Into the Wilde

At a time when the arts in America are under attack and many small dance companies are quietly disappearing, San Francisco’s dance scene—for decades second in its volume of activity only to New York—still has a pulse.

Performance

“The Axe: a long line of broken white people,” by Alley Wilde; Eight/Moves Season 2, choreography by Mia J. Chong and Tsai Hsi Hung

Place

CounterPulse, San Francisco CA, September 11, 2025; ODC Theater, San Francisco CA, September 12, 2025

Words

Rachel Howard

Eight/Moves in “Steam” by Mia J. Chong. Photograph by Natalia Roberts

This was evident on the second weekend of September, when it seemed nearly all the surviving dance artists in the Bay Area decided to hold their shows all at once. This often happens in September on the Northern California dance calendar, but the recent overload was especially and hearteningly rich. Of four shows I caught on one weekend, two stood out not just for the electricity of the performances, but for the evidence of legacies moving forward. The two dancemakers, Alley Wilde and Mia J. Chong, could not be more different in artistic temperament: Wilde is, true to his name, raw and primal, while Chong’s work, although visceral in its movement language, is contained and carefully composed. But each, thrillingly, carried forward a distinct strain of the San Francisco dance family.

Wilde is a descendant of the dance collective Contraband, which emerged in San Francisco in the 1980s under the leadership of the dancer/writer/priestess-of-dystopia Sara Shelton Mann. Taking a ritualistic, catharsis-driven approach to confronting political evil, the group disbanded in the mid-90s but has remained hugely influential here, thanks in large part to the prolific presence of two of its key members, Jess Curtis (who died suddenly last year) and Keith Hennessy, a mentor of Wilde’s for more than a decade.

Like Hennessy, Wilde (who uses they them pronouns) is a tall, white, and handsome; like Hennessy, Wilde uses nakedness to establish an atmosphere of vulnerability. At the start of “Axe: a long line of broken white people,” this involved chatting with the audience at CounterPulse, clothed, pre-performance, then reappearing with only a large bell tied around the waist, bell clanging and penis flying as Wilde ran circles around the stage. A huge black tire with a rubber exercise ball sat stage left; a tall wooden pole stood in the back corner. Suspense was thick as Wilde reappeared wearing a green mechanic’s suit trimmed with what looked like Germanic folk embroidery.

Keith Hennessy’s subject over the years has mostly been the interconnections of American capitalism and war and violence (though Hennessy has in recent times made some profound works focused on race). Wilde’s obsession—their burden—is more purely race. Wilde wants, explicitly, to purge white guilt, but to do so in a way that is more than self-serving.

Alley Wilde in “The Axe: a long line of broken white people.” Photograph by Mariah Tiffany

The titular “long line of broken white people” in “The Axe” are Wilde’s blood ancestors, whom Wilde traces back to the once-Slavic inhabitants of what is now Stolpe, Germany, where “Axe” was created during an artistic residency. The thesis driving “Axe”—the realization that Wilde is calling on to cultivate empathy for the politically conservative relatives Wilde declares “deeply fucked up”—is that pre-Christian Europeans were violently torn from their earth- and community-connected Pagan spirituality by the Vikings and Romanized Germans.

In “Axe,” Wilde bounces through a Norwegian folk dance called the Halling and picks up two Styrofoam pool noodles, using them to beat the rubber exercise ball like a Taiko drum. In the longest section, they strip off the mechanic’s suit and, wearing tiny black shorts and kneepads, throws life and limb at the ball and the walls, Contact Improvisation-style, while a voiceover delivers text backed by effectively thudding beats from Oakland composer Fractal Drip. “This is a dance putting up a Christmas tree on the solstice and not knowing the practice comes from German pagans burning a Yule log on the coldest night,” Wilde’s voiceover laments, ranging freely to other matters: “This is a dance that knows the genocide in Gaza is the story of how the west was won.”

The actions of Wilde and the rubber exercise ball become decreasingly interesting, but the text does not. Unlike the trance-like litanies Sara Shelton Mann wrote for Contraband, Wilde’s writing builds rather than loops. And unlike his mentor Keith Hennessy’s raging monologues, the text holds a strange tenderness at its core, devoid of self-righteousness, more concerned with genuinely lamenting the pathological harm perpetuated by cycles of guilt and sublimated shame.

The last section of “Axe” is a riveting piece of cathartic theater. “I learned I cannot heal myself by erasing my ancestors,” Wilde says. And then, with disbelief and grief, they add, “St. Boniface cut down the village’s sacred oak and used the tree’s wood to build a church.”

Wilde grabs an axe and begins hacking at the wood pole, sweat and wood chips flying. For complicated reasons—a fear that the axe might go flying into the audience among them—I became scared. I also noted a growing desire to talk with Wilde, to ask whether they believed it possible to be non-toxically religious in a way inspired by what Jesus actually taught, rather than the violent directions so much of institutional Christianity took off in. As the wooden pole finally cracked, and Wilde dropped to the floor in exhaustion, I came to feel that my desire to talk with Wilde meant the performance had been successful. Meanwhile, the audience was on its feet.

Eight/Moves in “Wasteland” by Mia J. Chong. Photograph by Natalia Roberts

The next night, across town at ODC Theater, a standing ovation rose for Mia J. Chong’s company Eight/Moves. Again you could feel generational legacies charging the air like an electric current.

ODC is the prime hub of San Francisco’s dance culture, encompassing a school for all ages and styles, a company, and a theater; Chong began her dance training at the ODC School when she was just five years old. She eventually joined ODC’s internationally touring company—the first dancer from ODC’s school and youth company to do so—and then left at the prime of her performing career to pursue a Master’s in arts administration at Northeastern University. Back in San Francisco last year, she launched her own company, Eight/Moves, featuring work choreographed in collaboration with one of ODC’s past artistic directors, KT Nelson.

“Steam,” one of those collaborations with Nelson, returned to close Eight/Moves’ second season, while a premiere by Chong, “Wasteland,” opened the shows. “Steam” proclaims that it is about “the tipping point when our extreme climate conditions can no longer be ignored;” “Wasteland,” the premiere, is about “a culture of waste and disposability.” “Steam” uses stage fog; “Wasteland” sets the dancers adrift in a landscape of floaty white plastic bags. Both are compositionally sophisticated ensemble dances, and both use contemporary instrumental music marked by pulsing urgency. You can understand and forgive, I hope, the way the two dances melded together in my memory.

Douglas Gillespie and Lani Yamanaka in “The End” by Tsai His Hung. Photograph by Natalia Roberts

The great strength in each dance is the rich movement vocabulary, built on a base language shared by ODC’s primary choreographers Nelson, Kimi Okada, and founder Brenda Way. Expansive arabesque turns drop to the ground in fascinating floorwork (the riveting William Brewton Fowler Jr. does a lot of inventive turning and balancing on his knees); rhythmic passages of frenzied splayed-hand gestures punctuate inventive and fiercely interconnected duets. Chong easily generates juicy ensemble passages.

The weakness in each dance is the sameness that solidifies even though the material is so inventive. That is to say, we can’t track the development of idea and emotion. There are plenty of ways for Chong to break out of this: by working more with clear movement motifs that create metaphorically suggestive pattern, or by letting some of the dancers break out into distinct, almost character-like roles. (Right now they seem to all embody the same concerns and relationship to those concerns). Chong is only 28 years old and no doubt will grow.

In the meantime, part of Chong’s promise, when it comes to extending legacy, is her instinct for inviting guest choreographers. Before moving to San Francisco, ODC began as the Oberlin Dance Collective, after all, a shared project for many talents to experiment within. For Eight/Move’s season two, Chong invited former BalletX choreographic fellow Tsai His Hung to create a premiere. “The End,” a duet to music by Taiwanese composer Liu Tzu-Chi, was a stunning centerpiece. Douglas Gillespie and Lani Yamanaka began under a rain of what looked like confetti but hit the floor to become powdered dust. A fist-flinging torrent of crawling, stomping, and sudden passages of fierce, rhythmic unison followed. “The End” was, according to the program note, about the Jungian idea of the “shadow self.” But you could read any psychological concept onto it, or none, and still be utterly compelled. Eyes burning with commitment, Gillespie and Yamanaka gave the performances of their lives.

We’ll soon be seeing more of both Hung and Chong soon, I’m sure. I can’t wait to watch the developments.

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the former lead dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her dance writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, Ballet Review, San Francisco Magazine and Dance Magazine.

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