SFDanceworks opens its ninth season at Z Space from Nov. 4 through 7, pairing a slice of Merce Cunningham’s modern-dance legacy with two brand-new world premieres from choreographers Brett Conway and Jermaine Maurice Spivey. Tickets for the four-night run in San Francisco’s Mission District range from $36 to $130, with performances set for 7:30 p.m. on opening night and 8 p.m. the following three evenings.
The company, which has built its identity since 2014 on connecting modern-dance iconoclasts with contemporary innovators, describes the new program as one that brings together seminal modern-dance lineage, distinctly contemporary voices, and the collaborative energy of artists working at the edge of the form, according to sfdanceworks.org. SFDanceworks was founded under former San Francisco Ballet soloist James Sofranko and is now directed by former San Francisco Ballet soloist Dana Genshaft, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Two Accounts of Who Dances Cunningham
Exactly who performs the Cunningham repertory on this program depends on which source you check. SFDanceworks’ own season page states that the program features a trio of Merce Cunningham solos performed by Silas Riener, a former Merce Cunningham Dance Company member who was with the company from November 2007 until its closure at the end of 2011, according to the Merce Cunningham Trust. Per the Chronicle, Riener is coming in from New York for the performances.
Z Space, however, describes a Merce Cunningham solo performed by San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Joseph Walsh, and Dance Informa USA goes further, reporting that Walsh will perform excerpts from three Cunningham works: Scenario (1997), Ocean (1994) and Enter (1992).
Two World Premieres Join the Bill
Rounding out the season are world premieres from Brett Conway and Jermaine Maurice Spivey, who will make his Bay Area choreographic debut with the company, according to Dance Informa USA. Conway, a former dancer with Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater per SFDanceworks’ own bio page, has created a trio for returning company artists Isaac Bates-Vinueza, Sarah Chou and Emily Hansel, the outlet reports. Spivey, who was most recently a company member of Crystal Pite’s Kidd Pivot, is based in Los Angeles.
The program also brings back Yue Yin’s A Measurable Existence, a duet originally created for two men, as Z Space notes. The piece will be danced by two different casts this season: Chou paired with Lani Yamanaka, and Bates-Vinueza paired with Nat Wilson, the same Dance Informa USA report states.
Looking Ahead to a Milestone Season
SFDanceworks frames Season Nine as a step toward its 10th anniversary season, per its own program notes. The company’s history of pairing repertory lineage with new work goes back to its 2016 debut, co-presented with ODC Theater, which featured world premieres by James Sofranko, Penny Saunders of Hubbard Street Dance, and Dana Genshaft, according to sfdanceworks.org’s press materials. More recent programs have carried that same formula forward, including a seventh-season lineup that paired a Rena Butler premiere and a Marco Goecke solo danced by Butler herself with a work by Los Angeles-based JA Collective, as the Datebook | San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time.
Z Space sits at 450 Florida St. in San Francisco, and the four-night run gives Bay Area dance audiences a rare chance to see Cunningham’s mid-century vocabulary set alongside brand-new choreography from artists shaped by companies as varied as Kidd Pivot and LINES Ballet. Cunningham, who died in 2009, remains a touchstone for the company’s mission of tracing a throughline from modern-dance pioneers to today’s working artists.
