People affiliated with SF State’s Dance program continue to show a range of successes through performance, film and scholarship.
The San Francisco Dance Film Festival features alumna Kamala Devam’s film The Art of Defining Me from November 6 to 9 at the Brava Theater in San Francisco. Curator and San Francisco Ballet Principal Dancer Tiit Helimetst ranked it in the festival’s top 10. Devam (B.A., ’01) directed, choreographed and starred in the short performance film with Seeta Patel.
Assistant Professor of Dance Yutian Wong explores the Shen Yun Performing Arts Company’s “unique status” in a talk at Stanford University on November 11. Shen Yun proclaims to “revive 5,000 years” of Chinese civilization through its performances of music and dance. The company, however, has been based in New York since its founding in 2006 and has never set foot in mainland China. Wong, who serves as coordinator of the Dance program, teaches courses in critical dance studies and writing for dance majors. She is the author of Choreographing Asian America (Wesleyan UP, 2010) and the editor of the forthcoming Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance Studies.
Dance majors Oona Wong-Danders and Leesha Zieber have been invited to perform as guest artists in the ODC/Dance Home season in March at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Wong-Danders and Zieber are interns at the contemporary San Francisco troupe.