Dance Brigade: Artistic Director Krissy Keefer’s company remains fierce and feminist.
Keefer’s collective maintains commitment to art, activism
Leaflet-strewn tables promoting the ACLU, the Women’s March and the Living Wage Coalition greeted audience members streaming into the YBCA Theater on Friday, Jan. 13. It’s hard to imagine a more apt prelude to twoplus hours of fiercely political, feminist performance celebrating Dance Brigade and Artistic Director Krissy Keefer, who founded her first feminist dance company 40 years ago.
“Gracias a la Vida: Love in a Bitter Time” combined five past works and an epic world premiere. They all bore Keefer’s indelible stamp, an alchemy of ballet, modern, hip-hop, jazz, taiko drumming, the theatrics of a revival meeting and unabashed female power.
“Feminism, for me, is a worldview about what is just and what is fair,” Keefer, 63, said by phone a few days earlier. “For not only women, but for everyone. That has been the driving force of my work.”
Keefer trained in ballet as a child in Columbia, S.C., but found her calling in Eugene, Ore., in 1975, when she co-founded the feminist
dance company Wallflower Order. Wallflower took political performance on tour internationally. “It was the first time that people had seen a bold and brazen and selfproclaiming group of women, with no uncertain terms, make declarations about their female strength ... within the dance world,” Keefer said.
Resettled in the Bay Area, Keefer co-founded Dance Brigade in 1984 with fellow Wallflower alumna Nina Fichter. (Fichter died in 2003.) Their most famous creation was “The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie,” a sharp, witty and festive referendum on the dominant paradigm.
In 1998, Keefer established Dance Mission in the Mission. Technically a nonprofit studio and performance space, at heart it is a multicultural home and a hub for women and girls of all ages, straight and LGBTQ people, and the disenfranchised and gentrified to express themselves without fear and to speak their truth to power.
About 1,500 kids and adults take classes at Dance Mission every week, and select teens join the junior company Grrrl Brigade. The 140-seat theater is booked roughly 45 weeks per year with visiting performers and local artists like Nol Simonse, Micaya and Ramón Ramos Alayo.
Sarah Bush, 40, is among the many artists Keefer has supported. “I feel so fortunate,” says Bush, a 16-year Dance Brigade member and head of her own eponymous dance company. “Krissy’s lasting legacy is of creating this institution based on her values: feminism, diversity, inclusion, celebration of cultures, standing your ground when it’s not easy.”
On Friday night, Bush was a marvel of gangly intensity in “Break It on Down”; women in prairie dresses pounded brooms on the stage floor, incanting Longfellow’s “There was a little girl” like frenzied witches, declaiming their right to self-definition. In “Swan Song,” she was among the black-clad women mourning the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and undulating their arms like Odette/Odile.
Keefer invited three men to perform: Adonis Martin, Edisnel Rodriguez and Delvis Friñon, who defected from Cuba and were brought to Dance Mission by Alayo. In “Defection, Deflection, Devotion,” they conjured sorrow, fear and brotherhood through emotive solos and a remarkable interweaving of acrobatic flips, falls and leveraged balances.
Keefer examined current events in 2016’s “Sin Palabras,” about Edward Snowden and press freedom. The work was strongest when Lena Gatchalian’s video montage of Snowden gave way to TV-fuzz and abstract, highvelocity dancing in a blizzard of foam packing pellets.
Spoken word is a defining component of Keefer’s work, and her 25-year-old daughter, Fredrika, opened the contemporary “Tribe” with definitive proclamations about women: “I am not a pearl, I am the Atlantic Ocean.”
New generations of girls are finding their voices through Dance Mission. “We had very feminist, activist teachers who really trained us to become independent thinkers,” says Marivel Mendoza, 20, who first enrolled at age 7 and now teaches there. “To be asked as a young girl what your opinion is, is really big and important. I try to implement those ideas into my (students) as well.”
Unfortunately, rising rents are forcing Dance Mission out of its historic home. A potential new location, at 16th and Mission streets, would offer a 99-year lease, but Keefer describes the renovation costs as “exorbitant.”
“As soon as this show is over, I have to go into capitalcampaign mode,” she laments. After four decades, raising money still daunts her the most. “I tell people I have PTSD from running an arts organization in the United States, because it’s so difficult.”
That trauma was far from her mind in the second half of the show, when “Gracias a la Vida” premiered. Holly Near and Christelle Durandy sang in English and Spanish, while the full company pounded joyously on taiko drums and alternated mournful solos with exuberant salsa-inflected hip-hop.
They shouted about freedom and justice, Chile, El Salvador and chemical warfare. They performed it with purpose. As Keefer said in her narration, “What good is our beauty if it does not serve our people?”