,” In another moment, four dancers circled around one woman and began to adjust her face and body, until they step back and she began to adjust herself. In the end the chairs are arranged with one facing the audience and two flanking either side, as if at a conference table where people typing, and the ensemble began to fight. Creating a brilliant ending to a piece in which hierarchies, cell phones, and modernity all brought into question by chairs.
The most bizarre piece of the night, Cluck, choreography by Shannon Hummel, was also the most humorous. Throughout dancer Sarah McCullough performed an intimate duet with a raw chicken while being bombarded by lemons. At the opening of Cluck, the chicken carcass sat on a plush red cushion, clearly an object of attention. McCullough’s facial expressions change slowly and profoundly from disgust to curiosity to affection. Eventually she stood and revealed a lemon tucked under her arm, which was easily mistaken for an egg until she hurled it across the stage. The audience gasped, expecting a splat. Meanwhile, the relationship with the chicken progressed, and McCullough waltzed with it lovingly while lemons rolled at her from offstage. Suddenly, she launched the chicken across the stage. It landed with a dull, fleshy thud, raising a gasp from the crowd. McCullough ran and cradled it, almost as if were an infant. At the end of the piece, the chicken returned to its cushion, and, at the very last moment, McCullough raises a butcher knife overhead as if to stab it. Instead, she cuts a lemon in half dousing herself in the juice and taking the chicken by the wing, the fraught relationship seemingly now calm. I had so many questions, and yet I couldn’t look away for the entirety of the piece.
In a place for us to rest, three dancers — Caleb Daly, Courtney Mazeika, Morgan Phillips — each represented facets of the choreographer, Megan O’Brien, whose choreographed served as a description of her experience as a dancer with a disability. The trio, wore gauzy tops and skirts with white sneakers that gave them a girlish appearance, and at first moved to voice messages from the choreographer’s answering machine: a Valentine’s Day wish, a telemarketer, a friend calling to sing, “I just called …to say… I love you.”
The dancers unrolled three stretches of astro-turf at the audience’s feet, creating a grassy swath downstage for each of them to lie upon. They luxuriated upon the grass, contorting in slow, fluid movements. They stood and danced in unison, their movements were jerky and stumbling and awkward before softening. Two remained upright, while one body rolled back to the ground, lying on the grass, seemingly unable to join the others.
While it was easy to imagine the separate bodies as being different individuals with different abilities, and this piece being an window into the social effect of disability, the identical clothing and the choreographer’s program note also invites us to see what parts of a person might be affected by their disability while other pieces of them remain free of pain and engaged. In the end, the trio lied on the grass touching each other, able to rest free of pain.
Dancer Karla Quintero utilized the words and excerpted music of the world’s most famous divas in Star Light to create a darkly comedic drama with a life-sized “diva statue.” These were divas that Quintero grew up listening to and being seduced by: Madonna, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Britney Spears. But as she aged, she found their messaging to be problematic and haunting. She sampled their songs and quoted them throughout the piece, always in dark mockery, in renditions that had a weird edge, and often she repeated the lyrics in a creepy “zombie” voice.
She opened by boldly stating her intention in a quote by Janet Jackson, “This is about control… over what I’m allowed to say.” On stage behind her stood a mysterious life-size statue: a white face with large lit-up eyes and shiny body and a pink tulle skirt. Gorgeous, and very creepy.
Quintero improvised her movements in Star Light — often rushing across the stage in fast mincing steps, and travelling to all four corners of the room as she speaks. She whips off her jacket to reveal a black bustier and busts out into a very Madonna-like skip across the stage to Madonna’s Express Yourself. The weird edginess of the pop music and Quintero’s repeating of the lyrics in a creepy-whisper voice with a wry facial expression undermined the glamour that hides horrific messages that even the most feminist diva-icons have spewed into the pop-o-sphere.
Quintero removed the diva-statue’s face and used it as a mask, its wide eyes glowing eerily as she approached the audience and hissed lyric after lyric until we were left with the eyes glowing in the dark.
For the program’s finale FACT/SF’s CP#1, performed by LizAnne Roman Roberts, Keanu Brady, Erin Coyne, Jonathan Kim, rounded out the night with a brief meditation on isolation to music by Charli XCX. Choregraphed by Slender-White with contributions from the cast, each dancer stood in a separate spotlight at the piece’s opening, seemingly unable to escape. Limbs stretched and reached and expanded. In a show that was largely about ending isolation it was hugely satisfying when they freed themselves to dance together.
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.
FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Is A Buffet Of Dance (with chicken) was originally published in ODC.dance.stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.