Philosopher Martin Buber inspires former Marin resident’s dance performance, ‘Regard’

In a mirrored rehearsal studio in San Francisco, dancers move in unison with dramatic sweeping kicks, hops and arabesques. They crawl backward, make juggling and drawing motion, or experiment with yarn or moving fancifully painted panels. The dancers work with concentrated focus, but the mood is also playful and upbeat.

“We’re going to use these steps to create stuff, so they don’t have to be perfect,” choreographer Alyssa Mitchel, a former Marin resident, assures her dancers.

They’re in the middle of creating “Regard,” an hour-long dance performance exploring the nature of interpersonal relationships between people, inspired in part by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, the author of “I and Thou.” It’ll be performed the first two weekends of August in the Yud Gallery of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in downtown San Francisco.

Taking place at 1 p.m. Fridays through Sundays, the performances are free with museum admission. On the first day, admission to the museum is free as well, as it is on the first Friday of every month. Saturday performances are followed by a question-and-answer session with the artists.

“Regard” is a collaboration with cellist David Goldblatt, guitarist Steven Lin, muralist ORLUarts, and dancers Jess DeFranco, Claire Fisher, Brandon Graham, Juan Magacho, Juan Ruiz, Fabiana Santiago and Alice Wells. (The piece is for six dancers, and Fisher and Graham take turns as the sixth.)

Raised in San Francisco, where she lives, Mitchel studied dance from an early age, doing tap and jazz and rhythmic gymnastics in her childhood, then moving on to ballet in middle school.

“In my senior year of high school, I had got an injury at a few dance schools in the city, so I wound up going to Marin Dance Theatre,” she recalls. “It was a really great training program for me. I started doing contemporary dance there, and they asked me to be the first student choreographer there.”

Math connection

Relocating to San Rafael in her teens, she continued to work at Marin Dance Theatre while a student at Dominican University of California in San Rafael.

“I did not do the dance program there,” she says. “I majored in education and I minored in math. I am a math tutor also. I like the balance of choreography and math. I think they work really well together. There’s so much counting and patterns and shapes.”

The partnership with CJM came about after an outdoor production that Mitchel did at the Exploratorium in late 2021, featuring two of the dancers that are in “Regard.”

“I realized maybe before I go back into a theater, I want to collaborate with another museum,” she says. “I had never been inside the Contemporary Jewish Museum, but I’ve been outside of it so many times because the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival is right around there. So I contacted them, because I was really interested in just seeing the space. And they looked me up and saw that I had just done the Exploratorium. They showed me all of their spaces, and I saw how perfect the Yud Gallery was for this. They’ve had dance a few times in there, not recently, and it has such natural acoustics for sound. So it was perfect that this is my first production with live musicians, too.”

A few sections of “Regard” are preexisting pieces that Mitchel has choreographed, while others are brand new.

“The whole piece actually was inspired by a piece that I choreographed back in 2016 at SAFEhouseArts, a choreography residency for young choreographers starting out,” she says. “And the piece is called ‘Close, Far and Somewhere in Between.’ It’s a duet with two women, which is actually going to open this show. The piece is about a friendship that’s really close that then disintegrates. I was reflecting on a lot of different friendships and relationships, and I wanted to build on that.”

Unlikely inspiration

That led to finding inspiration in unlikely places.

“I was having a discussion with my mom, who’s a psychiatrist, and she was telling me about Martin Buber,” Mitchel says. “The second section out of six sections is inspired by his work, ‘I and Thou.’ Martin Buber talked a lot about how a lot of times in life there are missed meetings and how we’ll use people or not treat them as full human beings. And then the contrast is coming together, the Thou, and understanding each other and supporting each other. And so the first half of this section, there is a lot of pushing and throwing and tossing. And the second half, I have yarn that’s connecting all the dancers together.”

Another section is inspired by the late painter R.B. Kitaj, an American artist known for his expressive, figurative works that capture contemporary life.

“He had a big exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London, and the critics attacked him because he wrote too much Jewish commentary about his work,” Mitchel says. “So we created a piece called ‘Inner Critic.’ It features Fabi, and she represents an artist struggling with doubting themselves and hearing both the inner critic and the outer critics.”

Other sections explore grief, friendships and the loneliness of being an artist.

When I meet with Mitchel, she’s still in the process of creating the final section.

“We’ve started bits of it, but we’re putting things together after me teaching a few phrases,” she says. “I like to work really collaboratively with dancers. The first day of rehearsals, I have my own choreographic phrases that I create, and I teach these little dances to my dancers. And I have them create their own material, too, so that it’s not just me choreographing every single second. They get to play with their own material as solos and together, using what I’ve already taught them.”

A museum gallery may seem like an unlikely place to find dance, and that’s just how Mitchel likes it. Much like the piece itself, it’s all about connecting.

“I think that the pandemic changed the way a lot of artists think about putting dance out there,” Mitchel says. “I’m just really excited for people to see this whole production, especially people who aren’t familiar with dance, because there’s no right way to interpret it. They can be watching the musicians or the panels or the dancers. There are windows, so you can just peek. But then you’ll open the doors and there’ll be seats right by the doors. I want people to come with clear mind and open eyes and enjoy it.”

Sam Hurwitt is a Bay Area arts journalist and playwright. Contact him at shurwitt@gmail.com or on Twitter at twitter.com/shurwitt.

IF YOU GO

What: “Regard”

Where: Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., San Francisco

When: Aug. 4 to 13; 1 p.m. Fridays through Sundays

Admission: Free with museum admission

Information: thecjm.org