Summer Dance Festival (2025)

FACT/SF SUMMER DANCE Festival overview

August 15-24, 2025 - ODC Theater, San Francisco

Keanu Brady in FACT/SF’s *Half Time, Full Out* the 2024 FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival. Photo by Robbie Sweeny

Now in its sixth year, the FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival is a highly anticipated cornerstone of the array of summertime offerings in the Bay Area dance scene. It is the most popular program offered by FACT/SF Fieldwork, a set of programs that nourish the contemporary dance ecology by providing opportunities, support, and material resources to fellow artists.

The Festival is curated from a highly competitive pool of contemporary dance works by choreographers from the Bay Area and beyond, and includes a mix of world premieres and created dances re-staged for San Francisco. Over two weekends, audiences will witness a variety of pieces from a wide range of different perspectives and contemporary dance disciplines juxtaposed against one another to spur dialogue, and support the artists’ artistic growth. FACT/SF will present two brand-new pieces as part of the development process for Artistic Director Charles Slender-White’s newest evening-length work The Waves, which will premiere in early 2026.

2025 Festival Artists

program one

Jenna Riegel in *Varvara* as part of FACT/SF’s 2024 Summer Dance Festival. Photo by Robbie Sweeny

Jenna Riegel
Jenna Riegel, originally from Fairfield, Iowa, is a dance artist and movement educator. Jenna holds an M.F.A. in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Maharishi International University. During her eleven-year performing career in New York City, Jenna toured and performed nationally and internationally as a company member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, David Dorfman Dance, Alexandra Beller/ Dances and Bill Young/ Colleen Thomas & Company. She also danced with Daara Dance (choreographer Michel Kouakou), Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company, Shaneeka Harrell, Tania Isaac Dance and johannes weiland. She has been on faculty in the dance departments of Barnard College, The Juilliard School and Virginia Commonwealth University and at the American Dance Festival and the Bates Dance Festival. Jenna is currently an Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance at Amherst College.

The Davis Sisters

The Davis Sisters, Alexander Davis and Joy Davis, were mistaken for a married couple in 2015, and have been spending the last 6 years unsuccessfully trying to convince people that they are not married, but are kind of related… At the threshold of dance, theater, comedy, and installation, TDS create experiences in which performers and audiences are invited to contemplate humanity, enjoy absurdity, and delight in physical and verbal articulation. Drawing from pop culture and the pedestrian, TDS develop work that displays the theatricality of everyday life and imagery from less logical dreamscapes of the imagination. By illuminating underrepresented queer narratives, they delve into topics about love, hope, and memory which transcend boundaries and make space for individual connection. Through rigorous imagination, movement improvisation and the ridiculous, they courageously and insightfully dare to create scenarios in which they perform magnified versions of themselves.

FACT/SF

FACT/SF is a San Francisco-based contemporary dance company, founded in 2008 by Artistic Director Charles Slender-White as a platform for organizing collaborators, building community, and creating choreography. FACT/SF regularly performs in the San Francisco Bay Area, maintains a core group of local collaborators, and has developed an extensive international network of colleagues and partners. FACT/SF believes that civic life is made more vibrant by the contributions of dance artists, and that robust and equitable arts ecosystems enable artists to work at their greatest potential. The dance field continues to prohibit the full participation of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people, so we prioritize their inclusion across all of our programming. Within this context, FACT/SF collaboratively creates dance performances for the public, employs and advocates for ethical work practices, and offers programs that fortify dance artists in their work.

program two

Heather Dutton
Heather Dutton is a Brooklyn-based queer and gender fluid choreographer, teaching artist, and freelance performer. They recently completed a residency at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC, under the mentorship of Gerri Houlihan and Momar Ndiaye. Their evening length work "Watch This!" was supported by Here Arts Center's sublet series in 2023 and presented again at Dixon Place in 2024. They have also shared work at festivals such as unKEMPT dance festival, the Craft NYC, Dance bloc, and the Koresh Come Together Dance Festival. They have developed and shared new works through programs such as Spark Theater Festival’s new work series and Mare Nostrum Element's Emerging Choreographers Series. In addition to her movement practice, Dutton has a background in theatre, comedy, and gender studies, all of which inform her choreographic aesthetic. Their creative process is steered by the ambition of making complex but emotionally accessible work for her audiences, often grounded in nuanced narratives and a deep investigation of human relationships. Dutton is particularly interested in a layered and thorough exploration of identity, intimacy, and the public vs. the private.

Clairey Evangelho
Clairey is a movement artist and educator. She received her B.S. from UC Berkeley in a self-designed major which included studies of Environmental Embodiment, Environmental Justice, and the Sociology of Science. She has presented and co-produced dance works with ODC Pilot 74 and SafeHouse RAW. Clairey's artistic identity is sprouting from her roots in environmental education on the San Joaquin River, Special Education in Oakland Unified School District, and conservation biology research at CSU Fresno. Her performance aesthetics are taking shape through her movement practices of contact improvisation, Afro-Brazilian forms, soft acrobatics, site-specific and apparatus-based dancing. Her creative concepts and values are highly influenced by her autism. Clairey’s past works center sensorial dreamscapes, architectural apparatuses, nature, scale, and relational dynamics. Her creative process begins with an emotional experience. She improvises movement in nature and the studio to create scores that help make sense of her emotional landscape. Simultaneously, she consumes massive amounts of literature on anything sparking interest (recently: Butoh, Autistic neurology and non-ordinary states of consciousness, the geologic history of Middle California). She then creates imaginary worlds and dreamscapes encompassing everything she’s discovered from her emotional and intellectual research. These dreamscapes become her creative playground for new works.

Derion Loman
Derion Loman started dancing at the age of 19. He graduated with a B.A.and B.F.A. in Psychology and Dance, respectively, from the University of California Santa Barbara. He began his career in Ballet Hispanico’s Second Company, where he performed at a variety of different events - most notably, the 2013 Presidential Inauguration. He went on to join Pilobolus Dance Theatre from 2013-2017. In his time with Pilobolus, he performed works created in collaboration with artists such as: Sidi Larbi, Avshalom Poluk and Imbal Pinto, OKGO, Javier De Frutos, and Penn and Teller. He later went on to tour with Diavolo Architecture in motion, where he was a finalist on America’s Got Talent with the company. Derion is also known for being a Divisional Finalist on NBC’s World of Dance Season 3, and the 2019 Emmy Awards. He has created work for Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Google, 2Point4 Dance company and many more. He recently won the Pacific Northwest Ballet Film Festival. In 2023 he returned to set work on Pilobolus Dance Theatre. This work premiered at the American Dance Festival and the Joyce Theatre. Third Angle New Music selected Loman as their inaugural guest creative director. Most recently Derion was a one of the recipients of the prestigious Ann & Weston Hicks Choreographic fellowship at Jacob’s Pillow. Derion finds himself to be drawn to projects centered around connectivity, collaboration, and human moments.

seymour::dancecollective. Photo by Robert C. Bain.

Chafin Seymour with seymour::dancecollective
Chafin Seymour is a native of Brooklyn, NY. He holds a BFA with Distinction in Dance from The Ohio State University and an MFA in Choreography from the University of Iowa. He has had the pleasure to perform with Sage Ni’Ja Whitson/The NWA Project and Anneke Hansen Dance among others. As a choreographer, under seymour::dancecollective, Chafin’s work has been presented throughout NYC and nationally at venues such as Center for Performance Research (CPR), Triskelion Arts, Dixon Place, Livestream Public, Gibney Dance, The Wild Project, New York Live Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, ODC Theater, The Ohio Dance Festival and The American Dance Festival among others. The collective works on a project to project basis with a rotating roster of curated artists. Chafin has taught contemporary forms at Gibney Dance in NYC since 2015 and at ODC San Francisco since 2023. He was an inaugural Ann & Weston Hicks Choreographic Fellow at Jacob’s Pillow in 2018 and was commissioned by The American Dance Festival and Limón Foundation to create ‘Suite Donuts’ for the Limón Dance Company in 2020. His most recent commissions ‘At Play’ for the Modern American Dance Company (MADCO) in St. Louis and ‘Glitch’ for the LINES Ballet Training Program Limón premiered in 2022. Currently Chafin resides in the Bay Area, CA and serves as an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Dance at San Jose State University.

Taja Will
Taja Will (they/them) is a non-binary, chronically ill, queer, indigenous Latine (Chilean) adoptee. They are a performer, choreographer, somatic therapist, consultant and Healing Justice practitioner based in Mni Sota Makoce. Taja’s approach integrates improvisation, somatic modalities, text and vocals in contemporary performance. Their aesthetic is one of spontaneity, bold choice making, sonic and kinetic partnership and the ability to move in relationship to risk and intimacy. Will’s artistic work explores visceral connections to current socio-cultural realities through a blend of ritual, dense multi-layered worldbuilding and everyday magic. Taja initiates solo projects and teaching ventures and is a recent recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, in the dance field. Will established a project-based collective, the Taja Will Ensemble, in 2015 and collaborates with local dance, music and design artists. Their work has been presented throughout the Twin Cities and across the United States including local performances at the Walker Art Center Choreographer’s Evening, the Red Eye Theater’s New Works 4 Weeks, and the Candy Box Dance Festival. They are a 2018 McKnight Choreography Fellow and NCCAkron alumni artist.