a day ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Resilience, resistance and two tour de force solos open ODC Theater's State of Play festival
Like so many arts organizations, the Mission District's ODC Theater has reason to feel dispirited by the current autocratic regime.
In May, the groundbreaking venue lost $15,000 in funding for its annual State of Play Festival when the Trump administration rescinded National Endowment for the Arts grants already appropriated by Congress. Keep in mind that this significant budget item is just a small fraction of the approximately $1 million in total funding the ODC/Dance troupe and its many campus programs have lost as other funders shifted priorities.
On Thursday, July 31, after a low-energy start, 2025's State of Play found its drive. Between a sparsely attended first performance and the evening's middle offering, the lobby filled with many of the city's most compelling dancers and their adventurous fans, eager to see what the night's three shows of experimental work would bring. Their persistence was rewarded by Oakland dancer Gizeh Muñiz's solo, 'Fishblod' — the kind of bizarrely riveting, unclassifiable movement art that makes such avant-garde festivals necessary and life-giving.
Presenting eight artists in total for 2025, State of Play curators Zaquia Mahler Salinas and Maurya Kerr have categorized Muñiz as a 'Curious Creator,' presenting a work just 30-minutes long. (State of Play 'Risk Takers' offer hourlong works, while the 'Experimenters' give work-in-progress studio showings.) 'Fishblod,' which repeats Sunday, may be short in duration, but it is large in impact, a master class in tension.
As you enter the theater, the dancer's limp body, clad in jeans and a hoodie, hangs from a rig with a scrim of glowing orange behind, human wreckage in almost imperceptible suspended motion. Kevin Lo's sound editing washes the air with a distorted soundscape of pounding waves, and Muñiz reaches for another rope and pulls tighter, tighter — when will she have to let go?
Muñiz studied dance in Mexico before working with legendary San Francisco dancer Kathleen Hermesdorf, and rigorous, committed authenticity defines her every millimeter of movement. On the ground, she rolls and flops, but in ways that make you rethink the origami of the body. She feels her way through time with such intentionality that tiny motions — the wigglings of toes, a slow slide of her fingers on the floor — both command your attention and lead you subconsciously into the next section of her motion experiments, so that the progression of the solo feels fated.
Subtle and then shocking lighting design by Erin Riley and Mary Clare Blake-Booth leads to a finale of mesmerizing rebounding limbs. Muñiz's artist statement says that her work is 'rooted in somatics, preverbal memories and evoking a sense of remembrance.'
I cannot tell you what 'Fishblod' is about, exactly, but I can say that like Muñiz's duet 'Auiga' — performed at CounterPulse in 2024 and one of the year's best Bay Area dance performances — it feels primordial in a weirdly comforting way.
The rocky start to the night came with drag artist Black Benatar's 'Black Benatar vs. the Cistem,' a 'Law and Order'-style trial of the health care system that involved a ruffly ovary costume attached to a puppet cyst. The deeply personal piece excoriated the pervasive racism faced by Black women in pain, but the show needs a lot of work finding its rhythm. (Also, dramaturgically it's missing a crucial character development bridge to its defiantly joyful ending.)
The final show of opening night was a tour de force. Former Urban Bush Women member Wanjiru Kamuyu brought her 2022 solo 'An Immigrant's Story,' fiercely reenacting the jeering faced by a teenage Kenyan transplant to conservative small-town America, then widening the scope to include a panoply of immigrant experiences, even that of a Russian exiled to Sweden. Kamuyu's writing is tightly crafted, her acting is spectacular, and her dancing is radiant.
'An Immigrant's Story' repeats at 6 p.m. Friday, followed by a condensed version of Bay Area dancer Molly Rose-Williams' 'Crush,' a hilarious solo I saw (and loved) in a previous iteration. Other artists on the festival lineup include Leila Awadallah, a Palestinian dancer who divides her time between Minneapolis and Beirut, and the antic New York duo Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein.
The resistance continues. In the lobby on Thursday, ODC Theater creative director Chloë L. Zimberg was frank but undaunted about the countercultural work the organization is undertaking in the wake of funding cuts. The theater's calling, she said, is to cultivate community members who will 'take a risk on seeing the unknown,' an endeavor the organization began two years ago with the ODC Theater Art Club, which pairs performances with mixers and discussions.
'We didn't know the funding cuts would happen so fast, and in such large dollar amounts,' Zimberg said. 'But we knew it was time to ask individuals to step up.'
