Sketchbook
Showing a slate of dance works, still in draft form. Free to attend, donations appreciated. Produced by KT Nelson and Cauveri Suresh.
Friday, January 23rd 2026 at 7:30pm
Joe Goode Annex
401 Alabama Street San Francisco CA 94110
Maya (excerpts)
Choreography and Performance: Kira Fargas
Sound: Ili Ili Tully Anay performed by Florante Aguilar, Lolita by Ric Manrique Jr.
Inspired by the reality of families torn apart by seas, structures, and policy, this work researches themes of displacement, captivity, separation, and detachment. Titled after the former national bird of the Philippines, "Maya" investigates the impossibility of physical togetherness, exploring the anguish, longing for community, and instinct for self-preservation that arise in response to this harsh reality.
dance in three prayers
Choreography: Cauveri Suresh
Performance: Tessa Nebrida, Phoenicia Pettyjohn, and Karla Quintero
Sound: Matt Robidoux
This dance contemplates questions of collective survival strategies and prayer. We look closer at how a time of immense chaos and destruction is transforming each of us uniquely, what preparation we undergo to ready ourselves for this transformation, and how this transformation serves our individual as well as our communal survival. We draw on existing mythology and create our own new mythology as guides for the seemingly apocalyptic time in which we are living. The dancers walk in unison, reflect one another, and engage in a process of transformation/shapeshifting to meet this moment.
dance in three prayers is the second entry in a larger project, Destruction Mythologies — an iterative choreographic interrogation of questions about survival, transformation, and renewal. As opposed to creation myths, Destruction Mythologies attempts to create new mythology in the interest of new knowledge for individual and collective survival under increasingly unsurvivable conditions.
Untitled
Choreography: Ky Frances
Performance: Ky Frances and Nico Ortiz Maimon
Untitled is an exploration of power, desire, direction and yielding between Ky and Nico. It is a fever dream and a fantasy and a made up/very real relationship. So soft it’s tense, it takes place on the ocean floor, in a bar, in the studio, and at a gas station.
hold you me
Co-created by KT Nelson, Kira Fargas, Hadassah Perry
Performance: Kira Fargas and Hadassah Perry
For the last year, my 2-year old grandson has been coming up to his parents and me, underfoot, reaching up and saying “hold you me.” I’ve interpreted this as “It's time my body reconnects to another body. . . I’ve been in my own body for a while and now I need to settle into another body.” In this duet between Kira Fargas and Hadassah Perry, I‘m exploring the seam, the middle territory of belonging to another body and living in a separate body. The messy, intimate sometimes joyous, sometimes maddening nature of sharing a significant connection with another.
When I was a young parent I felt on-going pressure to encourage our children’s independence rather than their dependence on others. I continue to find this questionable. Humans are both dependent and independent beings. Learning about our dependance seems equally important as learning about our independence.
In this duet, I would like to explore this concept of interdependence between human bodies but also through the lens of a human’s body in relationship to earth. I continue to struggle with the indifference humankind exhibits towards our collective harm to the natural world. If we and our children had more awareness of our relationship to the earth, its soil, sunlight, air, plants, climate would we treat it better? Would we care for it? Listen to it?
Kira Fargas is a queer, first-generation Filipinx-American movement artist, choreographer, educator, drag performer, and community advocate. She grew up dancing at the Westlake School for the Performing Arts in Daly City, CA, and received a BFA in Dance from the University of Arizona in 2017. Kira currently performs and collaborates with UNA Productions (Fuchsia), EIGHT/MOVES (Mia Chong), and Detour Productions (Eric Garcia and Kat Cole), and she has also worked with New Dialect (Banning Bouldin), Rosie Herrera, Alex Ketley, Ariel Freedman, KT Nelson, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, and Rena Butler, among others. Her own work has been showcased at UNA Productions' Glimpse, ODC’s State of Play, and BODYSONNET's OTHER/self. Central to her artistic practice are explorations of her Filipinx and queer identity—honoring both her cultural history and her chosen family. Kira co-directs the Contemporary Training Program at the Westlake School for the Performing Arts alongside Hadassah Perry and is deeply committed to advancing the field through mentorship and collaboration with the next generation of dancers.
Cauveri Suresh (they/them) is a dance artist whose work considers the relationship between bodies and physical environment. As part of Emma Lanier + Cauveri Suresh, they have created interdisciplinary performances that respond to site and sculpture. Cauveri’s solo work frequently deals with themes of time, mythology, and cycles of destruction. Their current project is an iterative series of dance works, Destruction Mythologies, which creates new mythology in the interest of new knowledge for individual and collective survival under increasingly unsurvivable conditions. As a performer, they have had the pleasure of working for KT Nelson, Gerald Casel, Risa Jaroslow, Kickbal, Lauren Simpson, Ky Frances, and Jodi Melnick, among others. Cauveri graduated cum laude from Barnard College in 2018 with a B.A. in Dance. They were born and raised, and currently live and work, on unceded land of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Ohlone, in the territory of Huichin.
Ky Frances is a dancer, performer, maker and educator. He works with movement, paint, text and narrative. In his work he is exploring intimacy, power, the meaning making we do when we watch people together, preferences, secret codes, tangential anecdotes, proximity, world building, rehearsal as performance and what it feels like to watch the person watching.
KT Nelson (ODC Fellow) joined ODC/Dance in 1976. From 1976- 2020 she danced, choreographed and partnered with Brenda Way in directing the ODC/Dance Company. KT has been awarded the Isadora Duncan Dance Award four times: in 1987 for Outstanding Performance, in 1996 and 2012 for Outstanding Choreography, and in 2001 for Sustained Achievement. Her collaborators have included Berkeley Symphony, Na Hoon Park, Shinichi Iova-Koga, and Joan Jeanrenaud. Path of Miracles, with ODC and Volti Vocal Ensemble received a NEFA National Dance Production touring grant. Nelson’s Dead Reckoning was presented in 2018 at Jacobs Pillow and in the 2019 American Dance Platform at the Joyce Theater (see Fighting Climate Change with Dance | KQED Arts). Her collaboration with Brenda Way, boulders and bones, was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2017 Next Wave Festival. Her collaboration RingRoundRozi, with French-Canadian Composer Linda Bouchard, was selected for the 2008 Tansmesse International Dance Festival. From 2015-2025 she and Liz Heenan co-founded RoundAntennae a free mentorship project for supporting emerging and independent choreographers. Since leaving ODC in 2020, KT has focused on mentoring which has morphed into working side by side with independent artists. Presently she is co-producing, co-teaching and collaborating with Bay Area artists.
Nico Ortiz Maimon Originally from Mexico City, Nico Ortiz Maimon is a queer Bay Area performer, choreographer, drag artist, educator, and community organizer. She also works with children and makes music. An experimental improviser//alchemist, their artistic practice centers pleasure and collective liberation.
Tessa Nebrida is a movement artist and community based healing practitioner. Her offerings traverse the realms of spirit, energy, and consciousness — serving as a bridge into deeper embodiment, inquiry, and imagination. Rooted in improvisational lineages and practices, her curiosity in movement making seeds itself in the present/now as a convergence point for past future ancestral remembering to vessel through.
Hadassah Perry is a queer artist and performer currently based in San Francisco. Originally from Riga, Latvia, she began her training in dance and piano before relocating to Nashville, Tennessee. In 2017, after a year of study with the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, Hadassah joined New Dialect under the direction of Banning Bouldin. While with the company, she had the opportunity to work with choreographers including Alex Ketley, Rosie Herrera, Bryan Arias, and Roy Assaf. Since moving to San Francisco in 2022, Hadassah has performed and collaborated with UNA Productions (Fuchsia), Sharp & Fine (Megan and Shannon Kurashige), Detour Dance (Eric Garcia and Kat Gorospe Cole), KT Nelson, and Deborah Slater. Her choreographic work has been presented through New Dialect’s Third Voice installation, Pearl Street Collective, UNA Productions’ GLIMPSE, and the Kindling Arts Festival. Hadassah is the co-director of the Contemporary Training Program at the Westlake School for the Performing Arts in Daly City, and is also on faculty at Training Ground SF. @smileypiley
Phoenicia Pettyjohn (she/her) is a longtime SF resident, movement artist and educator. She is the rehearsal director/dramaturg for Catherine Galasso’s 10,000 Steps: A Dance About Its Own Making for ODC/Dance. Performance collaborators include Christy Funsch Dance, Catherine Galasso, Aura Fischbeck and Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works. She has also worked with Risa Jaroslow, Sara Rudner (Margaret Jenkins Dance Company Encounters over 60) Miriam Wolordowski Sense Object, Rosemary Hannon, Susan Rethorst and Kira Kirsch among others and has appeared in the works of Maguy Marin, David Dorfman, Neta Pulvermacher, Sara Shelton Mann and Jess Curtis. She is a longtime collaborator with Christy Funsch Dance, recently appearing in her 12 hour piece “Epoch” at ODC Theater and “Kid Subjunctive” at CounterPulse SF and NYC. She is a faculty member at the San Francisco Ballet School and teaching artist in the SF Ballet Dance in Schools and Communities Program and a certified Axis Syllabus teacher.
Karla Quintero’s cross-genre improvisation practice draws from contemporary, club, and partner dance, somatics, and a love of genre (horror, telenovelas). She works from a deep faith in the doing, the ongoing practicing of dance, and in what that steady return offers to her community and immediate family. Her practice foregrounds relation and persistence over production, inviting community to emerge through the act of dancing itself. For more than 15 years, Karla has performed in the works of and participated in processes with artists she admires including Cauveri Suresh, Gerald Casel, Hope Mohr, Catherine Galasso, Robert Moses, Alma Esperanza Cunningham, Aura Fischbeck, among others. She actively collaborates with movement artists Belinda He as ALLOYED METTLES and with Shareen DeRyan as GRUMN, and is developing STAR LIGHT, an improvised evening-length work that follows her attempt to cut ties with pop influences that have distorted her sense of self. Karla is based in Huichin/Oakland.