dawson dance

fabbrica materasso d'argento performance at Zaccho Studio

dawson dance sf is pleased to announce the launch of its new company website.  Please visit dawsondancesf.org for information on artist profiles, upcoming performances, and ways to support the company in its mission to bring new and exciting works to the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.  In particular, a New Kickstarter Campaign has been launched, and the company can be seen performing in San Francisco, Southern California, and New York this season.  Excited to be making San Francisco's Zaccho Studio its home base, dawson dance sf is looking forward to a season of passionate and innovative work.  Please check the company’s website and Zaccho's AIR Blog regularly for news regarding current and forthcoming projects.

Amy Seiwert Artist in Residence

July is a very special time here at Zaccho Studio! For the past four summers, we have had the immense pleasure of hosting AIR Amy Seiwert and her Imagery Dancers during the creation of their SKETCH series. The SKETCH series was launched in 2011 as a platform for experimentation and innovation in ballet based choreography. Each choreographer self identifies a risk and uses that as their departure point for creation. Opportunities for pure choreographic exploration and development are almost non-existent in the ballet world, and rarely do they come with the freedom or resources that choreographers need to truly experiment. The SKETCH series was created specifically as a resource for choreographers to abandon their comfort zone. Each year the series has a theme. For 2014, that theme will be the relationship between music and dance.  

SKETCH 4 | Music Mirror is an exploration of how two very different ballet choreographers interpret the same piece of original music by composer Kevin Keller. The commissioned music will be performed live by Amy Seiwert's Imagery (ASI), where Choreographers Seiwert and Adam Hougland will collaborate with Keller in the creation of new works, culminating in public performances at ODC Theater. 

The impact of SKETCH on both artists and audiences is significant. For the composer and choreographers, it is a chance to revel in possibility and creative ambition; for the dancers, it is an opportunity to participate directly in creation; for audiences, SKETCH provides access to the creative process. The works-in-process showings that take place at Zaccho Studio, as well as performances at ODC Theater (in San Francisco July 24-27 2014) with talk-backs and receptions happening at ODC on July 26th 2014, allow for a deep exchange between the audience and artists.

Amy Seiwert  serves as the Artistic Director and primary choreographer of Imagery. Her collaborations with artists of other disciplines and commitment to experimental work from a classical base make her a unique voice in the SF dance community. She is honored to be the Choreographer in Residence for Smuin Ballet as well as an Artist in Residence at the ODC Theater and Zaccho Studio.

Gregory Dawson Artist in Residence

Our most featured AIR of 2014 is Artistic Director Gregory Dawson and his company dawson dance sf! They have re-established an enormous presence in San Francisco with the presentation of their highly successful World Premier fabricca matterasso d'argento. A high-energy and hard-hitting ballet, fabricca is set to the music of Alton San Giovanni and inspired by Langston Hughes' poem Dreams. As said by Ray Mark Rinaldi of the Denver Post, "The piece is an intimate, sensual and surreal marathon that pushes the dancers to the limits".

 In his second production as AIR, Gregory Dawson embarked on the exciting and challenging territory of aerial dance with his Intrinsic Motion Project, staging his own highly ambitious, high-impact style of choreography off of the ground. Informed and inspired by his previous work as a dancer with Zaccho Dance Theatre, Gregory turned to Artistic Director Joanna Haigood for consulting on aerial techniques and safe practices. Zaccho's House Rigger, Sean Riley of Gravity Design, was also on board to rig the dancers' apparatus, allowing them to safely explore the realm of dancing in the rafters and zip across the floor with ropes.

Video Footage of this highly ambitious and successful new project can be seen here:

Gregory Dawson  retired from Lines Ballet in 2005 and began to teach and choreograph for Alonzo King's LINES Ballet BFA at Dominican University California and for LINES Ballet Training Program. Students from the LINES BFA Program were selected to represent the Southwest Region and perform his Solid Soil Beneath Our Feet at the National College Dance Festival in New York. Mr Dawson has also been on faculty for the San Francisco High School for the Arts for the last eight years. 

 In 2007 he formed dawsondancesf. In 2008 he choreographed Which Light in the Sky is Us for Company C which was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Award for Choreography. In 2009, he became Assistant Director of the CCCSA Dance Dept. In the spring of 2010, Mr. Dawson reset Venus for the 2010 season of David Taylor Dance (DTD), and in spring 2011 created a new ballet for DTD, Big Sky Endless Mountains. 

In the fall of 2011, Mr Dawson became Director of Dawson Wallace Dance Project in Denver, Colorado (formally David Taylor Dance). In 2011 Dawson was selected to receive a CHIME Grant to be mentored by Elizabeth Streb for one year, ending in December of 2012. In 2013, the Denver Post named Dawson the Best Choreographer in Denver. In September of 2013, dawsondancesf re-established it's presence in San Francisco with the World Premier of fabricca matterasso d'argento at Zaccho Studio, the company's new home.