Summer dance sampler
ODC/Dance’s 2017 Summer Sampler, July 27-29 at the San Francisco company’s Mission District space, features two premieres: a new work the company’s co-Artistic Director
KT Nelson created with Korean choreographer Na Hoon
Park that employs three ODC dancers, and a quartet by
Kimi Okada titled “Head in the Sand.” It’s about coping mechanisms for bad news and tough times, based on Okada’s personal experience using denial and laughter to deal with unwelcome things.
Then there’s a reboot of “Format II,” an improvisatory 1978 piece by ODC founding Artistic Director Brenda Way that includes a ticking stopwatch and what the company describes as “the unexpected and often humorous dancer interaction with a massive staircase designed by sculptor Athena Tacha.”
For more information, go to www.odc.dance.
Holliday songs
Big-voiced Jennifer Holliday, the “Dreamgirls” star famous for raising the rafters, will be “In a Mellow Tone” when Feinstein’s at the Nikko presents her July 21, not at the Nikko but at the larger Marine’s Memorial Theatre in San Francisco. She’ll presumably sing that above-titled Duke Ellington chestnut when she serves up jazz, Broadway and R&B tunes and tells tales about Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand.
For more information, go to www.feinsteinsatthenikko.com.
Womanly music
Forty years ago, the soulful San Francisco singer Linda Tillery recorded an influential self-titled album for the feminist Olivia Records label that included several songs with proudly lesbian lyrics, among them “Womanly Way.” To celebrate the anniversary, Tillery is performing that music at Freight & Salvage on Saturday, July 1, with her Womanly Way Reunion Band, featuring several musicians who played on the record, among them singer and multiinstrumentalist Vicki Randle, bassist Diane Lindsay and keyboardist Mary Watkins.
For more information, go to www.thefreight.org.
Awesome Nilsson
On Sunday, July 2, at the Independent in San Francisco, the up-for-anything Awesöme Orchestra presents “The Point!,” the 1971 album by the late, great singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson about the only round-headed boy in a land where everything must have a point. His son Kiefo Nilsson sings lead vocals, accompanied by a dozen players and scenes from the Fred Wolf animated movie adapted from the album, narrated by Oakland humorist Mallory Ortberg.
For more information, go to www.awesomeorchestra.org.