For more than a decade, SFDanceworks has been presenting some of the very best contemporary dance repertoire in the Bay Area. Moving from classics by the likes of Martha Graham and José Limón to works by current choreographers, the dancers of this small company have always shown the highest level of technical proficiency and artistic depth.
The company’s upcoming festival at San Francisco’s Z Space, July 10–12, offers three new contemporary pieces by the Los Angeles-based JA Collective (Jordan Johnson and Aidan Carberry), Canadian Emma Portner, and Yue Yin, originally from Shanghai, now based in New York.
Portner and JA know each other and have done work in the commercial and pop world. Portner’s portfolio also includes choreography for the West End musical Bat Out of Hell, and numerous pieces for international ballet companies. As half of the indie music duo Bunk Buddy, she appeared in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). Here she will perform her duet elephant, originally created for Kammerballetten, with longtime SFDanceworks collaborator Babatunji Johnson.
Yue Yin, who received Dance Magazine’s Harkness Promise Award in 2021, melds her knowledge of Chinese classical and folk traditions with modern dance to express “the complex and diverse influences of the immigrant experience.” At SFDanceworks’s show, she’ll present A Measurable Existence, a duet for two male dancers.
Yin discussed her route to becoming a choreographer in an online chat with SF Classical Voice. “I started dancing when I was three years old,” she says. “I studied at the Shanghai Dance Academy and then went to college for dance. After that, I decided to get an MFA, but not in Shanghai. I wanted to explore something different from everything I had seen. That led me to search — what is outside?”
She ended up at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “The original plan was to go study there, then come back to Shanghai. But then, when I graduated, I saw school is not a real experience of dancing, so I [wanted] to stay for at least a couple years to [discover] what it really feels like dancing in the city; I stayed till now.”
Yue freelanced for some time but soon began to choreograph her own dances. She performed these at festivals and, in 2013, got her first commission, from Northwest Dance Project. In 2018, she founded YYDC, her own dance company.
She planned to expand her success to China and won first place for choreography in a dance competition there in 2015. She expresses some frustration that the victory and her commissions here and in Europe have not led to opportunities in her home country.
Yue says she has built a following on RedNote, the Chinese Instagram, but “the top people have [yet] to invite me. They invite people from outside China; they want cultural diversity and things that are ‘different.’ When I’m in the U.S., my work is obviously based off the combination of Eastern and Western. The problem I’m facing here is [producers] want to clearly see the Chinese part, but I am trying to explore the contemporary side of Chinese identity. People here want to see Chinese culture that is from the 18th century. I’m not Chinese enough here, but then, too Chinese for China.”