The San Francisco and New York based contemporary dance company RAWdance is an award-winning contemporary dance company known for turning theaters and/or public areas into performance spaces. The company’s CONCEPT series is well known for bringing its excellent dance art to communities around the Bay area. At 6pm PST on Friday, August 14, 2020 RAWdance and guest artists Eric Garcia (Detour Dance), Marissa Brown (Lone King Projects), Frankie Lee III (FLEE), Megan Lowe (Megan Lowe Dances), and Jocelyn Reyes (Reyes Dance) will present the CONCEPT series: Digital Edition online via Zoom.
Their press release read in part: Hosted live by RAWdance’s “the Digital Edition will focus on dance for camera, including a mix of short dance films completed during the recent months of sheltering-in-place, as well as works-in-progress. The films will be followed by a full on dance party, complete with Jumbotron camera action. The dance party is a chance for the audience to move together, and even to take over the screen to show their best dance moves. Throughout and following the event, audiences will be encouraged to share impressions and feedback with the choreographers, helping provide an outside perspective as they continue to craft their works”.
Dance artist Megan Lowe will present a pre-quarantine site-specific work performed in an abandoned zoo incorporating crumbling stones, cracked concrete, and metal cages. Jocelyn Reyes’s work explores a multiplicity of selves and how ordinary places start to become un-ordinary. Eric Garcia is a Theater artist and activist who brings “prismatic storytelling and queer aesthetics to dance film”. The work of dance artist Frankie Lee III presented here centers around his recent personal journey. Marissa Brown is on pause from Broadway’s revival of West Side Story, will also present a work on this experimental version of the series. RAWdance’s Co-Artistic Directors share two films: one filmed in the Bay Area by Katerina Wong and a second made in New York’s Hudson Valley by Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith.
RAWDANCE has been presented by the Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow, YBCA, Dance St. Louis, ODC Theater, the Singapore Fringe, Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance, and more throughout the U.S. and in Asia. Since 2007, the CONCEPT series has presented works by over 100 Bay Area artists. In 2019 the company expanded to two coasts, with Co-Founders Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein shifting to New York’s Hudson Valley, and Katerina Wong assuming the role of Co-Artistic Director in San Francisco.
RAWdance invites you to ‘attend’ the CONCEPT series: Digital Edition at 6pm PST on Friday, August 14, 2020 online via Zoom. The performance fee is Pay-What-You-Can with a suggested donation of $10-$25. For more information about RAWdance and the CONCEPT series: Digital Edition, click HERE.
Written by Jeff Slayton for LA Dance Chronicle.
Featured image: Stacey Yuen of RAWdance – Photo by Hillary Goidell
