Sean Dorsey Dance Celebrates 20th Anniversary Home Season

Sean Dorsey Dance celebrates its 20th Anniversary Season with two decades of groundbreaking and award-winning artistry by trailblazing choreographer Sean Dorsey. The company will perform a powerful retrospective program featuring Lou (2009), based on the lifelong diaries of pioneering trans activist Lou Sullivan, and excerpts from The Missing Generation (2015) and The Secret History of Love (2012), both based on oral histories Dorsey recorded with LGBTQI+ elders across the US. Performances are 8pm on Thursday, September 19, Friday, September 20 and Saturday, September 21 at Z Space in San Francisco. For tickets and information, go to https://seandorseydance.com/20thAnniversary These Dorsey dances are powerful explorations of the human experience, featuring his signature fusion of full-throttle dance, luscious queer partnering, theater and intimate storytelling. Highly physical, accessible, rooted in story, and danced with precision, guts and deep humanity, Dorsey’s works have boldly created new space for trans and queer voices, bodies and stories in contemporary dance. His works have been praised as “exquisite…poignant and important” (BalletTanz), “trailblazing” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “evocative, compelling, elegant” (LA Weekly). “This Home Season is about legacy, about sharing our history, about uplifting stunning beauty, heartache, resilience and love, especially at this brutal moment in America,” says Dorsey. “My work is embodied, joyous, righteous resistance to the massive, national anti-transgender backlash my community is enduring right now,” adds Dorsey “There are 643 active anti-trans bills in 43 states this year alone. Our existence, our rights and our freedom of expression are under attack . This is an incredibly important time to uplift trans and queer history and artistry.” The 20th Anniversary Home Season features excerpts from a trilogy of SDD works that lift up previously buried, censored or forgotten trans and queer history that Dorsey created between 2009 and 2015. He says,“I wanted to ask: what happens to those stories, those lives that slip between the pages of recorded history and family albums? How do we uncover and reclaim the important stories of trans and queer people that history passes by? I worked with diaries, archives and oral histories as powerful ways to uncover and share our history.” Dorsey’s voice provides the narration for the Lou soundscore in which Dorsey reads excerpts from Sullivan’s diary entries. When Dorsey recorded the original score in 2009, he had been living openly as transgender for more than a decade, without taking testosterone. Like Lou Sullivan, however, Dorsey later decided to start taking testosterone and so this year, he re-recorded the entire soundscore in his current “post-T” voice. “It’s incredibly moving to be re-recording my own poetry/narration for the score, as well as these hundreds of diary entries Lou wrote, in my current voice,” Dorsey shares, “Audiences actually still will hear my old voice during the early part of Lou’s journey where he is aching for his body to align more with his spirit. I think this change is a powerful, powerful addition to the show.” These three works comprised an award-winning trilogy that the company performed and toured to more than 25 cities across the US. For the first time in Sean Dorsey Dance’s history, the company will revisit and perform excerpts of audiences favorites from the last 20 years. The 20th Anniversary lobby experience includes a retrospective photo exhibition of photos of Sean Dorsey Dance by Lydia Daniller and Kegan Marling, a gigantic love letter to Sean Dorsey Dance for audiences to sign, limited edition Sean Dorsey Dance merch, a photobooth and DJ. The Saturday September 21 performance includes a special post-show Gala reception and champagne toast with Dorsey. The Sean Dorsey Dance 20th Anniversary Home Season is performed by Becca Dean, Sean Dorsey, Brandon Graham, Héctor Jaime, David Le and Nol Simonse.

Event Links

Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2581330-0

Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2581330-2

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