Hot on the heels of the company’s first evening-length commission, presented at ODC Theater’s State of Play festival earlier this month, SFDanceworks has announced the program for its seventh season featuring world premieres by Rena Butler and Ja Collective alongside the West Coast premiere of a solo work by renowned choreographer Marco Goecke. Season Seven will take place at Z Space November 7 – 10, and tickets, $40 – $100, will go on sale mid-September and can be purchased here.
On Thursday, November 7 at 8 p.m., SFDanceworks will offer a ticketed preview. Season Seven opens the following night at 7:30 p.m., with an additional two performances at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday.
Since 2014, SFDanceworks has earned a reputation for its high-caliber curation and top-notch dancers. Each season the company aims to present the best of the past, present and future of dance, and this year SFDanceworks has commissioned a new work by Ja Collective, the duo of Aidan Carberry and Jordan Johnson. Best known for their intricate and spellbinding choreography created for pop music videos, the Los Angeles-based artists, who trained under William Forsythe at the University of Southern California, will make their Bay Area debut as part of SFDanceworks’ new season.
Under the working title of Why Does It Listen And How Does It Know Who It Is?, Ja Collective is making a trio set to new music by J. Tyler Johnson, bass player with the rock band half•alive. Carberry and Johnson will be joined on stage by Lani Yamanaka, who is returning to SFDanceworks for a third season.
“We are especially thrilled to be collaborating with SFDanceworks because this is our first time making work on a professional dance company in the concert scene,” said Carberry and Johnson in a joint statement. “Our choreographic style is an eclectic fusion that draws inspiration from a vast array of sources, from hip-hop to theater, contemporary dance and ballet. We infuse jazz’s rhythmic complexity, counterrhythms and the intricate mechanics of Rube Goldberg machines into our work. For our world premiere with SFDanceworks there is also a pull from some tutting aesthetics and hambone.”
Rena Butler has been called “the epitome of contemporary cool” (Dance Magazine). The much in-demand dancer and choreographer most recently performed with Gibney Company and was their inaugural choreographic associate. Before that she danced with Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M., Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Her original choreography has been commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada, Sweden’s Norrdans, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballet X, Whim W’Him and San Francisco Opera, among many others.
For SFDanceworks, Butler is working on a quintet with music performed by the Young Women’s Choral Projects of San Francisco. Her starting point is an investigation into the mutability of animals, what she describes as “one animal masquerading as another…a species in transition…adapting to changes in climate, environment, resources and perhaps technology.”
Performing in Butler’s new work are Isaac Bates-Vinueza, Chris Bloom, Sarah Chou, Emily Hansel, and making her SFDanceworks debut, Gabrielle Sprauve.
SFDanceworks is delighted to present Butler a second time on the program, performing in Goecke’s highly acclaimed dance, Äffi (2005). Butler will be the first American woman to perform this work, which was originally created for a male dancer. “This is a stamina-testing, eleven-minute solo sure to mesmerize,” said Dana Genshaft, SFDanceworks artistic director. “Long established in Europe for his unmistakably unique movement vocabulary, Goecke is an artist Bay Area audiences deserve to know better.”
Goecke is currently preparing for a new role as artistic director and resident choreographer of the Ballet at Theatre Basel. Over a nearly 25-year career, as artistic director and/or resident choreographer, he has also served in the companies of the State Ballet Hannover, Gauthier Dance Stuttgart, Nederlands Dans Theater, Stuttgart Ballet and Scapino Ballet in Rotterdam, marking an extremely productive period in which he has earned almost every major dance award in Europe.
