Up until that moment I had literally never imagined I could become a pro- fessional dancer: how could I, when I had never seen another person like me in dance? So I took a year off of grad school, entered a two-year stu- dio-based Dance program, and never looked back. The very first piece of choreog- raphy I made at dance school was a duet and it was definitely queer. At that point I hadn’t seen a lot of dance-theater or “talking dance,” but from the beginning I’ve always felt called to bring in elements of story
and text. The local dance community came out to these student recitals, and was very supportive of young students and their burgeoning craft. I don’t remember feeling nervous at all about my work being queer. People were awesome: I was blown away by the incredibly positive response and feed- back from professional dancers to my baby-choreography. They were “interested in my voice” and “were excited to see what I did next.” The day after the show, in morning tech- nique class, the school director pulled me out, sat me down in her office,
and told me sternly that my piece “made people feel very uncomfort- able”—which was not even a little bit true. I had experienced the exact opposite. I don’t know how I had the wherewithal to feel sure of that truth at the time, but I did. She actu- ally withheld my graduation certifi- cate at the end of my program. In that moment, the years of all the awful experiences in gendered bathrooms, gendered costumes, everything came crashing down on me. But at the same time, I realized that this was how I could forge change in the world, this was my calling, and this was how I could be of service. Her words made me realize the power of dance-the- ater work that’s based in the body, in story, and in language. SB: What do you love about dancing? SD: Feeling into my love of danc- ing, there is both the love of velocity and the momentum of movement, the embodiment of energy and emo- tion, but also a real love of the rela- tionship and response to music. But I have also always loved storytelling. Those were not separate things. You know a lot about me if you know that my favorite childhood movies were Fame and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rocky Horror was so huge for me. Here’s this amazing, sexy, gender-expansive, fierce, totally embodied character in Frankenfurter. SB: Fame came out in 1980, when I was 9 and you were 7. It was not a thing to watch at that age! SD: When I go back and watch it now, I’m like, This is the most depressing movie about trauma and abuse ever! But at the time all that mattered was Leroy, roller skates, and the romantic notion of bottle caps on the bottom of your shoes. That was my dream high school, but I never imagined my own adult life being about dance and performance. I never saw anybody like me in those fields doing those things. So it wasn’t
Toby MacNutt
Javier Stell-Fresquez and Ivy Monteiro
SB: So, if I have my math right, you’re dating your 20th anniversary from 2001, right? What happened then? SD: In June 2001, I performed my first work in the Bay Area for the final Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival at Dance Mission. I had seen Dance Brigade perform in Vancouver a few years before. It was one of the first times I’d seen dance theater that was fiery and political, imbued with text and story; they were just gloriously ripping into colonialism and misog-
like, gosh, I wish someday I could do this. There was literally no brain path- way for that dream because I literally didn’t exist in the world. Trans people of my generation and older—and maybe just a little bit younger—we had to work so hard to find any proof of our existence other than our own selves in the world. For example, my partner, Shawna Virago, a trans woman musician, filmmaker, and director of the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, talks about going to the public library just to find anything, and there being like one weird medical book on transsexuality. There was no internet, no blogs, no Gay Straight Alliances in high school, there was nothing, unless you saw maybe a transsexual on the Donahue show. If I had been lucky enough to know or been connected to ballroom culture and voguing, I would have been like here’s this amazing trans/ GNC leadership, lineage, and ances- try. Here’s this long lineage of Black and Latinx trans women, queers and GNC folks with this amazing dance and performance form and huge cho- sen-family/community network. Flash forward to today, and so much has changed while so much has still not changed: in pop culture we still have cisgender people being cast as trans. Totally unacceptable when there are so many talented trans and nonbi- nary actors. But in dance also, we’ve seen many institutions investing in
works for the stage that portray trans characters as pathological, disturbed characters; and even more institu- tions and companies bringing exactly zero trans bodies, dancers or lead- ership to the stage. And not having dance educators who are trans, non- binary, or GNC. The Bay Area, like the rest of the country, still has to do a lot better.
SB: How did you make your way to the Bay Area?
YOU KNOW A LOT ABOUT ME IF YOU KNOW THAT MY FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MOVIES WERE FAME AND THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW.
SD: I had been dancing in some small companies in British Columbia, and on a visit to San Francisco in 2000, I took classes at ODC with Lizz Roman and Ellie Klopp. With Lizz’s class, I was like, “What is this magic?!” It was my real introduction to upside down, release technique. There was very little of that in Vancouver. It was this room full of all these glorious people, and Lizz was singing and Daniel Berkman was accompanying; it was this mag- ical, mystical experience. And then Lizz asked me to join her company! I danced with her for six amazing amazing years, hanging from rafters, climbing up walls, and dancing on furniture.
yny. I kept presenting work under my name, and then I date my company, Sean Dorsey Dance, from when we had our first full-evening home season, which was 2005. SB: How did you come up with the name Fresh Meat Productions? SD: In 2002, I brought together a group of artists and activists to put on what we thought would be a one- time festival of trans and queer per- formance. We wanted to center trans artists, center BIPOC queer/trans art- istry, and do it gorgeously. At an early planning meeting at a Mission café, we were like, “What do we call this thing?” Jesse Bie said, “Let’s call it
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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