Residency Announcement: RAWdance

We are pleased to announce RAWdance as Zaccho’s spring Resident Company!

RAWdance’s Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein. Photo Credit, RJ Muna

During their residency period, RAWdance Co-Artistic Directors Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein, in collaboration with Scenic Designer Sean Riley and Composer Joel St. Julien, will be developing material for a new site-specific work commissioned by the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. Titled Through My Fingers Deep, this dance will draw inspiration not just from the architecture of the Gardens, but also from the layers beneath the feet of the dancers and audiences. The landscape brings up questions that are intensely personal and emotional, as well as geographic. What happens when the ground beneath your feet is not what you think it is? Where does the surface end and the foundation begin? Do we follow the clearly constructed paths designed for us, or invent our own?

In their own words, “Our primary interest in Zaccho’s residency program is to establish a home for the creation of a new work for the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in July. Being able to create the work at Zaccho would have an unquestionably positive impact on the work; A consistent home for rehearsals, space to work with and store sets, and a studio large enough to create work on the scale of the performance site. We are also interested in connecting to a different community. Our hope is that working at Zaccho would offer more than just space, but also the opportunity to interact with other artists, and reach out to the surrounding audience through an open rehearsal.”

Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein formed RAWdance in 2004 with the mission to reveal an intimate core of our relationships and identities through collaboration and performance. The company makes visually striking, athletic works driven by human interactions, and presents them in unexpected public spaces as well as the theater. SF Weekly dubbed their work “edgy, sexy inventive fare designed to speak to audiences.” Criticaldance hailed it as “experimental work done brilliantly.” The SF Bay Guardian honored RAWdance with a 2014 Goldie Award.