Movement festival whirls into Grace Cathedral
They flocked in droves to Grace Cathedral, like pilgrims on a quest. The thousand people who entered the glorious Nob Hill sanctuary after sundown Friday, Jan. 19, were seeking not an Episcopal sacrament but a more catholic experience: the third annual San Francisco Movement Arts Festival. For one night a year, the movement festival brings dozens of dance companies and scores of individual artists into Grace, which becomes a spectacular setting for dance from ballroom to contemporary, classical Indian to ballet, aerials to performance art.
“I sometimes call it ‘the Wild West
shootout’ because anything goes,” founder Jim Tobin said in a preperformance phone conversation. That’s exactly how it feels when you’re surrounded on all sides by performance and spectacular architecture overhead.
The movement festival is a movable feast for the senses, a riot of sound, a kaleidoscope of visual input and something of a race against time if you want to see everything that interests you. The diversity of the artists, combined with the beauty of the setting, has a magical appeal: The 850 tickets sold out 10 days in advance, so Grace added another 100 tickets at the door.
Performances are staged at 12 stations set up in the chapels, in the side aisles, on the high altar platform and in the choir (the baptismal font and the high altar itself are offlimits). The audience wanders randomly from station to station to watch Caroline Liviakis Dance Company under the vaulted choir ceiling, or Karri Mae Becker & Her Aerial Dancers whirling in a suspended ring near the blue glow of “Jacob’s Dream,” the ladder of light tubes created by Grace’s 2016 artists-in-residence Benjamin Bergery and Jim Campbell.
Dancers have four-minute slots in rotation with others who share their station, so each soloist or group performs five or six times over the twohour event. Only a few are allowed to use music, but no one dances in silence; applause and melodies echo from one end of the space to the other. Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” wafted far beyond Erin Parsley and James Brosnahan III’s period-costumed waltz on the Labyrinth and made a surprising complement to Kathryn Roszak’s Danse Lumière, who were reciting Emily Dickinson at the high altar while flamenco rhythms beckoned from Grace Chapel.
Few boundaries exist between artists and public at the movement festival. Dancers take in the sights between sets, and you might have to walk through one performance to get to another. “There are so many things going on, it can be a little bit overwhelming for an audience member,” said Jetta Martin, 34, who performed a duet with her sister Coral, 29, in front of the high altar. Indeed, no viewers were willing to interrupt their reverie and share their experience for this story. “But as a performer,” Martin said, “it’s incredible. You can feel how much is in this space.”
“I’ve never participated in a performance where there’s multiple dances going on at once, and different sounds are coming at you,” said Lucy Chen, 27. Performing a traditional Tang Dynasty solo in the choir, she flung 20-foot silk ribbons into the air while her gold-beaded Dunhuang costume sparkled in the light. Chen has participated in all three years of the movement festival, and “just being in this setting feels so majestic and grand, and it totally informs how you perform.”
Religion is not Tobin’s motivation for bringing dance to Grace. “My faith is Mother Nature,” said the retired Silicon Valley professional, 66. He produces the festival — with volunteer help and some of his own money (the festival has yet to receive any grants) — because he loves the Bay Area dance scene and the space.
“The moment I walk into Grace Cathedral, I really feel a sense of being at home,” said Tobin, who runs the blog Bay Area Dance Watch. “True religions open up their doors wide, and they let the world in. Grace Cathedral is as good an example of that as you can get.”
Cultivating the arts and welcoming the community are essential to Grace’s mission, said Rebecca Nestle, its director of events and cultural programs. “We’re very open to all pathways to spirituality,” she said by phone. “To me, and to many others here, an integral part of what makes us human is our ability to express ourselves through art.”
A case in point was Nathan Cottam, 43, whose contemporary solo, “Fire of Life” by mime artist Rick Wamer, had a spiritual but nonreligious theme. “Its inspiration is the amazing experience we’re having through life, the sensual experience of life, and of course how fleeting it is,” he said. After dancing in front of Chapel of Nativity’s golden shrine, he contemplated the synchronicity of site and subject. “What could be more right in a place of worship and spiritual reflection that is meant to bind us to eternity,” he said, “than something that reflects on exactly that?”