Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival

August 8-10, 2025

Mission Dance Theater, San Francisco

Presented by Urban Jazz Dance Company

By Kristen Cosby

Zahna Simon and Antoine Hunter of Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival. Photo by Matt Haber

The 13th Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival brought  a wide range of performances and dancers from the States, Botswana, Colombia, and Jamaica. 

The show was largely composed by choreographer and dancer Antoine Hunter whose dance-film rounded out the night in Urban Jazz DanceCompany work-in-progress The Power of Shuffling Through Deaf Education.  (The full showing of which will occur  October 24-26 at CounterPulse.) The  film opens in black and white, the camera close up on Hunter’s face. Then, in what is possibly a flashback, we see a young boy, who we understand is also hearing impaired, forming his relationship with the world. The scene cuts back to the dancer’s solemn adult face. As the piece builds, the lower half of faces interject, mouthing the word “deaf.” With each iteration, we leave the young body moving forward through the silent world, and see the adult dancer’s face twitch, his body increasingly contorting around the word’s wounding, until the contortion becomes the dance.  

It was a poignant end to a show that largely defied and complicated the narrative that to be deaf is to live in isolation or in silence. Both ASL and International sign language translators were on site all evening. Often, there were three bodies signing from the stage. As Hunter opened the program, he moved quickly from signing to various audience members informally into dance. He regards his hands. Suggesting that the body communicates in many ways, and that dance and sign language are not separate forms of expression.  The audience responded by lifting their hands and shaking them while pounding the floor with their feet, in the universal sign for clapping. 

The program’s artists drew from many different traditions, the Okabango Deaf Polka Dancers of Botswana introduced two duos of synchronized polka dancers. Wicked Witch Bianca Ware brought Broadway to the stage in her rendering of an ASL version of “Defying Gravity”. In Danga, two dancers from CDK Dead Dance Company of Jamaica wore the colors of the Jamaican flag. They stomped and leapt in celebration of Jamaica's Independence Day beneath a video-reel that showed highlights of the island. In the piece Pink Petals, the audience saw a fusion of Bollywood dance and burlesque.  Best costume of the night, had it been awarded, would have gone to Jon A Kasptrap for his masked,  red-sequined, befeathered Firebird. 

In stark contrast, Our Bodies are a Conversation, danced by Juilianan Frick and Anna Gichen, was dueted in silence with both dancers dressed in black. They began entwined on the floor in a small clump, and then moved apart, their spins and small lifts always echoing something read in the other body. At its finale, their bodies spiraled closer and closer. Until upon touching, one dancer left the state and the other stood with her gaze following her finger spiralling through the air.

Similarly, in Ancestral Joy, Noah James III began kneeling, head bowed and shrouded in white cloth, as if he were a monk in prayer. Against the backdrop flashed images of the dancer in hospital.   “Oh how am I to dance in this crumbled body of mine? Has it truly crumbled to pieces?” the voice of young poet Nivia Charles asks from the video, iterating a struggle with sickle-cell anemia. James raises an arm from his shroud in pain and unwinds from his cloth while the young poet reads, “I want nothing more than to revel in the freedom of my own vessel,”  which felt very much like what the performers accomplished this night.