Toys, Robert Fuentes larger version

A Cup of Tea with Choreographer Sean Dorsey | Jenna Humphrey

But still, for Sean, the city of San Francisco hasn’t fully arrived.  “A lot of San Francisco is hip enough to be open to listening, watching, witnessing,” he says.  “But when it comes to internalizing the way people conceive of their own work and choreography, that has not filtered down at all yet.  And it’s not like I’m advocating for, you know, ‘modern dance must revolutionize and become completely gender-neutral,’ but there is still not even a variety of gender expression on stage.”

Sean has become a solid fixture in the dance scene, providing a space within traditional high society where transgender experience can be represented.  Two very different scenes are now brought together in a way that’s totally unique and interesting.
“The first Fresh Meat event was originally intended as a one-time event until there was this huge community response and then you knew there was a clear amount of need for an organization to step in.”  So, he founded one, establishing himself as the nation’s first transgender modern dance choreographer, and founder of Fresh Meat Productions, which now offers year-round programs, including the annual Fresh Meat Festival.  Fresh Meat Productions started in 2001 when a group of artists and activists came together to organize the first event.  Among the round table was Jesselito Bie, Artistic Director of STEAMROLLER, a San Francisco-based guerrilla dance company that often performed in the streets to address, among other issues, the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

At their brainstorming meeting about what to call the show, Bie murmured, “fresh meat.”  Sean laughs.  “We were all like, ‘Did he really just say that?’  It was a bold step to say, Yeah, we transgender and queer people are innovative and fresh and we are hot and strong and we are powerful and this is something new in town that hasn’t been on the stage or at the table before.  Everyone loved the name, and the name stuck.”

This year’s Fresh Meat Festival returned in 2007 for the sixth season to sold-out houses.  It included a roster of performances Sean calls “an extraordinary powerhouse lineup of artists who are reclaiming tradition and blazing new paths with their art.” Imagine traditionally gendered forms such as Afro-Columbian and hip-hop through a trans lens, punctuated with spoken narrative, glam rock, aerial dance, taiko and hula.  These pieces handle heavy stuff with the sort of positive fierceness that weakens people’s defenses against transgender and queer experiences.

About his artistic process, Sean says, “There have been pieces where I am a few weeks away from the performance and I know the ending to the text isn’t right or I know that a certain kind of movement isn’t right and somehow luckily it falls into place.  But when it resonates with me as really honest, I feel like I’m done.  The most important thing for me is to feel like I’m not allowing myself any emotional shortcuts or to fall back on any clichés or preconceived notions or next-logical thoughts to jump to in a narrative or with movement.” 

Catherine Plato, managing editor of the lesbian magazine, Curve, went to Fresh Meat shows in both 2005 and 2006.  Of the performances, she says she enjoyed seeing “a lot of trans artists, which are generally underrepresented in the LGBT society.  The art was made subversive just by virtue of having someone perform a part not generally assigned to their gender, like the all-female break dancing part.”  And it wasn’t all about the politics.  She continues, “The quality of the performances were so good that just about anybody would be excited to see the really kick ass dancers.” » next page »

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