ODC/Dance Fellow and former Co-artistic Director KT Nelson was trying to make sense of the sudden death of her husband in December 2023 when not long thereafter, troupe artistic director Brenda Way commissioned her to choreograph a new work.
“I feel that the biggest thing was the world looked differently to me after Doug passed,” Nelson recalls. “All the assumptions I made about life, about what mattered, how to see the world, really altered. And so it was transforming to me, and it still is.”
In response to her loss, disorientation and changed outlook, Nelson created “Nothing Is Going to Make Sense,” a world premiere in ODC/Dance’s Summer Sampler onstage July 17-20 in San Francisco. Mia J. Chong’s “Theories of Time,” inspired by research into the mysteries of time perception, also premieres on the program, which also includes Catherine Galasso’s 2024 “10,000 Steps: A Dance About Its Own Making.”
Nelson describes her contradictory emotions, saying that the depth of her love is equal to the depth of her grief. Today they live together. And while there is loneliness in traumatic grief, there’s also the capacity for togetherness among surviving loved ones.
Significantly, Nelson says her sense of a reality that’s tinged with emotional nostalgia is reflected in her work.
“Artists try to glorify or romanticize, instead of just taking life as it shows itself, and I feel more clear about what’s real than I ever did before,” she says. “But at the same time, there’s so much desire to go back… Like, ‘Can’t I undo this? Can’t I talk to him one more time?’ And I see this in my grief groups. Everybody’s doing anything they can to shift this reality.”
“Nothing Is Going to Make Sense” is set to “Tumblebird Contrails” by Berkeley composer Gabriella Smith; “Bard of a Wasteland” by Smith and her longtime friend and frequent collaborator Gabriel Cabezas; and Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem Op. 48.
Nelson, whose “The Velveteen Rabbit” is an ODC/Dance holiday season staple, set her new work on 10 dancers, or, as she puts it, “theoretically five biological males and five biological females.” Their preparation for the piece included a tour through her grieving process.
“When I make a new work, I usually bring in a phrase that came from some aspect of the world I was interested in creating and ask the dancers to write about whatever that might be,” she explains. “But this time I did interactive things with them before we started to work on the work that were much more esoteric internal stuff, not about the subject matter. I wanted to open them up to some of my process of grieving and what I’ve learned and didn’t know before about life, and I shared a lot of that with them. And then together we made the work.”
Chong, 27, a student at ODC School as a 5-year-old, a member of Dance Jam, the troupe’s professional teen dance company, and then a six-season member of ODC/Dance, cites Way, Kimi Okada (ODC founding member, choreographer and school director) and Nelson as major influences on her dancing and dancemaking.
Nelson played a major part, Chong says, in “Theories of Time” and her own personal growth.
“Watching KT go through her grief process and how we collaborated a lot in the period after she experienced her loss really changed me as a person, artist and as a woman,” she says. “Her piece addresses that directly; my piece reflects on those themes a little more abstractly, because I also had some personal loss in the last couple of years. But there’s something about being there for people who have had to let go.”
Chong, ODC Dance’s stage director and founder of the contemporary troupe Eight/Moves, was inspired to choreograph “Theories of Time,” a full-company work for five men and women, while she pondered how humans experience time. That encompasses everything from exciting moments when hours seem to fly to monotony when everything slows to a crawl, to intensity, when it feels like time stops entirely.
“I wanted to explore those ideas through choreographic structures, so there’s a lot of framing related to speed in the piece, lots of surreal slow motion, and then a lot of detailed, rapid movement…. ” she explains. “I also tried to touch upon the emotional relationship to time, the way that we reminisce, or feelings of nostalgia, the way we look back on time we’ve spent, project forward and what we think our worries or fears or excitement are about the future.”
“Theories of Time,” set to “Walk Music” and “Unknown Touch” by Henrik Schwarz and “Drops & Points” by Pascal Schumacher, has costumes by ODC dancer Christian Squires and lighting by Thomas Bowersox. Both Squires and Bowersox have worked with Chong on Eight/Moves projects.
Busy with Eight/Moves, Chong is pleased to maintain her relationship with ODC/Dance.
“They were fully supportive when I founded my company and gave me a lot of advice and support and were at every show,” she says. “I think their willingness and interest in collaborating really keeps our work together fresh.”
ODC/Dance’s “Summer Sampler” is at 7:30 p.m. July 17-19 and 5 p.m. July 20 at ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., San Francisco. For tickets ($30-$100) call 415-863-9834 or visit https://odc.dance/summersampler.
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