ODC/Dance Presents Intimate Summer Performance Series

ODC/Dance, San Francisco's world class contemporary dance company, presents its annual summer event, Summer Sampler, July 20-21 and July 27-28.

This series invites audiences to experience the dynamic ODC dancers up close in an exciting range of choreographic styles in the company's intimate Mission District theater. The ODC dancers will have just returned from a tour to South Korea's MODAFE Festival, and soon thereafter will be departing to perform at one of contemporary dance's most prestigious festivals, Jacob's Pillow in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. This year's Summer Sampler expands to two weekends, and features work by all of the ODC choreographers, including Founder & Artistic Director Brenda Way; ODC Co-Artistic Director KT Nelson; Associate Choreographer Kimi Okada; and Resident Choreographer Kate Weare.

Three works headline the first weekend. Brenda Way's 2005 work, Something about a Nightingale, set to music by the Tin Hat Trio, is a delightful response to the flight of birds and the nature of inspiration. Kimi Okada's 2017 quartet, Head in the Sand, explores the different ways we cope with bad news and delves into our mechanisms for carrying on, from denial to humor. Kate Weare's 2016 work, Giant, explores cultural perceptions of the heroic body, offering a startling series of graphic fantasies about courage, violence and valor with women and men alike in evocative positions. The second weekend offers up a special program featuring the two works ODC will tour to Jacob's Pillow this August. Triangulating Euclid,the celebrated 2013 collaboration between Way, Nelson, and Weare, danced to Daniel Roumain, Shubert and Max Richter, is a highly physical and emotive piece inspired by a rare original edition of "Euclid's Elements of Geometry". It was hailed as "beautifully enigmatic" (Huffington Post). Also on the program is Nelson's 2015 work Dead Reckoning. Setto a commissioned score by composer and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, Dead Reckoning gives voice to the emotions Nelson, and many of us, have around climate change. Through the use of scenic elements and rigorous, heart-pounding dancing, the stage becomes unrecognizable, a metaphoric prediction of what's to come. The San Francisco Chronicle called the work "enormously satisfying." Brenda Way, KT Nelson and Kimi Okada, along with the ODC dancers, will be on hand after the performances to raise a glass to art and summer.

For more information visit www.odc.dance/.