For dancer, choreographer and trainer Krissy Keefer, 2025 is a giant yr. It marks 5 many years since she began the seed of Dance Brigade, her unabashedly feminist up to date troupe, and 25 years since she landed in San Francisco from Oregon and helped set up Dance Mission, headquarters of Dance Brigade and neighborhood website for lessons and efficiency.
Her remark in regards to the achievements: “[That] I persevered,” she says with amusing. “I didn’t give up. The fact that we’ve been able to gather resources for our house at Dance Mission [and] actually put together a tour of this magnitude … to celebrate 50 years in the field is kind of astonishing.”
“A Woman’s Song for Peace,” a seven-stop tour in Oregon and California kicking off this month, is the primary of three packages within the firm’s celebratory season. Dance Mission twenty fifth anniversary showcase, a tribute to Mission District venue’s function as a vital efficiency and incubator for the Bay Space dance scene, is in November, and March 2026 gives the world premiere of “Match Girl,” Keefer’s San Francisco-set dance adaptation of “The Little Match Girl,” a fairy story by Hans Christian Andersen.
Dance Brigade’s fiftieth anniversary tour, “A Woman’s Song for Peace,” runs in Oregon and Northern California from Jan. 9-19. (Courtesy Brooke Anderson)
“A Woman’s Song for Peace,” which begins this week and concludes Jan. 19 in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, is greater than a two-hour efficiency by Keefer and her collaborators. Subtitled “A Tribute to the Past, A Vision for the Future,” it’s additionally an indication of kinds, that includes Dance Brigade and particular company: songwriter-activist Holly Close to, queer singer-songwriter Ferron and Afro-Cuban jazz artist Christelle Durandy.
Its segments are supposed to function a information and different to world conflicts (together with the Israel-Hamas struggle) that occupy the headlines, significantly these involving the US. The tour concurrently is a tribute to Keefer, celebrating the half- and quarter-century she’s put into Dance Brigade and Dance Mission. It begins Jan. 9 in Eugene, Oregon, the place Keefer conceived Dance Brigade, which stemmed from the Wallflower Order, a feminist dance collective.
“We were a pivotal part of the cultural movement,” she says of her time with Wallflower, which sought so as to add a lacking aspect to the thriving girls’s motion in the US within the mid-Seventies: “I think we were probably the only dance company that really put forward a kind of ‘lesbian politick’ at the time, and tried to figure out social justice issues and wove that into our work.”
After the touring firm moved to Boston in 1981, it discovered a extra agreeable political local weather on the West Coast in Berkeley. Nevertheless, inside clashes led Keefer to formally break free from the collective. In 1983, she established Dance Brigade in San Francisco, the place she discovered appreciable arts funding. Its first dwelling was on Brady Road; it will definitely moved to twenty fourth Road within the Mission, the place the corporate organized a theater and studio.
Requested if she’d try opening an organization in that vogue right this moment, Keefer replies no, however provides, “There has never been as much money in the state of California as there is right now, and foundations that are willing to support, particularly, dance.”
“I think the focus on artists of color has really invigorated everything,” she says, declaring that variety advantages each unbiased artists and established establishments. “I think the only way that ballet is going to survive is to have artists of color integrated and in all of the leading roles. I think that artists of color bring something very specific and transformative to the arts, and that if we can keep generating the resources and highlight artists of color, particularly Black artists, into the center of what’s going on, then the arts really have a future.”
Having reached these milestones after many years of appreciable effort, Keefer has not made strong plans for retirement.
“The amount of work that it takes to run Dance Mission, I sniff around and ask people, ‘Are you interested in running this?’ They’re like, ‘No! Way too much work!’” she says.
Additional contemplating its future, she says, “I think that what Dance Mission brings to the community-at-large is so important, because we really share all of our resources, and we promote, produce and support so many artists. I would hope that we would just be able to keep expanding on our capacity to do this.”
“A Woman’s Song for Peace” is onstage in Eugene on Jan. 9, Portland on Jan. 10, Medford on Jan. 12, Ukiah on Jan. 15, Santa Rosa on Jan. 17, Santa Cruz on Jan. 18 and San Francisco on Jan. 19. Tickets are $25-$50 at dancemissiontheater.org.
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist, activist and performing artist. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and San Francisco Examiner. Dodgy proof of this may be discovered at The Considering Man’s Fool.wordpress.com
