‘Sweet 16’ wish list for troupe: a home
Push dancers raise money with show in alley outside future space
Turning from San Francisco’s Fifth Street onto Minna Street on a recent Sunday, you’d drive through a tunnel and into a cinematic landscape of broken glass pipes, dusty lots, weird half-finished metal towers, and bodies crouched in doorways or huddling under a leather jacket or dashing curb to curb. Only by parking and walking could one tell the pre-existing chaos from the orchestrated choreography.
But if you came closer to the masked man rattling the bars on an empty brown brick building, you’d hear a woman in sweatpants and gold-rimmed glasses saying, “That’s good, grab the bars. And then maybe you’re peeking through and then you’re thinking, ‘Why can’t I get in there?’ And then you’re getting more aggressive.”
That woman was Raissa Simpson, and the building the dancer was rattling is, she hopes, soon to be a home and refuge for her Push Dance Company. Simpson is currently working with the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, which was given the empty Dempster Building as part of the $1 billion 5M development of offices and condos that will soon transform this part of Minna. Push hopes to secure an affordable long-term lease when 447 Minna opens, which CAST projects could happen in early 2022.
In the meantime, Push is scheduled to put on an outdoor site-specific performance fundraiser titled “Sweet 16 Sixteen” to help make reality of its vision of a third-floor home encompassing two studios and a “BIPOC Refuge,” a rejuvenating space for artists of color. As part of the benefit, work-in-progress performances of Simpson’s new “Emme Ya: Expedition” are set for 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 28-29. A filmed online sneak peek of “Emme Ya” is slated to stream for a month beginning Sept. 16, and the online program is also expected to feature a roundtable discussion and interviews.
It’s a powerful resurgence for Simpson after an extraordinary year of deeply considered choices.
“There were all these calls for resilience,” she said of the year after COVID-19 shelter-in-place measures began. “And I went the other direction. I said, I need to know what it is to take a break.”
For seven years, Push had produced an annual showcase of new work known as Pushfest, which had grown from three days in 2014 to a three-week, 18-choreographer digital event during the pandemic in 2020. But when it came to 2021, Simpson decided to cancel the festival. In the past year, four of her eight dancers had contracted the coronavirus, which was sobering, she said. She needed time to rest, rebuild her mission and be in discussion with fellow members of Dancing Around Race, a community of choreographers meeting since 2018.
The break has given Simpson a chance to gain perspective on the nomadic way Push has survived since she founded the company in 2005, growing its community programming to offer outreach and young dancer workshops even as it moved between temporary locations in the Western Addition and Bayview.
And though Minna Street holds the promise for Push of a permanent home, its landscape of change — tractors and bags of cement line the sidewalks — connects to Simpson’s ongoing exploration of displacement.
“We’re asking as nomadic travelers, what is our relationship to the land, this land that is Costanoan and Ohlone land and the Filipino Heritage District,” said Simpson, who is of Filipino and African American descent. “Here we are back where Push started. It feels ambivalent, this reality of forced migration and assimilation into a space in order to survive. It’s one thing to do a piece about gentrification and another to be in it.”
“Emme Ya,” whose title references
Afro-futurist mythology, will build on these experiential connections and on Simpson’s investigations of site-specific work, Black dance history and Afro-futurism, which deepened when she earned a master’s degree in theater and dance from UC Davis in 2016.
“She really came to a sense that dance is an integral expression of the Black body and a tool of survival for people of color and enslaved people of the African diaspora,” said UC Davis Professor Emerita Halifu Osumare, author of the memoir “Dancing in Blackness” and adviser of Simpson’s graduate thesis. “I see Raissa as almost a modern-day Katherine Dunham, a dance maker and philosopher-scholar. She’s interested in dance and movement and social issues at the same time.”
(Case in point: Simpson contributed a chapter on Afro-futurism to “Critical Black Futures,” an anthology recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.)
Simpson is beginning a position as a lecturer in dance at Stanford University this fall. But as eddies of gravel blew down Minna and a stranger doing something covert in a urinesoaked corner put a shirt back on and walked off, she was still deeply connected to city reality. Leaving the solo dancer at 447 Minna to improvise with his bar-rattling, she walked toward Fifth, where a group of women were playing a singsong game she had asked them to improvise. Her collaborators’ laughter reverberated through the tunnel at her approach.