Personal and professional journeys are dotted with destination points. Consequential, transformative spaces. Consider your own path. Where have you experienced a dramatic and profound shift in trajectory?

Maybe it was your hometown, college campus, the city where you started a particular job or began a new life chapter - places where you encountered lush creativity, rich collaboration and deep abiding relationships. Choreographer, educator, dance advocate and movement artist Sidra Bell can point to many such places along her own journey, including New York, Philadelphia and right here in the Bay Area.

This April, Bell is back in San Francisco with the world premiere of her new commission for ODC/Dance’s celebrated Dance Downtown program.

ODC dancers. Photo by RJ Muna

Living into a self-proclaimed inclination to patternmaking, Bell has been crafting dances for over two decades. After studying at the Ailey and Dance Theatre of Harlem Schools and feeling an urge to choreograph in late-high school, Bell headed to Yale College (the undergraduate division of Yale University), which at that time had limited dance curriculum.

“We formed a student dance organization, the Alliance For Dance at Yale, not only to create, perform and foster community, but to advocate for dance at this institution,” recalls Bell, “this is where dance leadership and dance advocacy really became part of my story.” From there, she founded Sidra Bell Dance New York in 2001, and then, journeyed to Harrison, New York, earning her Master’s degree in choreography at SUNY Purchase.

While making work with her own company proved — and continues to be — artistically fruitful, Bell knew that she also wanted to choreograph outside of that container and stretch across different somatic mediums. “As a director, I was excited to continue investigating choreographic form, practice and theory, and I also wanted to explore how movement can inter-weave with different places and modalities, like theater, visual art and performance-centered events,” Bell shares. The artistic community was paying attention, and Bell began receiving invitations from national and international groups to build new work with them.

Bell's first commission for the Ailey School debuted in 2005, and since, her unique vision has been in high demand, choreographing pieces for institutions like New York City Ballet, The Juilliard School, The LINES Ballet School and the Metropolitan Museum of Art/MetLiveArts.

In the early 2010s, several projects began to arise that were based in San Francisco: the AMP (Artists Maximizing Potential) program with LEVYdance, the BY series with Robert Moses’ KIN and choreographing for Chris Mason Johnson’s powerful feature movie, "TEST". Set in San Francisco in the early years of the AIDS crisis, "TEST" captures the tremendous fear and uncertainty of that time. With angular and flowy phrases, experimental physicality and classical vocabulary, Bell’s movement in the film embodied a constant state of flux, adapting to whatever moment was at hand. It poetically mirrored the precarious circumstances of the film’s characters.

Fast forward a decade and Brenda Way, Founder and Artistic Director of ODC/Dance, presented Bell with an opportunity that would bring her, once again, back to the Bay. “I met Brenda in 2012, through LEVYdance’s AMP program, and we connected on many beautiful levels, like our mutual love of analysis, rigor, writing and academic discourse,” remembers Bell, “so when she contacted me about a possible commission for ODC, I felt a real sense of cyclicality – working again with a familiar community and familiar artists, though at very different points in my career.” Bell was all in, and plans began to take shape for a new commission, slated to premiere as part of ODC/Dance’s 2025 Dance Downtown engagement.

Creation of the new work would unfold over a sustained five-week residency - two weeks this past October, two more weeks coming up in March, and finally, tech week ahead of the official performances. The early days of the residency were highly significant and highly collaborative, focused on generating ideas and investing in possibilities, “fall was a time of ‘big’ research, working with phrase material and somatics, designing the scenes and dance sections, and really thinking about the syntactical value of the movement.” Expiration of the breath, pushing beyond in space and the tension between classical form and atmospheric distortion – Bell and the ODC artists took a deep dive into each.

As the spring residency weeks and the April performances approach, details continue to be finalized. The piece’s title, as well as its length, which Bell estimates will likely fall between 20 and 30 minutes. And there is the possibility of live musical accompaniment. Bell had long decided to use compositions by jazz composer and musician Mary Halvorson to accompany the movement, music that she describes as “a prolific sonic conversation between strings, guitar and percussion.” Halvorson is currently touring, so the hope is to engage local musicians to bring her score to life.

While Bell is, of course, very excited to see her commission premiere during Dance Downtown, the moment also invites the chance to reflect on her path. “ODC/Dance is a beacon, and so to inscribe my process on such a legendary company is surreal,” Bell remarks, “but there has also been an easeness to it, something that comes from building relationships with a community of people who support you and are witnesses to your artistic journey.”

→ Dance Downtown - April 10-13
Blue Shield of California Theater, YBCA

Main Image:
Sidra Bell. Photo by David Flores