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SAN FRANCISCO, CA, November 1, 2024 – ODC Theater is pleased to announce the program for its 2025 Spring Season featuring four weekends of experimental performance by artists from New York, Los Angeles, and as far away as Barcelona, Spain. The Theater’s Spring Season runs February 28 - April 13, with headliners including Miguel Gutierrez, Lali Ayguadé Company, Baye & Asa, and Adrienne Westwood & Angélica Negrón.
With this announcement ODC Theater also welcomes new Resident Curator Zaquia Mahler Salinas, a Chicanx/Palestinian dance artist currently based in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2018, Salinas co-founded DISCO RIOT, a nonprofit that supports radical dance and creative possibilities in San Diego. She has been awarded various artistic residencies, including a 2019 residency in Bethlehem, Palestine with Diyar Dance Theatre where she deepened her understanding of dance as a form of cultural, embodied resistance.
In 2023, Salinas was awarded one of San Diego’s inaugural Far South/Border North grants for artists working in socially engaged practice; and in 2024, she relocated to Boston to accept the role of Senior Director of Artist Programs and Residencies with Boston Center for the Arts. Salinas’ term at ODC Theater overlaps with outgoing Resident Curator Maurya Kerr’s residency and runs through the end of 2025.
Salinas’ curation will take shape most visibly beginning in next year’s State of Play festival, but in the meantime, she is collaborating with Kerr and ODC Theater Creative Director Chloë L. Zimberg in selecting next year’s awardees of the Theater’s Rental Discount Initiative, who will be announced later this year. “As someone who is endlessly moved by the community-building and storytelling power of dance, I am interested in exploring ways that the curation of the Theater can participate in amplifying local voices while engaging the community in conversation with visiting artists,” said Salinas.
“My collaboration with Maurya has expanded the breadth of ODC Theater's artistry, inviting new voices while cultivating and maintaining meaningful, deep relationships with our constituents,” said Zimberg. “And now I am thrilled to welcome Zaquia into the same role!”
“In next year’s Spring Season we are also proud to welcome the return of an artist who since his last presentation by ODC Theater in 2008 has become something of a superstar: Miguel Gutierrez. We are delighted to present the West Coast premiere of his newest work, a quartet, which will first show at New York Live Arts in January.”
“We are also excited to welcome back Brooklyn-based artists Baye & Asa, whose West Coast debut was at ODC Theater during last year’s State of Play festival. The artists, Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington and Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt, have adapted their phenomenally visceral HotHouse for a proscenium stage. And, finally, in keeping with ODC Theater’s long history of supporting influential artists who wish to tour for the first time to the Bay Area, we are very pleased to present the West Coast debuts of Lali Ayguadé Company, which hails from Barcelona, Spain, and Adrienne Westwood, who hails from Brooklyn, New York. Lali Ayguadé is sharing a powerful work of dance theater, and Adrienne Westwood, together with composer Angélica Negrón, will show an evening-length preview of their movement-and-sound installation which has been long in the making.”
In advance of ODC Theater’s 2025 Spring Season, on Saturday, January 25, the Theater will host a Winter Formal in celebration of its vibrant community of dancers and dance lovers. Tickets for ODC Theater’s 2025 Spring Season, $0 - $80, are now on sale at odc.dance/springseason.
MIGUEL GUTIERREZ
Super Nothing (West Coast premiere)
February 28 - March 2
Miguel Gutierrez is an internationally recognized, multidisciplinary artist who divides his time between Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, four Bessie Awards and the Doris Duke Artist Award, Gutierrez describes his practice as the creation of “empathetic and irreverent spaces for himself and other QTBIPOC folx to dream, reflect and find agency.” He is currently an Associate Professor of Choreography and the Vice Chair of the MFA Program at UCLA in the department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
Super Nothing is a new dance theater work for four performers, exploring the essence of the creative process, and how our bodies hold stories that shape our understanding of community and identity. Featuring performances by Jay Carlon (L.A.), Justin Faircloth (N.Y.C.), Wendell Gray (N.Y.C.) and Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez (L.A.), Super Nothing navigates a shifting terrain of intimacy and pent-up feelings to create a world where we rethink what it means to come together.
LALI AYGUADÉ COMPANY
Runa (North American premiere)
March 7 – 9
Born in 1980, Lali Ayguadé trained at the Institut del Theatre of Barcelona and the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels. She has been a member of the Akram Khan Company and collaborated with Hofesh Schechter, Marcos Mora, Joana Gomila and Akira Yoshida, among others. Since 2013, she has directed her own company. Ayguadé starred in the short film Timecode, awarded at Cannes and shortlisted at the Oscars.
ODC Theater is proud to present the North American debut of Lali Ayguadé Company and the North American premiere of Runa about two people set in a ruined landscape, their task to investigate, re-imagine and reconnect with what once was. Through abstract movement and profound embodiment of dimensions and weight, the characters bring us back to our core existence as beings shaped by the relentless passage of time.
On Wednesday, March 5 at 7 p.m., ODC Theater will co-host an intimate conversation with Ayguadé at The Academy SF, located at 2166 Market Street in San Francisco.
BAYE & ASA
HotHouse (West Coast premiere)
March 14 – 16
Baye & Asa is a New York-based company under the direction of Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington and Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt. Their movement art projects blend hip hop and African dance forms in the service of “political metaphors [that] interrogate systemic inequities and contemporize ancient allegories.” In addition to their own award-winning live movement and film work, Baye & Ase has received commissions from the Martha Graham Dance Company, Baryshnikov Arts Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
After the success of their 2023 showing at ODC Theater’s State of Play festival, Baye & Asa return in HotHouse, a commentary on confinement and how the pandemic unmasked the greater systemic failures of America. In this evening-length duet, props and clothing are suspended behind a plastic barrier. The enclosed environment serves as an adaptable canvas, by turns a medical isolation unit, a slaughterhouse, a prison cell and a church. As the narrative unfolds, audiences are witness to the trauma of isolation and the myth of a white Jesus.
ADRIENNE WESTWOOD & ANGÉLICA NEGRÓN
[ ] (preview)
March 21 – 23
Based in Brooklyn, New York, choreographer Adrienne Westwood and composer Angélica Negrón have partnered on a project whose very title is unpronounceable: “It’s two brackets and the empty space between them, which is very right for a work about the embodiment of something,” said Westwood during a work-in-progress showing. Anchored by an interactive musical sculpture from which a collection of simple yet evocative objects are suspended, and featuring a cast of eight performers, [ ] fuses dance, electronic music and projection in an exploration of the untold histories of our female and femme ancestors.
While this project marks Westwood’s Bay Area debut, Negrón’s compositions have been performed in San Francisco by the San Francisco Girls Chorus, The Living Earth Show, San Francisco Symphony, Kronos Quartet, Ninth Planet and Ensemble for These Times, among others. Westwood’s work has been called “a finely crafted progression” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) and noted for its “precision, attention to detail and unspecific but tangible sense of the barely remembered” (Culturebot). Her work for cottages, flip books, nooks, crannies, screens, gardens, voicemails, a truck, as well as traditional theaters, has been presented widely in New York City and at Jacob's Pillow, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine (France), WUK (Vienna), The Firkin Crane (Ireland) and The Philly Fringe Festival. She is a 2024 Harvestworks Artist in Residence and a 2024 New Jewish Culture Fellow.
Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Negrón writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys and electronics as well as chamber ensembles, orchestras, choir and film. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2), while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise.” In addition to the groups already listed, she has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, loadbang, MATA Festival, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, the American Composers Orchestra and the New York Botanical Garden. Her film scores include Landfall (2020) and Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016).
ABOUT ODC THEATER
ODC Theater participates in the creation of new works through commissioning, presenting, mentorship and space access; it develops informed, engaged and committed audiences; and it advocates for the performing arts as an essential component to the region’s economic and cultural development. The Theater is the site of over 120 performances a year involving nearly 1,000 local, regional, national and international artists.
Since 1976, ODC Theater has been the mobilizing force behind countless San Francisco artists and the foothold for national and international touring artists seeking debut in the Bay Area. The Theater, founded by Brenda Way and currently under the creative direction of Chloë L. Zimberg, has earned its place as a cultural incubator by dedicating itself to creative change-makers, those leaders who give the Bay Area its unmistakable definition and flare. Nationally known artists Spaulding Gray, Diamanda Galas, Bill T. Jones, Eiko & Koma, Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, Karole Armitage, Sarah Michelson, Brian Brooks and John Heginbotham are among those whose first San Francisco appearance occurred at ODC Theater. For more information about ODC Theater and all its programs visit odc.dance/theater.
ODC Theater is generously supported by the APAP ArtsForward Grants Program, CalOSBA, Fleishhacker Foundation, John and Marcia Goldman Foundation, Hearst Foundations, Hellman Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Sam Mazza Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, U.S. Small Business Administration, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and many individual donors.
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