Summertime is when most Bay Area dance companies have finished their seasons and prepare for one of the West Coast's largest dance festivals, West Wave. In 15 years, the festival has evolved into a professional presenting organization that represents Bay Area contemporary dance and provides a fairly wide spectrum of what local choreographers have to offer. The queer community is well-represented in this year's festival by four groups of artists that approach queer work from different perspectives, each with a distinct idea of how the queer aesthetic can be interpreted.
July 11: Sean Dorsey's Fresh Meat Productions has been widely documented in the B.A.R., and for good reason. Dorsey has developed a distinct style of dance theatre that incorporates his transgendered status with meticulous craftsmanship transcending personal politics. His work is articulate and engrossing, and the beauty is you are not aware of Dorsey's sexual identity because of the humanity in his work. At West Wave, Dorsey will present a duet that debuted last year, In Closing. According to Dorsey, the piece "presents a mature trans/queer relationship onstage, and addresses the nature of that love, rather than the fact that it's queer. This is not to say it's in any way apologist or an 'I-just-happen-to-be-trans' piece. It's exactly the opposite."
Dorsey's true strengths are not in movement vocabulary but in theatrical direction, writing and integrating the various strands to draw you in and then devastate you.
July 12-16: It's easy to dismiss Eric Kupers' Dandelion Dancetheatre because it is performed naked. There is a titillation factor, though most audiences have been touched by the naked vulnerability and authentic theatrical experience. Kupers says, "Every body is perfect for dance. Mainstream culture is plagued with rejection of bodies as they are. This problem is extreme in the world where anorexia, bulimia, sizism and ageism run rampant."
Kupers has created an artistic niche that has captured the imagination of local audiences and exposed a wealth of undressed metaphors and thematic material. Because many of Kupers' pieces are community-based, working with both dancers and non-dancers, some of the work lands solidly in a grey area where process meets product, difficult to critique. In West Wave, Kupers presents Annica, a site-specific installation at Project Artaud. The new work "looks at body politics, power dynamics, the lines between sensual, sexual, aggression, violence and mortality." Partly developed in community workshops, it's the most recent culmination of Dandelion's Undressed Project. It will be interesting to see where Kupers goes with this new work. The novelty of nakedness will attract audiences, but in the end, it still has to be about the work.
July 22-23: West Wave director and choreographer Brittany Brown Ceres' Dance Ceres is both athletic and intimate, theatrical and authentic. Creating work that isn't flashy, Ceres has an identity in the local dance community as both an arts administrator (managing the ODC Theatre) and a well-respected choreographer. Her new work, Simultaneous Solos, was inspired by an improvisational performance in San Diego where she and a colleague created and presented solos simultaneously without rehearsing them together. In the new work, Ceres says, "I address the simultaneity of difference, how when individuals meet, they co-exist in a quietly understood state of agreeable dissimilarity for a time, until they slowly become closer and more familiar with each other. While they undoubtedly change to accommodate one another, they also remain individuals."
The experience stimulated a new phase in Ceres' choreographic development where she is focusing on a closer examination of how she is creating movement, being more precise and detailed. While choreographers like Dorsey and Kupers are consciously incorporating queer identity, Ceres' queer aesthetic is understated, choosing to look at the broadest human experience.
July 11: Although RAWdance doesn't exclusively identify themselves as a queer dance company, they participated in this year's National Queer Arts Festival, and the company has tackled issues around body politics, pornography and intimacy. Co-artistic director Ryan Smith says, "Our work always centers around intimacy and all the complications, criticisms, desires and questions surrounding our bodies and our relationships. We joke that everyone in the company has made out with each other on stage at least once."
The new work, Drained, focuses on the complications in communicating, misconstrued messages and exhaustive efforts to be understood. What's interesting about RAWdance is how unimportant gay and lesbian politics actually are to some emerging choreographers. Is it possible that the younger generation of choreographers have become so accustomed to "alternate orientation" that the definition of queer work has expanded beyond the struggle of who you're having sex with?
West Wave Dance Festival, July 11-30 at Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida St., SF. Tickets ($18-$20): (415) 863-9834 or www.westwavedancefestival.org.