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There’s a reason that 48 Hills and, before that, the SF Bay Guardian have kept a close eye on Sean Dorsey and his groundbreaking, award-winning, nationally recognized dance company over the 20 years of its storied existence. Interview after interview and review after review have traced the evolution of a trailblazing transgender artist who has pointed our arts scene in new directions through a positive and life-affirming embrace of humanity, even in these dark and cynical times.
Take Dorsey’s latest, and typically ambitious, ongoing project “The Lost Art of Dreaming.” It’s a colorful, multifarious invitation to restore the universal value of imagining a future for queer and trans people. Projecting ourselves into a utopian world—through movement, music, incantation, communion, connection, performance, even cosmology—is what sustains hope for at least some of that utopia to manifest. His full-throttle vision of a participatory theater of queer-trans liberation encompasses so much more than sitting in the dark, passively watching stories about you enfold. For Dorsey, it’s always go time.
“I felt called to create a show that in turn calls us to return to the Source of all things: longing. Gravity, magnetism, love, orbiting planets—everything in creation is driven by the pull of longing,” Dorsey told us about “Lost Art of Dreaming” last year. “And our desires and dreams are a living force that deserve our collective love and attention, especially if we are seeking justice and liberation. And let us not forget about JOY! In the face of such escalating hate and violence against our communities, we NEED joy, we need pleasure, we need love and we need each other.”
Dorsey’s vision has created space on stage for a fabulously diverse family of dancers who reach much farther than mere gesture, digging into their personal stories and self-identification to expand out definitions of what a professional dancer can be. Watching them on stage, and Dorsey’s typical upending of dance stereotypes through multi-gendered movements and representations, invites the audience itself into a cosmic dance of boundary-dissolving imagination.
Sean Dorsey Dance Company’s latest presentation will be its 20th Home Season show at Z-Space, September 19-21. Come see selections from the past 20 years of incredible work, a retrospective exhibition of photos of Sean Dorsey Dance by Lydia Daniller and Kegan Marling, and, in typical Dorsey fashion, a gigantic love letter for audiences to sign and a huge party.
