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Toeing the Line

Carly Topazio, the founding director of the Rosin Box Project, knows what a challenge it is to stand out amidst San Diego’s many dance companies. At the same time, a growing trend with contemporary dance companies is to present works in more intimate settings, allowing audiences, often with cocktails in hand, greater proximity to the artists.

 

Performance

The Rosin Box Project: Incubator Lab

Place

The White Box Theatre, San Diego, California, May 29 - 31, 2026

Words

Robert Steven Mack

The Rosin Box Project's Incubator Lab. Photograph by Hannah Cox

This is what scene one entered in the White Box Theatre, where Rosin Box performed works from its first-ever Incubator Lab from May 26 to 31 at the White Box Theatre. The program included the world premiere of three new works by emerging choreographers: “Sticks and Stones” by Bethany Green, “Blueprint” by Natasha Radar, and “Mothership” by Alexandra Schooling. While the venue may have been modest, tucked away on the second floor of a complex at Liberty Station in San Diego, the dances and their interpreters revealed a space for unique creative voices to find their emerging expression. 

“Sticks and Stones” is a theatrical piece starring two dancers who behave as a sort of twin pair of Loraxes, defending not a tree but a rock against a greedy capitalist danced by Darion Flores. In Green’s telling, “a couple of friends are playing in the woods and create a “little guy” out of rocks, ferns, and a stump. For the rest of the piece, other characters assign their own meanings to this little guy they stumble upon, and chaos ensues as their meanings and agendas come into conflict.”

Next, Radar’s “Blueprint” was an exercise in trust. In the first movement, dancers mill about and walk past each other. The second movement features a tentative pas de deux featuring Green and Brian Bennett. The third included symbolic gestures such as trust falls to signal the healing of trust and friendship. Meanwhile, Schooling’s “Mothership” was the standout piece of the evening, with dancers clad in silvery “trash jackets” moving to a techno interstellar soundscape by Chris Desien. 

A founding member of the company and an alumna of City Ballet of San Diego, Green said “Sticks and Stones” is her ninth piece for Rosin Box. Green, who describes her work as toeing the line between contemporary ballet and theatre dance, attributes her inspiration to the twentieth-century theatrical genre of absurdism. “In these plots,” she explains, “there is no conventional logic, and the plays often end where they begin with no resolution or growth. But because they argue that human existence has no purpose, they tend to lean more toward anxiety and hopelessness. I think we have enough of that in our current world, so I used absurdism as a jumping-off point and instead veered more toward the silly and unserious.” 

The Rosin Box Project's Incubator Lab. Photograph by Hannah Cox

The Rosin Box Project's Incubator Lab. Photograph by Hannah Cox

Carly Topazio was also dancing with City Ballet of San Diego in 2018 when she founded the Rosin Box Project in 2018, its first program that August, during the off-season. She wanted to “spotlight artists' voices and refocus the company culture and environment to be more of something like an incubator, more something nurturing and art-focused and less about politics.” The initial performance was at the Geoffrey Off-Broadway, a black box theatre which had only recently then been converted from storage space for the now shuttered Spreckels Theatre, according to Topazio. In 2020, Topazio incorporated the company as a non-profit, which Topazio joked was “the worst year to pick.” Keeping the company lean and nimble, much of that first season was spent producing dance films, which Rosin Box continues to do.

Given that San Diego is home to numerous dance companies, classical and contemporary, Topazio explains, “a big part of our programming is trying not to plan another dance show because I feel like San Diegans have that already. A lot of our shows are trying to find something new.” The Rosin Box shares its Liberty Station complex with three other dance companies, San Diego Ballet, San Diego Dance Theatre, and Malashock Dance. According to Topazio, the companies are different enough that they can share resources and support one another.  

Topazio intends Incubator Lab as one such way of broadening the dance experience for audiences. As part of the program, the first three nights were open rehearsals designed to give audiences a window into the creation process behind contemporary ballet. Topazio says she encouraged the dancers “to not go into it with the idea that they have to make something that the audiences love. It’s more about the art. It’s more about what you want to explore, what you want to try out.”

Topazio acknowledges that audiences can be intimidated by new work and sometimes prefer familiar classics. By contrast, Schooling said that “Carly encouraged us to experiment, and having that freedom as an artist was really inspiring and allowed me to dive deeper into my concept.” Topazio said her hope is that, “if we can have audiences connect to dance through the process, they would be more connected and more inclined to see the final product onstage, trying to root them deeper into the art.”

The Rosin Box Project's Incubator Lab. Photograph by Hannah Cox

The Rosin Box Project's Incubator Lab. Photograph by Hannah Cox

Green described the open rehearsals as “scary,” however. She explained during the audience Q&A following the May 31 performance that “it’s a very intimate process where you’re just with these artists for the whole rehearsal process really, so to have a whole group watching before it's fully done is like bringing a pie out of the oven and doing a taste test.” 

While it may have sharpened her process, Green kept faithful to her concept for the pieces. “For me, I didn’t change much since those original rehearsals,” Green said, “but things definitely got fine tuned and tweaked and cleaned up. Even from last night to tonight, it’s a completely different show, if you were paying a lot of attention,” Green joked with the audience. 

“A lot of audiences only encounter dance once it is polished and fully packaged for performance,” explained Topazio, “but the actual rehearsal room is where so many of the most interesting questions, risks, failures, discoveries, and collaborations happen.” She added that, “concert dance can sometimes feel mysterious or inaccessible because people only see the final result, so Incubator was created in part to open that door.”

Going forward, Topazio said Rosin Box will continue to scale the company and find it a “forever home” with a studio-theatre. Already, the reputation of the company is growing, as evidenced by its ability to attract dancers from across the country with its 37 week contract, a relatively luxurious amount of work weeks in the San Diego dance scene. Topazio also hopes that the company will tour and develop immersive works that can distinguish the company. “While there is immersive theatre, there really is not much in the way of immersive dance,” says Topazio. 

This accounts for the continuing focus on dance films and smaller venues. “We want to get away from the proscenium stage,” Topazio said, “holding the audience where they are. We really want people to step inside.” The company seems intent on breaking the barrier between the dancer and the artist, even at the point of performance. Case in point, in the intermediate periods between each piece, the dancers would come onstage and sit around in their bare feet. In full view of the audience, they chatted as they put on their pointe shoes, despite there being a curtain that would otherwise have been drawn. If this takes away from the general mystique of the theatre going experience, this appears intended to be a feature and not a bug. 

The next season will carry challenges however, given that San Diego is cutting nearly all funding for the arts in its newest budget. Rosin Box stands to lose about $50,000 through an Organizational Support Program (OSP) grant that it received from the city, which supported operational expenses such as artist salaries, support staff, and education and outreach. “It’s just upsetting and disheartening in general that anyone would zero out funding for arts and culture,” said Topazio. 

“This whole year has been about managing risk and having a few plans for how things go, because if you zoom out the bigger picture, on the federal level, on the state level, the economy isn’t doing great, and funding is a little scary. It’s gonna be a little bumpy ride but that’s how it kind of is for everyone right now.”

Robert Steven Mack

Robert Steven Mack has danced with Indianapolis Ballet and City Ballet of San Diego and is an award-winning filmmaker. His writing has appeared in The New Criterion, Law and Liberty, American Purpose, and Arts Fuse. Robert received his Master of Public Affairs from Indiana University, Bloomington, from which he also holds a BA in History and a BS in Ballet Performance from the Jacobs School of Music.

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