Cancelled: 2020 Walking Distance Dance Festival

Cancelled: 2020 Walking Distance Dance Festival

The 2020 Walking Distance Dance Festival has been cancelled. If you are a ticketholder you may request a full refund, or hold on to your tickets to be used for next year’s festival. Additionally, you can return your tickets to ODC Theater as a tax-deductible donation. All donations help to cover the significant costs the Theater has already incurred. Please contact boxoffice@odc.dance


2020 Walking Distance Dance Festival
June 4 -14, 2020

The 2020 Walking Distance Dance Festival (WDDF) marks the start of ODC’s 50th anniversary. This special milestone edition of the festival, now in its ninth year, features a rich ecology of Bay Area artists immersed in the conditions and particularities of the region.

Two distinct double bills each weekend guide theater-goers across a range of dance and across ODC’s two-building campus. During the opening program, the flagship company, ODC/Dance will appear in a special outdoor performance along Shotwell Street. In addition to dynamic performances, four pre-show legacy talks, an archival screening lounge, and two community convenings will mine histories as well as the present-future of Bay Area dance, and inquire upon aspects of the body, story, and community.

From feminisms, bewitchment, and migrations, to dance incorporating literature, visual arts, folklore, film, and music, join us to binge on performance and celebrate an extraordinary gathering of artists including José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama of NAKA, Catherine Galasso, Margaret Jenkins and Rinde Eckert, Geoff and Dan Hoyle, Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton, Robert Moses, Hope Mohr and Monique Jenkinson.

Performances

  • Program 1: NAKA Dance Theater | Catherine Galasso | Special appearance by ODC/Dance Company

    Program 1: ODC Theater Presents NAKA Dance Theater, Catherine Galasso, Special appearance by ODC/Dance Company
    June 4 - 5, 8:00 PM

    NAKA Dance Theater: And the Twins Return
    And the Twins Return
    is a meditation on bewitchment and calamity, deception and possession, inspired by images from Northern Japan and Southern Mexico. When a fox attaches itself to you, it dunks you into a dream world, controls your thoughts, alters your behavior. The fox is a fickle trickster who brings fortune one day and misfortune the next. We attempt to go backwards in time to find something intact, something old, but there are few clues, so we turn to the unconscious, giving space for flow. Strip away, and listen to hear what our decolonized selves might sound like.

    Catharine Galasso & Dave Cerf: Alone Together
    Created specifically for ODC’s B.Way Theater with an all Bay Area cast, Alone Together flips the orientation of the proscenium, placing the audience on the stage and the performers in the seats. Other-worldly dreamscapes give way to volcanic dance numbers, ranging from the audacious to the familiar, combining Galasso’s signature cinematic approach with a riveting score by composer Dave Cerf.

     

  • Program 2: Geoff & Dan Hoyle | Margaret Jenkins & Rinde Eckert

    Program 2: ODC Theater Presents Geoff & Dan Hoyle, Margaret Jenkins & Rinde Eckert
    June 6-7, 8:00 PM

    Geoff & Dan Hoyle: Dads

    In 1977, Geoff Hoyle became a Dad. In 2015, his son Dan became a Dad. Sometime in between then, they performed together for a bit, but it’s been ten years since that happened. And this is the first time they will be performing together as official, card-carrying Dads. They don’t know what to expect, but chances are there will be songs, skits, musings, maybe a character or two, and a laugh or three. It will be all completely new. But will feel like they vaguely know what they are doing. Sort of like being a Dad.

    Margaret Jenkins & Rinde Eckert: Migratory Passages

    From the solitary birds to the flocking birds, from the baggage of culture to the nature of culture, Margaret Jenkins and Rinde Eckert premiere a new duet thematically related to their previous 3 duets: Shorebirds Atlantic, And So They, and Shadows & Water. As they shed their birdwatching gear they become more birdlike—the weight of a stone monkey countered now by the lightness of the migratory birds rising from the clear lake to disappear in the distance on their way north or south, to one home or another.

  • Program 3: Robert Moses' Kin | Garrett + Moulton Productions

    Program 3: ODC Theater Presents Robert Moses' Kin & Garrett + Moulton Productions
    June 11-12, 8:00 PM

    Robert Moses' Kin: The Heart of Darkness

    This collection of movement sketches by Robert Moses is drawn from what the choreographer understands to be the penalties leveled when an African American walks away from the fight with dominant culture and has the gaul to find peace in the sound of their own voice and away from the American dream. Musing on the sanctuary of self preservation, the words of August Wilson, Dave Chappelle, Richard Pryor, Malcom X, and the millions of aspiring citizens of Wakanda, these works are punctuated with Moses’s signature physicality and virtuosity.

    Garrett + Moulton Productions: Gyre and Gimble

    Garrett + Moulton Productions will present Gyre and Gimble—a new dance theater work choreographed by Co-Artistic Directors Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton. A spiraling journey through a vivid landscape of movement, image, and sound, this intimate and emotionally charged piece explores the driving human urge to find shared meaning and connection in an increasingly fragmented world. Garrett + Moulton’s stellar company will transport the audience into an uplifting and tenderly touching realm that celebrates the triumph of the human heart over isolation and despair.

  • Program 4: Hope Mohr Dance | Fauxnique

    Program 4: ODC Theater Presents Hope Mohr Dance, Fauxnique
    June 13-14, 8:00 PM

    Hope Mohr Dance: Leaving the Atocha Station
    Leaving the Atocha Station is a work of experimental dance theater inspired by Ben Lerner’s acclaimed novel of the same name. In Lerner’s postmodern novel about an artist’s search for authenticity, the protagonist poet, crippled by irony and doubt, longs to disappear into numbness. But he secretly believes in the power of art. Mohr’s work takes the genre- breaking nature of Lerner’s auto-fiction as a jumping off point for hybrid theater: part dance improvisation, part monologue, part hallucinatory testimonial for the role of art in precarious times. Featuring two veteran performers, Christian Burns and Wiley Naman Strasser, each of whom embodies a different aspect of the protagonist’s conflicted self.

    Fauxnique: C*NT, OR, THE HORROR OF NOTHING TO SEE
    C*NT deploys Jenkinson’s feminist rage to confront the ruptures caused by the stress of difference. As a feminist performing drag, she propels her own body into the history of drag’s complex relationship to femaleness: a relationship of fascination, honor, and revulsion. Both the (misogynistic) pathologizing and (feminist) mythologizing around the female body are a source of frustration, fascination, and humor for Jenkinson. Through camp and ironic play, she delights both in deflating misogyny, and poking at the preciousness of contemporary feminism. C*NT holds this multiplicity—the frustration, fascination, and humor—and requires her to grapple with their complexity and simultaneity.

All ticket sales are final. Performances, dancers, and guest artists subject to change.