As Legion of Honor celebrates 100th, Megan Lowe Dances moves for authenticity

Bay Area multidisciplinary artist Megan Lowe might be described in one word as “daring.” That’s not only due to the signature aerial and vertical movement she and her company Megan Lowe Dances have come to be known for when conversing with a space, but also through the subject matter they have taken on since the group was founded in 2013.

MLD’s upcoming performance Legacies and Legion (runs Sat/30 and September 6) celebrates the 100th birthday of San Francisco fine art museum Legion of Honor. The company performed in the museum’s Court of Honor back in April 2022 as part of the Legion’s Guo Pei exhibit, but this is the troupe’s first time performing within the building itself. Given a total of 14 days at the site to create and rehearse the piece—during nearly half of which they shared space with museum-going passers-by—Lowe and five fellow dancers arrived at something Lowe feels honors the institution’s history, while also challenging its narrative looking forward.

Lowe took some time on a rare day that she wasn’t in rehearsal—though she admitted she was spending it completing administrative work on the computer (“It’s hard for me to take days off”) — to speak to 48 Hills over Zoom. 

48 HILLS How did Legions and Legacies come to be?

MEGAN LOWE Last year, Maria and Devin, staff members at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, invited Megan Lowe Dances to come back for their 100-year celebration. They wanted to create something really joyful and warm for the Legion of Honor, which has a little bit of a reputation as being a cold, far, stuffy place with some cool art in it. So they invited [us] to hopefully invite other people who don’t normally come to the museum to go—younger generations, more diverse representations of race and culture. 

48 HILLS There are six dancers, including yourself, who are part of this work and each of you come from different movement backgrounds. What has the collaborative process been like? 

MEGAN LOWE  Two of these dancers I’ve worked with before. AJ “Dopey Fresh” Gardner is a turf dancer that I first started working with through a turf dance theater group called Mud Water in 2023. He comes from a street dance form background and has a very different movement vocabulary than I do. Even though I specialize in something called site-specific dance, turf dance is often a very site-specific dance exploration, because it’s happening on the street, in public, in front of people. Francis Cedayo is also someone I’ve worked with previously. The very first project I invited Francis on was at the Legion of Honor in 2022, so it’s fun to have somebody who was there coming back for this project. The other three artists, Johan, Anna, and Ài Yīn have never worked with Megan Lowe dances before, but have expressed interest.

I wanted to work with people who were really warm and friendly and could go with the flow, could really uplift each other and support each other and be calm and cool and collected and it’s been really, really heartwarming to see. None of these people, aside from AJ and Francis, have worked together and so even though we’ve only spent 10 days together and we haven’t had every dancer at every rehearsal, there’s so much joy and laughter and even though we are in very, very different dance forms, there’s not a moment where anybody feels singled out or out of place. We all just really cheer each other on in our individual dance forms. 

Another thing I want to share about the casting is the very first site visit that I had to look at their permanent collection. We weren’t allowed to make dance in the temporary collection downstairs because it changes too often and there’s also a lot of traffic with the cafe and bathrooms. We were going through the different rooms upstairs, and I noticed that the majority of the art was by white men who passed away, many, many years ago. The work that they do in the temporary exhibits downstairs is usually where they try to bring in that diversity and representation of different arts and races and cultures.

And so I straight up just said, “The artists that I’m working with are mostly people of color and we are in a very white space, and we don’t want to ignore the fact that that’s happening. So there might be some commentary, around being a Black body in a white space, or being an Asian body in a white space.” And Maria was like, the whole point of having you come here is to not only honor the 100-year anniversary of the Legion of Honor, but also move us into the future, and the future is one that is more diverse and one that has more representation of the people who are actually living in the Bay Area. 

So that’s definitely something that we’ve talked about in the rehearsal process with the dancers. There are times when we’re really paying homage to the art or the architecture in the space. There are other times when we’re kind of battling or grappling with some of the art in the space. 

48 HILLS  You anticipated a few of my questions there. Fine art, just like dance, has been dominated by Eurocentric tradition for a very, very long time. And it’s great that places like Fine Art Museums of San Francisco do have artists coming through that aren’t white, old men, but I can imagine that it was interesting to hold both of those things. 

MEGAN LOWE You also need to find the artists who are willing to be in these spaces. And this particular group of artists, even though there were maybe some uncomfortable moments where they felt like the space was not for them, they were up to the challenge and the excitement around creating that space for themselves, and all of us supporting each other in the process. 

So it’s really about perspective shifting, how to engage with art, with spaces, with who’s represented, with who’s not represented, and by being true to ourselves in this space, I feel like we’re also inviting visitors in the space to think about their relationship to the space and the art. 

48 HILLS In the past, you’ve told 48hills, “I feel my most generative when [I’m] interacting with a site, and it really excites the dancers, too.” How has that feeling been altered or even heightened moving through the distinct architecture of the Legion of Honor? 

MEGAN LOWE So one of the really funny things about this project is the Fine Arts Museums have decided to market it specifically as an architectural specific dance piece, but we’re not really allowed to touch anything inside. I went to rehearsals, and they were like, “You can’t touch that, don’t touch the walls, don’t get too close to the art.” Inside the galleries, pretty much the only architecture we’re allowed to touch is wooden benches. So in the gallery, limited architectural direct content, but all the dance is inspired by being in the space. If we can’t specifically touch something architecture-wise, there’s usually art that is inspiring the movement. AJ has a solo in one of the sculpture galleries. All the sculptures in there are Eurocentric art, and he was like, “How can I pay homage to this [art]?” I was like, don’t pay homage to it. Just be as you as you can possibly be.

48 HILLS The piece is set to live music composed by William Cenote. How were you two introduced? And what has the collaborative process been like having the music and having him there physically in the space with you all?

MEGAN LOWE I met Will through another collaborator of mine, Marica Petrey, the leader of a band called Girl Swallows Nightingale. I’ve been working with Marica on and off for various projects and she was recently a part of the Just a Shadow project. Will came to that show, and introduced himself to me. When this project became more solidified, I was trying to think of who could/would make music that would make sense for this space. This is probably one of the biggest, craziest dance things that’s happened at Legion of Honor from a live music perspective. I let him know about the project and he was down. 

We went through his repertoire of music to get inspiration and by the time I got to him, I knew there was going to be about eight sections of dance. A lot of the music we pulled started from seeds of things that he already had, and then there’s a few things that we built from scratch. For instance, one of the galleries used to be pretty much all oil, impressionist, nature paintings. And then, they replaced a water lilies portrait and put this super edgy Picasso painting in the middle of it. So the whole room is soft impressionist nature, beach, flowers, trees, and then in the middle is Picasso. AJ had a particular affinity to that space, and so when I met with Will, I was like, okay, I want a piece of music that starts kind of nature-y, and then a layer of edgy, heavy beats on top of it. 

We had lots of different versions of how we were going to project sound in the space, and we ended up with two Bose speakers that we move from room to room. It’s probably been the most complicated thing, how to get sound to happen in multiple spaces at once, because there’s sections of the dance where we’re not just all dancing in one room, but we’ll have three rooms activated at the same time, and audiences can move between all three rooms. 

48 HILLS What are you hoping audience members, whether they stumble across the performance or show up intentionally to watch Megan Lowe Dances, take away from this unique museum experience? 

MEGAN LOWE  I want to have more representation in the space. I hope people are inspired by seeing such collaborative dancers move through space, and I hope it gets us to see the art differently. I hope it also finds that balance of paying homage to the space but also being like, hey, like, this is a really white Eurocentric situation and reflecting on that. I hope people think about how they can interact with architecture differently. 

Megan Lowe Dances is kind of a guinea pig for a lot of art spaces that are not dance spaces that want to test dance out, so there’s a lot of discovery on both ends, a lot of learning together. I would love to make more dances in more museums, and have dance seen as art to be taken more seriously by different art forms, because dance is often an underrepresented art form, and especially from a financial perspective. The rigor and the skill and the passion that goes into making a dance like this, I hope, inspires people to want to support more dance and to take it more seriously, and to fund it more seriously, and to pay artists, pay dancers better. I can go on and on: meet new people, build community, make connections with people, help people make connections with each other.

LEGIONS AND LEGACIES runs Sat/30 and September 6. Legion of Honor, SF. Tickets and more info here.