The East Bay Connections of the SF Ethnic Dance Festival

The East Bay Connections of the SF Ethnic Dance Festival

PHOTO BY ADRIAN ARIAS.

Oakland’s AguaClara Flamenco performs on opening night of the Ethnic Dance Festival.


The festival coninutes its ascendance from a tiny community event to one of the oldest and largest world dance festivals in the country.

It took the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival 39 years to move from an “alternative” location (Palace of Fine Arts) to a “high-culture” venue (San Francisco War Memorial Opera House). That happened last year. Now for its 40th anniversary, the EDF is back in the Opera House. What will happen next year is anyone’s guess since the Opera House may be too expensive in the long run, and no suitable alternative seems to be on the horizon.

But the EDF has proved to be a remarkable sturdy institution. It has grown from being a San Francisco event giving voice to dance that thrived in neighborhood community centers to become one of the oldest and largest world dance festivals in the country.

Almost from the beginning the East Bay contributed its share with Dimension Dance Theatre, the oldest African dance company in the state, and the late Malonga Casquelourd’s Dia Fua Congo that now has given rise to new groups. Hence the Oakland area has become one of the nation’s largest communities of African and African-American culture.

So it’s gratifying to see that the East Bay African Diaspora will be handsomely represented at these 40th anniversary concerts. Arenas Dance Company, led by Cuban-born and trained Susana Arenas, teaches and performs on both sides of the bay with choreographies that are inspired by African deities and Catholic saints. De Rompe y Raja Cultural Association mines the cultural amalgamation from Latino, indigenous, and (primarily) West African cultures in Coastal Peru. Its dances shine with percussive footwork that may look familiar, though developed independently, to North American tap and clogging. Nimely Pan African Dance Company’s Liberian artistic director Nimely Napa will bring Dai Zoe Bush—The Breaking of the Poro & Sande Bush which re-enacts, with the help of “divine spirits,” the opening of a traditional and still vital “bush school.”

But Oakland is also home to AguaClara Flamenco, scheduled to premiere an EDF commission on opening night. Emeryville’s OngDance Company will close this 40th anniversary on what surely will be a festive note with traditional and contemporary Korean dances.

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. July 14 and 21, 8 p.m., and July 15 and 22, 2 p.m., War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, $25-$45, 415-392-4400.

This report was originally published in our sister publication, the East Bay Monthly.