ODC/Dance Artistic Director Brenda Way and ODC School Director Kimi Okada were first impressed with Gypsy Snider’s choreography after attending her hit show “Dear San Francisco” at Club Fugazi.
“I reached out to Kimi and Brenda as two women I deeply respect for what they’ve built here in San Francisco and wanted their mentorship,” Snider says of why she invited Okada and Way to see the North Beach acrobatic show she co-wrote, choreographed, directed and produced. “They kept saying to me how choreographically interesting they found the show. And I came to watch ODC rehearsals one day and they said, ‘Would you consider making a piece with the company?’”
Snider agreed to ODC’s commission for a new work she called “Caught in the Act,” which will make its world premiere March 5-8 as part of the company’s “Dance Downtown” program. In addition to Snider’s piece that’s evocative of a cabaret and circus, the program includes the world premiere of Way’s “After the Deluge,” which was inspired by what Way considers the government’s “wholly inadequate response” to Hurricane Katrina and eventual public indifference to tragic events like it, and a reprise of Mia J. Chong’s “Theories of Time” from last summer.
Tapping into her roots
Snider’s ties to the Bay Area, founding members of ODC and dance date back to her birth and upbringing in San Francisco as the child of parents who founded the legendary Pickle Family Circus. Okada, who was also a founding member of the PFC and was married to Bill Irwin, one of the circus clowns, taught a four-year-old Snider how to tap dance.
“I also learned my very first choreography from Kimi, and it was for a group of monkeys,” she recalls. “I was dressed as a monkey and learned an incredible sort of contemporary jazz choreography to an incredible original jazz score.”
Snider, who credits a lot of her creative origins to the way the family circus combined movement, theater and music, enrolled in the American Conservatory Theater’s youth program and attended the Urban School of San Francisco. She then moved to Switzerland, where she enjoyed a revelatory experience studying physical theater — ballet, modern dance, tap, folk, improvisational theater, traditional theater, silent theater, teatro dell’arte, music, music comprehension, writing and mask making — at Scuola Teatro Dimitri (Dimitri Theater School) and toured Europe with its troupe.
“I was already directing and choreographing at Urban, and then teaching and directing at the San Francisco Circus Center, which was an offspring of the Pickle Family Circus, and knew from a young age I wanted to create circus work unlike anything I had seen before, especially in the United States.” she says. “Europe opened the doors to contemporary circus and movement and was so ahead of the game in terms of mixing mediums; I was exposed to incredible dance theater and realized that the language of theater and movement was expansive, and that circus could have a place in the idea of movement and expression. And that was where I wanted to go.”
Snider went on to perform with Cirque du Soleil and Teatro Zinzanni before co-founding The 7 Fingers, a Montreal-based contemporary circus collective, in 2002. Since 2021, the troupe has resided at Club Fugazi.
“Caught in the Act” is set on nine dancers who come to a theater performance as spectators and realize they don’t have seats for it but that instead their places are on stage, which Snider says is a place that pulls them in but also traps them.
“I also learned my very first choreography from Kimi, and it was for a group of monkeys. I was dressed as a monkey and learned an incredible sort of contemporary jazz choreography to an incredible original jazz score.”
Gypsy Snider
‘There’s two layers to this story for me,” she explains. “One is that life in the arts is very much a trap once you access your creative source and center — it is very difficult to put back in a box — you become a vehicle for your own creative voice, in which case you have to sacrifice so much into creativity because creativity is always renewing itself.
“It also became really apparent to me that we are all somehow contributing to the current state of the world, and in a way unwillingly — so all the social media, data, algorithms — and I’m contributing to it and yet now I’m also a prisoner of it. And that is a very complex concept to put into the piece, but it is absolutely the inspiration for the music and the movement,” Snider adds.
Performers laid bare
“Caught in the Act” is set to a playlist of European electronic music by artists such as Michael Galasso, Ensemble FOVE, Faten Kanaan, Christophe Zurfluh, NTO, The Caretaker and dreamcorp. that was arranged by Snider’s frequent collaborator Colin Gagné.
Costumes for the piece were designed by the San Francisco multidisciplinary artist Jamielyn Duggan, whom Snider asked to create attire that one would wear to the theater but that also allows the dancers to move freely while wearing them — and disintegrate over the course of the work.
“The dancers become more and more part of the piece and laid bare so they end up not very dressed at the end,” Snider says. “I wanted them to be laid bare, sweaty and out of breath and sort of relinquishing themselves to the piece.”
Alexander Nichols’ scenic and lighting design that includes silver and gold Mylar decorative curtains help create a setting of entrapment that Snider was seeking.
“Mylar is very cheap — you might see it in a disco or cabaret — there’s something very performative about putting up silver and gold Mylar,” she says. “It forces the dancers to question their performative movement. It’s fun and shiny and yet it’s just a trap.”
ODC/Dance’s “Dance Downtown” runs 7:30 p.m. March 5, 7 (LGBTQ+ Night), 8 p.m. March 6 (Gala) and, 2 p.m. March 8 at the Blue Shield of California Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., San Francisco. Tickets are $30-$190 at (415) 863-9834 or odc.dance.