Small dance companies, particularly contemporary ones, are rarely able to hit the ground running when they debut. Most struggle for years before gaining enough recognition to survive, or they quietly disappear. A well-deserved exception to this rule is SFDanceworks, which opens its seventh season Nov. 7–10 at Z Space with dancer and choreographer Rena Butler.
The company, started in 2014 by James Sofranko, then a soloist with San Francisco Ballet, always had the goal of presenting both new works from younger choreographers and modern masterpieces by dance icons like José Limon and Martha Graham.
SFDanceworks’ debut was a success, and the troupe gained a reputation as the best small dance company in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, just after Brett Conway and Laura O’Malley came on as the new co-directors in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Dana Genshaft, also a former soloist with SF Ballet, took the reins in 2021 and intends to stay on. She explained, “It’s Jim’s baby, but there’s a group of us, really from the beginning, who wanted to see his vision of a mixed-repertory company — dedicated to the past, present, [and] future of contemporary dance — that’s not ballet-focused.”
Because smaller troupes have financial constraints, they don’t have the luxury of repeating pieces that deserve to be seen by a larger audience. Genshaft said she hopes “that work will come back somehow, either in our repertoire or somewhere else. That’s really a great marker of our success that I hope to achieve. You want the dancers to be able to repeat things so they grow into them, reach this other level. SFDanceworks is starting to create its own style as a company, an artistic personality.”
This week, SFDanceworks is bringing in Butler, who has performed with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Gibney Company, while her choreography has been dance by Hubbard Street, The National Ballet of Canada, BalletX, and Oregon Ballet Theatre, among others. She also worked with San Francisco Opera on its 2022 production of Orpheus and Euridice and returns in 2025 to choreograph Parsifal.
Here Butler will be performing Marco Goecke’s grueling 11-minute solo Äffi, originally made for a male dancer to music by Johnny Cash. “What was really interesting about this work is I met the man that it was created on,” recounted Butler, describing a rehearsal with Marijn Rademaker, who premiered the piece in 2005.
Equally demanding is the world premiere by Butler on the program, for five dancers and 31 singers from the Young Women’s Choral Projects of San Francisco, conducted by Matthew Otto. “I’m curious about the idiom of a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Butler. “Does it always ring true for the wolf to be in the sheep’s clothing, or could it be the inverse?
“I wanted to use [Felix] Mendelssohn’s [“Zigeunerlied” from Four Lieder, Op. 120]. It’s for a choir of men singing about women as wolves, even naming them in the song. It’s quite dark for Mendelssohn — haunting, eerie, creepy.”
Genshaft, failing to find an available men’s chorus, came across a young women’s group; Butler wanted to know how young the singers were. “When Dana said from the ages of 13 to 18, I was thinking about the register of their voices, how that’s definitely going to change the timbre of the music.
“It’s extremely timely. The election is just around the corner. I’m talking about galvanizing young women’s voices. With a female choreographer, dancers that are majority female, and then 31 young teenage girls who are making their throats dance — how do you get their bodies to sing alongside dancers?”
Also on the program is a new work by JA Collective, the Los Angeles-based duo of Aidan Carberry and Jordan Johnson, best known for their intricate and spellbinding choreography for pop music videos. Their work is inspired by hip-hop, theater, contemporary dance, and ballet, all infused with jazz’s rhythmic complexity and something of the intricate mechanics of Rube Goldberg machines.
