When Debbie Chinn attended the Peninsula International Dance Festival in 2024, she left with only two words on her mind: “holy cow.”
Now, as interim executive director of Peninsula Lively Arts, the nonprofit dance company that presents the annual event, Chinn hopes to continue the spirit of pride, togetherness, and unity — akin to the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, she said — that wowed her as an attendee.
For this year’s fourth edition of the festival, 21 different local dance companies, comprising more than 200 performers, are getting ready to take the stage at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center July 19–20 in a weekend that aims to highlight the Bay Area’s diversity through dance.
“I was transported to a world that was unlike the world [when] I left my house,” Chinn said, recalling her 2024 experience. “And I thought, that is the greatest gift we could give as an arts organization: transporting you to another place, where you suspend something for a moment and you come away [from] it transformed.”
As in previous years, the festival is set to feature two different programs to accommodate the large number of performing groups. Chinn highlighted Kantuta Ballet Folklórico de Bolivia, devoted to traditional Bolivian dance, and TaalSutra, a classical Indian dance company, as two new additions she’s particularly excited to showcase in 2025.
After each program, anticipated to run around two hours with intermission, the dancers spill out into the audience and even onto the street for a lively “after-party,” Chinn explained. She was catching up with SF Classical Voice at Peninsula Lively Arts’ ballet studio in San Mateo, a former Circuit City building now renovated to host dance classes for all ages.
Joining in the conversation was Chloé Watson, Peninsula Lively Arts’ director of artistic operations and a recently retired dancer who performed with Peninsula Ballet Theatre in the second annual PIDF in 2023 before taking on her current administrative role.
“We take you on a journey,” Watson said of the festival’s lineup. “You see these big, exciting, colorful, loud groups. But you also get these really intimate moments of a really deep, heavy flamenco solo or someone who’s recreated a traditional dance that was destroyed in a temple hundreds of years ago.”
Both shows during the two-day event are slated to start at 2 p.m. Tickets for each performance are $55–$75. For more information and the full list of who’s dancing which afternoon, visit Peninsula Lively Arts’ website.
