Clik here to view.
Bay Area choreographer Randee Paufve has established a reputation for artistically and emotionally textured works. Her newest project “Sisters,” which makes its world premiere Aug. 1 in ODC Theater’s 12th Summer Dance Festival, tackles a current and prominent charged issue: a woman’s right to choose.
The opus is among five world premieres in the “State of Play” festival in San Francisco, and one of three evening-length works dubbed “Risk-Takers” in a four-day program of presentations from 10 dance organizations.
“In the context of a culture that undervalues art, and mistrusts, appropriates and commodifies the body—especially women’s bodies—dance and choreography are inherently risk-taking,” Paufve says. “It’s a risk to insist that bodies, that dance and choreography, are the messenger and message. My new work ‘Sisters’ confronts the critical issue of reproductive rights, and the systemic erosion of women’s bodily autonomy.”
Paufve, a Richmond resident who came to the Bay Area from upstate New York in 1988, is the artistic director of the contemporary troupe Paufve Dance. She cites Ralph Lemon, Ohad Naharin and Pina Bausch as choreographers who have had the most important influence upon her career. The result has been what she calls a style of “quasi-linguistic gestures, unfamiliar pathways and movement invention.”
“I invent movement and then I craft it to the nth degree to make any story possible, whether an emotional story or story of the body,” Paufve explains. “I look for choreographic specificity, pare things back until only the most essential movement is left to tell the story, and I don’t always mean a linear story. I work with themes but more often an abstract theme, and we always work to bring the truth, the expression of that to light.”
The theme for “Sisters,” a nearly hourlong opus for 11 women, came to Paufve in 2019, before the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. While a grant to work in India, hip replacement surgery and the pandemic interrupted the project, after the repeal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Paufve came across a personal, family connection to the issue of choice that helped propel “Sisters” to completion.
Clik here to view.
“I was with my family in New York and learned through a series of articles that an ancestor of ours named Justine—she was my great-grandmother’s younger sister—who with her family had just immigrated to Brooklyn from Sweden, died at 17,” Paufve recalls. “We always thought it was from the flu, but these articles made clear that it was due to sepsis from a self-induced abortion.”
The need for secrecy was an ever-present theme Paufve came across in what she read about her ill-fated ancestor and her sister’s vow to keep her secret of who the father was to the grave. The experience sparked Paufve’s interest in secrets that led to a discussion with her company’s dancers about their personal stories involving sisters.
“It mushroomed into a discussion about motherhood, pregnancy, birth, abortion, death, whisper networks, the emotional labor of sisterhood and the secrets that sustain us, because we have to keep our secrets in a culture that’s still very misogynistic,” Paufve says. “So women support each other in these very quiet, subtle ways through the life experiences that we have.”
The dancers in ‘Sisters” are a diverse group from different backgrounds from multiple generations, with most identifying as women but a few as gender-fluid, Paufve says.
“Sisters” is a series of small pieces composed of solos, duets, trios and other dance groups that Paufve wove together, and the work, lacking set design, relies on lighting effects by Rogelio Lopez as well as vivid costumes designed by Elizabeth Zepeda—a seamstress and cast member—for added color.
Clik here to view.
Music accompanying “Sisters” includes a movie-dialogue-infused composition Paufve loves by Joshua Fried, who she met at a residency in Brooklyn many years ago; a lush piano work by Cécile Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1817-1853), wife of Felix Mendelssohn and a contemporary of Paufve’s ancestor Justine; jazz pieces by Max Brody, a sound editor and Paufve’s nephew; and Western-themed music by Waylon Jennings.
“There’s a cowgirl piece at the end that’s a love story of two women who meet, fall in love, have a fight and break up, kill each other and are resurrected, turn their guns into vaginas, and they become the new sheriffs in town,” Paufve says.
Throughout “Sisters,” the chemistry among the women dancers is a core element that Paufve feels animates the work and makes it compelling.
“The relationships between the women onstage are clear and very definite,” Paufve says. “It’s a feeling piece, very moving for us to have done this work, and the small audiences who have seen it in rehearsals have been very moved by it as well.”
“Sisters,” at 8 p.m. Aug. 1 and 7 p.m. Aug. 2, is part of “State of Play,” ODC Theater’s 12th Summer Dance Festival Aug. 1-4 at 3153 17th St., San Francisco; tickets are $40-$80. For details about the full festival and tickets (free to $80 for single, $80 for day pass, $300 for festival pass), call (415) 863-9834 or visit https://odc.dance/stateofplay.
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