West Wave Dance Festival
Now in its 23rd year of uniting the distal regions of the Bay Area on one stage, the West Wave Dance Festival brings established and emerging choreographers together in a four-day program that celebrates the diversity of our local dance companies. With a different program every night curated by choreographers from the East, North, and South Bay, West Wave offers the ultimate community experience for participants and audience alike. The festival is directed by SAFEhouse's Joe Landini, who has made a career out of bringing the outside in.
Sept. 3-7, Z Space, 450 Florida St., S.F. Call 626-0453 or visit westwavesf.org.
Lenora Lee Dance Seventh Anniversary Season
Lenora Lee Dance tells the stories of San Francisco's original outsiders with historically informed, socially conscious explorations of the Asian-American experience in dance and film. The Seventh Anniversary Season premieres The Detached, a multimedia piece on human trafficking that aims to empower women through the true stories of survivors. Also featured are 2013's The Escape and Rescued Memories, companion pieces on indentured servitude and exploitation in the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco, and Passages, on Lee's grandmother's experiences as an immigrant on Angel Island.
Sept. 26-Oct. 5, Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., S.F. Call 816-9376 or visit lenoraleedance.com.
Gerald Casel
Disorientation and displacement are the watchwords of Gerald Casel's Visiter, which uses a particularly Bay Area blend of random number generators and environmental prompts to produce a meditation on one of the fixations that characterizes our hyper-mobile society: the search for a home and an identity that fulfills all the needs and wants of the meticulously cultivated individual. Performed by seven dancers, the piece focuses on the contradictions between security and freedom, command and impulse.
Oct. 16-19, Joe Goode Annex, 401 Alabama St., S.F. Visit geraldcaseldance.wordpress.com.
Sasha Waltz & Guests
German choreographer Sasha Waltz works with collaborators of various ilk, including architects, sculptors, musicians, and filmmakers, all cordially referred to as "guests." In her 2004 Impromptus, her main collaborator is the 19th century Austrian composer Franz Schubert, who died at 31, leaving behind more than 600 songs, four of which are featured in Waltz's work. If an intimate work for seven dancers filled with theatrically inclined abstractions sounds too abstruse, watch for the moment when the hidden pool of water appears onstage.
Oct. 24-25, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley. Call (510) 642-9988 or visit sashawaltz.de.
Batsheva
Founded in 1964 by the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, who recruited the mother of American modern dance, Martha Graham, as an artistic adviser, Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Dance Company is now known for Gaga — not she of the renowned poker face, but the quirky elastic movement language developed by its current artistic director Ohad Naharin. Batsheva makes a stop at the YBCA on its Jubilee world tour with Naharin's new work, Sadeh21, a 21-part dance that hovers between passion, politics, and pure abstraction.
Nov. 6-8, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., S.F. Call 978-2700 or visit batsheva.co.il.
Mbongui Square 2014
Byb Chanel Bibene, artistic director of Kiandanda Dance Theater, is an escapee of the harrowing civil war that wreaked ruin and massive physical and psychological traumas on the people of Congo, an experience he documented earlier this year in Taboo and Heroes. In Mbongui Square, Bibene draws on the memory of the central meeting places of Congolese villages to showcase multicultural and interdisciplinary performance by local and international artists. No mere spectacle, the event is designed to foster dialogue and facilitate collaboration among its performers.
Nov. 15, Zaccho Dance Studio, 1777 Yosemite Ave. #330, S.F. Call 822-6744 or visit kiandanda-dance.com.
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