Modern Dance Fan Club: FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival, Weekend One
What I Needed
By Jill Randall

August 15-17, 2025
ODC Theater
San Francisco

I get to see a lot of dance, and this is an honor and a privilege. In particular this past July and August in the San Francisco Bay Area, dance artistry was abundant, with multiple performance options per weekend. This was amazing, hopeful, exciting. 

Of course, I am delighted when I am moved, touched, wowed. A sentiment of artist Jeanine Durning’s has stuck with me all of these years about “being inspired”:

It’s an interesting question these days. I really believe that being inspired is a practice and takes work, that it doesn’t just happen, or is given to me, and I really take that on as an audience member – to meet the performance on its own terms. I’m usually inspired by anything or anyone who is purely generous, purely committed, where I feel something is at stake for them, when someone is “all in,” when I’m not treated like an idiot, where an aspect of humanity – whether that’s terrifying or joyful – is revealed to me, not because the choreographer or performer want me to see it, or is forcing it on me, but because it emerges as a result of truly being fully inside something. That usually has nothing to do with being “smart” or witty or ironic. The question reminds me of a Chuck Close quote I recently saw, something like: Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just get to work. (Artist Profile #89 for Life as a Modern Dancer, April 4, 2015)

Thinking of choreographer Randee Paufve – “Don’t dance over the dance.” It’s about this moment, this body. On Saturday, August 16, the set of three dances really hooked me. There was an overall sense of

Vulnerability
Tenderness
Presence

Due to personal life events, the publication of this writing is very delayed by many months. But I still want to publish it, as it lingers with me and was one of the highlights of 2025 in the Bay Area for me. I feel I am on the long journey alongside FACT/SF and have been a fan for many years, documenting numerous summer festivals and projects over the years through Life as a Modern Dancer (see links below). Today I publish this for the choreographers – Charlie, Joy, Alexander, and Jenna. I publish this now to honor, document, and remember.

Piece 1: The Davis Sisters

In “Make (It) Work: ((A) Work In Process) (Working Title),” there is humor, props, and two dancers with incredible facility. There are dancey phrases, partnering, but also short dialogues, deconstructing a sandwich, and talking on a mic. They hooked me early on – I could watch them do anything. 

The piece is about making art – dancing about dance. Is this our last gig? It is so hard right now. I am reminded of A History with the Bebe Miller Company – another beautiful duet of two longtime collaborators dancing about their work and time together (Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones). 

Maggie Costales also plays the role of stage manager in the piece. She is onstage with Joy Davis and Alexander Davis. She assists, witnesses. Costales uses a broom to re-organize and re-imagine. She clears, shifts the energy. And in the end – she is the one stripping down and dancing…..what’s possible, what’s next….

Piece 2: Jenna Riegel

I am a big fan of Jenna Riegel, from seeing her for the first time pre-pandemic in Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s Analogy/Dora: Tramontane at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Last year she was also in town for the FACT/SF Summer Festival. Her solo work, “Varvara,” was fun, funny, and physical.

For this year’s festival, FACT/SF commissioned Riegel to choreograph a duet for longtime FACT/SF collaborators Charlie Slender-White and LizAnne Roman Roberts, entitled “to the marrow.”

The piece begins with diagonal light – the two horizontal and leaning on an elbow, making their way forward. They push something along…it could be an egg or ball.

Sections unfold with gorgeous dancing –
Tenderness
Whole bodied physicality
An added layer of someone talking about parenthood

The duet seamlessly rolls and melts from unison to short solos to partnering. I keep coming back to the words softness and soft. I referenced A History with The Davis Sisters’ duet, and I see it here too: longtime collaborators and the palpable ease and connection an audience member can feel/see/experience in front of them.

Two times during the 15 minute piece, we hear text: excerpts from On Being with Krista Tippett: Clint Smith, What We Know in the “Marrow of Our Bones.” Embodying this text, we see parent-dancers on stage; parenting on stage; and parenting, danced and expressed.

Soft existence
A yielding place
Lots of level changes,
Shifts of perspective

Be in space,
Forward motion
Bowing in humility

Reflection embodied on stage


They end balancing the balls/eggs on a lifted foot. Effort, commitment, and skill.

Piece 3: Charlie Slender-White

The last dance of the evening, “Maelstrom,” is a new quartet for the company, choreographed by FACT/SF founder and artistic director Charlie Slender-White. The cast includes Erin Coyne, LizAnne Roman Roberts, Jon Kim, and Keanu Forrest Brady.

This is full force dancing, reminiscent of last year’s “Half Time, Full Out” but with additions of pauses and slow motion (yes to exertion+recuperation!). It’s a marathon and a sprint at once.

Slender-White’s choreography is an affirmation of living, of perseverance, of the incredible human body and what it can do.

The phrasework is intricate. With lots of swirls and spirals, it is dizzying and I am in awe considering how the cast remembers it and executes it. They are even spinning while rotating as a group in a circle.

Then HALT. Wow. (Inserting a little poem here….)

Stop yourself
Calm yourself
My feet are planted
I feel the effects of the dancing in my body
I am alive

I am strong muscles
And memorized movements
I am breath
I am sweat
I am experiencing my body
While you are experiencing my body


The music is cinematic, emotional. I am all in.
—
Back to the word softness: there is a softness I have not seen in Slender-White’s work for a bit. One section in particular offers this, where three of the dancers each take a solo moment, dimly lit in a rectangular pool of light.

There are phrases of sequential movement through the limbs and torso – movement brought in a little more to the bone.

I also want to spotlight the unison (and I love unison). The unison here is about magnitude. Think = squared numbers, a kaleidoscope, light on a disco ball. More people makes more. Magnification.

At times I feel they are being tested: Can you stay present? Can you remember all of the choreography? Can you stay in sync? I am reminded of: Repertory Dance Theatre in the work of Laura Dean; Batsheva’s “Last Work;” and the meticulous unison duets of Jenny Stulberg and Lauren Simpson.

It was a stunning performance and commitment by Keanu Forrest Brady, Erin Coyne, Jon Kim, and LizAnne Roman Roberts. 
—
The FACT/SF Summer Festival (weekend 1) reminded me of live dance at its best: 

Let’s spend an evening together

A tender offering

Seriousness + a bit of levity
And some discussion after to see, hear, connect.


Thank you. 
—————
Related links:

Artist Profile #164: Charlie Slender-White
FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Keeps The Conversation Going (2024)
FACT/SF & DISCO RIOT Dance On Making (Summer Festival 2022)
Wholeness in “Split”
An Afternoon Walk and Dance Through Glen Canyon Park: FACT/SF’s “Diffusion”