Presented by Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, ChoreoFest 2021 highlights the spectacular strength, diversity, and vibrancy of the Bay Area contemporary dance scene. Curated by RAWdance’s Co-Artistic Directors Wendy Rein, Ryan T. Smith and Katerina Wong, the fourth annual YBG ChoreoFest is reimagined as safe artistic gatherings in response to San Francisco’s return to live, outdoor performances. Spanning three Saturdays this summer, nine local companies will activate and enliven the beloved downtown park with special site-specific performances.

Please note that this program takes place in multiple areas of the Gardens and requires the audience to change location. Comfortable footwear recommended. Persons needing assistance should seek Festival staff in orange Festival caps.

YBG ChoreoFest 2021 Dates:

• Day 1: July 10, 2021
• Day 2: July 31, 2021
• Day 3: August 14, 2021

Day 3 Program

Day 3 Artists:

CALI & CO dance/Christine Cali
Christine Cali is the director of the San Francisco based CALI & CO dance (2001) and Chair and Associate Professor of Theatre Arts & Dance at Sonoma State University. Cali performed with Brooklyn-based Urban Bush Women in Hair & Other Stories, (2019) and directed CALI & CO’s site-adaptive work ADAPT, performed in 20 locations in SF in collaboration with Matt EL Music (17-19’). Since March 2020 Christine has offered SIP Somatic Dance & Wellness classes via ZOOM, with donations supporting SF Bay Area BIPOC artists and organizations. Cali has been described as “one of the most ferocious, spell-binding dancers I’ve seen in this city” in the SF Chronicle, and nominated as Best Dance Class in SF Magazine’s “Best of 2015”. Her creative work and teaching are rooted in anti-racist practices/pedagogies, embodied story-sharing, original live music, and collaboration through community-building and art-marking.

Concept o4
Concept o4 is a production company based in dance and led by Natasha Adorlee and Max Sachar. The company creates innovative media work that challenges in both the realm of inventive choreography and technical productions; All this effort to reach a wider audience and create safe, immersive spaces for dance to thrive. Max and Natasha most recently were the directorial team behind the award-winning short film Take Your Time. TYT received the best short award from San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Red Rock Festival, and Valley Film Festival. After dancing professionally for over 15 years, Natasha is currently the Director of Video at Ubisoft, and Max is a producer at Pixar. They are excited to present The Drommer in a live setting, with the intention to translate to work to film later this year.

Fog Beast
Since 2009 Fog Beast, directed by Melecio Estrella and Andrew Ward has made numerous theatrical dance performances marked by warm humor, vivid imagery and full bodied song and dance. Their newer works of the last 2 years have sprung from research into local and global climate change, as well as citizenship- both ecological and national. For years Estrella and Ward refined their craft collaborating on large scale outdoor and indoor site specific performance with Bandaloop and the Joe Goode Performance Group, before launching fog beast performance endeavors, offering context specific work that invites both absurdity and directness.

See updated safety guidelines under Visitor Information.

This program is supported by: