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Local Festival Sustains Dance from Around the World

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San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival fosters many styles at home and abroad

Thanks to its beautiful rolling hills, iconic Golden Gate Bridge, picturesque seaside views and rich cultural history, the city of San Francisco, California, attracts millions of visitors each year. But the city is quickly gaining recognition for another reason: the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.

San Francisco is home to a uniquely diverse dance community. Some of the most outstanding local ethnic dance companies perform throughout the month of June as part of the annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, created by the not-for-profit World Arts West organization. The festival not only showcases many rare and unique forms of dance, it actively preserves those dance traditions, helping them stay vibrant both within the United States and around the world.

Building the Festival

“I believe that we have the most extraordinary dance community anywhere,” says Julie Mushet, executive director of World Arts West. “We work with over 400 dance companies in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, easily 20,000 dancers who sustain over 100 distinct traditions from around the world.”

Culling the festival lineup from such a large group of potential participants is no easy matter. The festival’s producers put audition attendees, all of whom must be based in Northern California, through a rigorous selection process that involves both live auditions and written essays about the cultural traditions from which their performances spring. A panel of experts reviews each applicant, applying criteria ranging from stage presence to appropriateness to the dance’s cultural origins. The competition can be fierce; for the 2010 festival 137 auditions culled about 2,500 dancers down to the final line-up of some 600 artists in 37 performances.

In 2010, the festival program represented cultures from every part of the globe. One evening’s performance featured companies dedicated to Indian, Haitian, Peruvian, Tahitian, Indonesian, Spanish and Japanese dance traditions. Several years earlier, one performance even featured the rarely seen Balinese Gamelan jegog, an ensemble of giant bamboo marimbas that musicians must climb in order to play.

Mushet says she loves spotlighting such a diverse array of dance traditions within a single performance. “People may come to see Spanish Flamenco but fall madly in love with other forms they would never have otherwise been exposed to,” she adds.

Ethnic Dance Beyond San Francisco

While the festival focuses on local dance companies, its effects touch communities thousands of miles away, especially since World Arts West recently began sponsoring the involvement of guest artists from around the world. “There was one Muslim tribal chief from the Philippines who had never left [his home] island of Palawan before he participated in this festival,” says Mushet. “Two dancers from San Francisco had gone to Palawan years before, trained and learned the local dance form. They taught it to a San Francisco-based dance company and brought the chief over as a guest artist for our festival. The company performed that style to 3,000 people across three sold-out shows.”

“The tribal chief videotaped the whole performance to bring back to the people in his tribe. It was transformative. Kids in that culture [had] less-than-wonderful American movies as their only window into what American life was like* — and this was really troubling to the tribal leaders.” Playing the video of the dance festival performance sparked a new interest in America among the children on Palawan and showed that appreciation of their own culture extends far beyond the Philippine borders. This realization “made a big difference in the chief’s ability to sustain his own local culture.”

Though the festival seeks to nurture and share traditional dance forms, stylistic innovations regularly make it to the festival stage. “There are dancers who have significantly changed their form,” says Mushet. “It can be controversial, but after years of being masters in their fields, they have the credibility to pull it off.”

One recent example included Charya Burt, a former faculty member of Cambodia’s Royal University of Phnom Penh who immigrated to the United States in 1993. “Three years ago, she stood in the wings before going on stage, very nervous,” says Mushet. “To her knowledge, this was the first time in 2,500 years that a Cambodian dancer had ever sang and danced at the same time. She was so afraid that she was ruining the authenticity of the form. But as a Cambodian American, she felt that this was the next step in her artistic development.”

“Not many in the audience knew this major change was being made to the art form, but for people in that culture, it was certainly a huge shift. It wasn’t ‘authentic,’ but it was beautiful and well received.”

For Mushet, the significance of ethnic dance transcends any particular style or tradition. “Dance is core to human experience,” she says. “It’s amazing that, in cave drawings from 30,000 years ago, the images that are repeated millennia after millennia are of hunting and dancing.”

“Dance has been key to humans’ sense of community, to living a rich life. These styles that the festival celebrates come from a cultural context that brought people together to celebrate, to mourn, to connect spiritually. There’s so much that is embedded and transferred in the knowledge of these dance forms.”

The culture and artistry intrinsic to any given dance form make events like the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival all the more important and necessary. These festivals help ensure that dance traditions are seen far from the lands where they originated, resulting in greater understanding and appreciation of a broad array of cultures and forms of cultural expression.