The Black Choreographers Festival performance on Sunday night, Feb. 23, at Dance Mission Theater delivered gorgeous works from some of the powerhouses of Bay Area dance. These choreographers’ creations, some nascent and others reprised, represented a breadth of styles that, when taken together, formed a vibrant tapestry of dance dedicated to Black joy, struggle, beauty, and triumph. Arduous dedication to community- and coalition-building on the part of the festival’s co-founders, Laura Elaine Ellis and Kendra Kimbrough Barnes, was evident. Short films from the San Francisco Dance Film Festival added texture. A full-tilt dance party with cake at the end brought sweetness.
Deborah Vaughan and Laurie Fleurentin created the first live performance on the bill, calling us forth with live drumming by Baba Duru, Carson Fratus, and Cy Thompson. A voice-over spoken by Vaughan ended with the line, “In joy we build, we heal, we thrive,” and the piece that followed demonstrated that sentiment with verve.
Ten dancers clad in red, white, and denim blues took to the stage with lively, whirling, full-bodied phrase work, largely driven by the whistle and high-stepping action of a colonel in the Haitian Rara tradition. What appeared to be a blend of folk and contemporary stylings sang out from the stage as dancers wound round one another, playfully nodding and gesturing to the musicians and audience, shifting seamlessly between unison phrases and individual musings. I couldn’t help hearing Vaughan’s words as a particular sort of resistance given the current political and social moment (read: Black History Month during the reign of Donald Trump and Elon Musk). The piece got folks moving in their seats, primed for the rest of the program.
Next up was Jenelle Gaerlan, dancing a solo excerpt from a larger work in development by Robert Moses. Gaerlan’s lush movement was flawlessly executed, demonstrating the flow and buoyancy characteristic of Moses’s choreography across the years. While stylistically similar to certain of Moses’s previous works, the piece saw Gaerlan bringing a sly and novel sort of daring to her embodiment of this solo character. There was a jauntiness to her shoulders, a playful tilt of the head, all layered on top of impossibly complex footwork and big arching sweeps of the arms. Clad in a white button-down, red slacks, and an open black jacket with tails, a character emerged that harkened to Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and seemed to pair perfectly with the Miles Davis and Woody Herman Orchestra piece that Moses had selected.
House of Rashad, a work in progress by Raissa Simpson, followed. The piece is dedicated in memory of Rashad Pridgen, a beloved contributor to the local dance scene who died last year. Five masc dancers wearing identical gray and white costumes moved beautifully, reverently, energetically. Each seemed to dance a prayer, full of grief as well as relief. Their carefully crafted and highly individualized movement was somehow simultaneously aching with memory and alive with hope. Algin Ford’s sound design (he was mixing onstage during the performance) generated a liminal space that seemed one part dance club, two parts concert stage, and the rest pure ether, in which ruminations about the connective tissue between here and beyond emerged.
Simpson came up through BCF’s mentorship program, as did Gregory Dawson, who has gone on to hone his craft exquisitely. On Sunday, his O’Reilly Quartet served as a shining example of his contemporary ballet stylings. Dancers brought to life the intricacies of this piece, set to lively jazz by Luke Carlos O’Reilly. Of particular note were the duets that exemplified and amplified the interplay of the instruments.
Next came Byb Chanel Bibene’s solo, which brought to light the tragedy of an upturned vessel off the coast of Libya that dumped migrants from North Africa into the sea. Bibene danced with a red cloth that rippled and churned, evoking water moving in a way that was far from peaceful. His body was heavy with despair and maybe even rage — his muscular form now hunched on a folding chair, now descending achingly to the floor, now splashing water again and again in his own face. He danced an invocation that seemed to honor the lives lost and indict the systems that caused those deaths.
The final dance on the program, Vodoun Tapestries, was epic, creating an energetic lift that literally brought audience members to their feet and out onto the dance floor. The embodied spirits of Haitian Vodou, with their itinerant colors and gestures, here combined in a glorious display of power and joy. The approach was richly layered and a feast for the senses — the stage chock full of dancers (more than 20 in total) in full regalia, churning toward a state of collective reverie.
What an honor it was to be in the room for this calling forth of ancestral wisdom, this unbridled celebration of Black music and movement, this raucous reminder that Bay Area art is alive and thriving, here and now.
