In an Arts Town, Laguna Dance Builds a New Residency for Making Dance

Kaitlin Wright
15 minutes ago
7 min read

Laguna Dance’s inaugural three-week residency pairs professional dancers with apprentices and teenagers to build world premieres from scratch.

For three weeks this summer, a group of dancers has had the experience to fully immerse themselves in making a new piece of work, together, with nowhere else to be. There’s no company season pulling at their attention. No school. No full-length repertory piece that has to hold up across a dozen performances and a tour. Just one goal, followed through from start to finish.

Laguna Dance’s new Summer Creation & Performance Program is a three-week residency that culminates Aug. 6-9 in “Summer Stage: We The People.” The final week of the program includes four days of performances across Laguna Beach – free shows on Main Beach and at Laguna Art Museum, a master class and ticketed evenings at Laguna Playhouse.

This summer program will not replace the organization’s long-standing winter festival. Instead, it introduces an annual residency built to give artists dedicated space, time and financial support to create new work, something increasingly rare in today’s dance world.

The timing is coincidental but notable – the residency launches just weeks after the National Choreographers Initiative, the Irvine-based choreography lab that spent more than three decades giving choreographers unpressured space to create, held its final performance. Laguna Dance's residency isn't a direct successor, but it lands in a moment when Orange County has one fewer place doing this kind of work and now, one just getting started.

Laguna Dance has commissioned work before, at community art walks, its mainstage festival and its annual gala, but this is the first time that the creation process has become an entire program of its own.

Laguna Dance executive and creative director Jodie Gates, who founded Laguna Dance 21 years ago, has moved through a career that spans principal ballet dancer, artistic director, professor and founding dean at USC's Glorya Kaufman School of Dance.

“Why can’t Laguna Beach provide the space, the resources, the collaborative community?” she said, referencing Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, which gave established dancers room to experiment outside the grind of a company season, as a rough touchstone for what she’s after.

“That’s my hope for this,” she added. “Is that it can become a space where choreographers can create.”

Laguna Beach’s arts identity has, for a century, centered on visual art: the Festival of Arts and the Pageant of the Masters, known for its living re-creations of famous artworks, draw crowds every summer. Nearby the Sawdust Art Festival and Laguna Art-A-Fair also attract locals and out-of-towners. Gates has spent two decades adding dance to that identity, through art walks, commissioned duets and scholarships for young dancers.

Dancers performing choreography by Jodie Gates. Melisssa Gelfin, left, and Minori Sakita and Taylor Carrasco. Photos courtesy of Cincinnati Ballet/Hiromi Platt

From a City Grant to a New Blueprint

The program’s roots trace to the city of Laguna Beach’s Innovation Grant, awarded every three years to local artists making new work. Gates pitched a piece honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the seed of what would become a new piece, “We The People,” that will anchor this year’s finale.

“The kernel of it was me just making one dance for a group of 20,” Gates said.

But then she brought the board of Laguna Dance an idea. What if they rethought the summer entirely, building something less like an intensive and more like a laboratory.

"There are so many great intensives in Orange County, and all of these wonderful dance schools,” Gates said. “And we're not that, and we're also not a company, you know. A lot of companies, of course they have intensives that feed into their company. So I thought, ‘What if we had a summer experience that was different than that?"

Instead, Laguna Dance could offer time and space for choreographers and an experience that resembles life in a professional dance company for emerging artists. Dancers train and rehearse six hours a day, six days a week, while Gates and Peter Chu, the residency’s other choreographer, get weeks to build new work on a company of professionals, apprentices and pre-professional high school dancers.

The city’s grant, individual donations and free studio space from the Laguna Beach Unified School District are funding the pilot for three years. Beyond that, nothing is guaranteed, Gates said.

“It all comes down to continued funding and people believing in the vision,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to work with musicians and filmmakers,” she added, describing her hope to expand the program in future years, “even a visual artist, because obviously that’s what we’re so known for here.”

PHOTO 1: Kannen Glanz, of Salt Contemporary Dance in Salt Lake City, is a professional dancer participating in the residency this summer. Photo courtesy of Salt Contemporary Dance/Samantha Little PHOTO 2: Stephanie Dai graduated from USC Kaufman in 2019 and is currently dancing and choreographing in the Los Angeles area. Photo courtesy of Laguna Dance/Owen Scarlett

A Community In and Out of the Studio

For the dancers, the program is a jolt of energy – new surroundings, a break from routine, a common goal. Kannen Glanz, a member of Salt Contemporary Dance in Utah who got his first professional job from Gates at Cincinnati Ballet, has built part of his career on short, intensive residencies like this one.

“It feels like a unique capture of time and energy and movement. You have to be in it from the start and there's no room or time to not give your fullest self,” Glanz said. “I feel like projects like these are a way of me choosing myself. It’s a reward.”

Glanz and five other professional dancers are being paid to spend their off-season restaging and expanding Gates’ 2012 work, “Delicate Balance,” originally made for BalletX, into a larger 45-minute work built around this year’s “We The People” theme.

“It’s been this really cool opportunity to see how I can take something old and put it in a new context, on new dancers,” he said.

Like most of the visiting dancers, Glanz is staying with a host family rather than in a hotel. His hosts took him on a bike tour of town his first day and pointed him toward their favorite spots.

“Being here feels like I’m being welcomed into something much bigger than myself, much deeper,” he said. “It’s homey. It’s personal.”

That welcome continues through the studio door. What strikes both Glanz and Stephanie Dai, Gates' rehearsal assistant and a working choreographer and teacher in Los Angeles, is the absence of hierarchy inside a room spanning nearly a decade in age and experience. Dancers as young as 14 take the same company class, at the same barre, as dancers who have toured internationally.

"There's, I think, in other spaces there would be a risk of a sense of hierarchy, or just weird vibes," Dai said. "Jodie and the other teachers have been really amazing at creating a healthy environment where everyone knows this isn't for competition. We're all a community. Be here to push yourself and be inspired by the other people in the room."

That instinct for building community isn't new to her. Dai was part of the inaugural graduating class at USC's Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, and now finds herself inside another inaugural cohort.

“There's a similar sense of anticipation of what this can lead to,” she said, “both as it is in this iteration, but what future iterations can look like. As a participant, you feel a lot of agency and invitation to really put in what you want, realizing, oh, I do have a lot of power, and I'm actually invited into contributing my skill sets, my talents, my own vision for what we want dance to look like here, because we love it so much.”

PHOTO 1: Versa-Style Street Dance Company, founded in 2005 by Los Angeles natives Jackie Lopez and Leigh Foaad, was created to promote and celebrate the artistry of hip-hop and street dance culture. The company will perform on Laguna Main Beach during the Laguna Dance residency. Photo courtesy of Laguna Dance/Timothy Salaz. PHOTO 2: Peter Chu, an award-winning choreographer and founder of the contemporary dance company chuthis., is premiering a new work at Laguna Dance's Summer Stage. Photo courtesy of Giordana Dance Chicago. PHOTO 3: Founded in 1992 by Philadelphia native Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris, Rennie Harris Puremovement is widely credited with pioneering the genre of Street Dance Theater, bringing hip-hop from the street corner to the concert stage. Photo courtesy of Laguna Dance/Steven Pisano. PHOTO 4: Based in Orange County, the Pan America Chinese Dance Alliance tells classic Chinese stories through traditional dance while also inspiring original choreography that reflects the experience of Chinese Americans. Photo courtesy of Laguna Dance/Leo Liu

An Ecosystem, Not a Replacement

None of this replaces what Laguna Dance already does. The mainstage festival, which brings in emerging and touring companies that don’t always get booked at venues like Segerstrom Center for the Arts, continues alongside the scholarship program.

“That part’s a little nerve-wracking,” Gates admitted when talking about running two full programs each year rather than one. “Because that means, of course, everything costs more.”

The week’s lineup opens with free, outdoor performances: a street-dance show and community workshop on Main Beach, and a program from the Pan America Chinese Dance Alliance at Laguna Art Museum. It then moves to ticketed mainstage evenings at Laguna Playhouse, including two performances by Rennie Harris Puremovement, the company widely credited with bringing hip-hop from the street corner to the concert stage.

The residency closes with “Voices Unbound,” pairing a world premiere by Chu with Gates’ own reimagined “We The People,” which opens with the full residency company on stage together, scored to Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade.”

Whether the model survives past its three funded years is an open question, by Gates’ own admission. But inside the rehearsal room, she’s already made her case.

“I think every human wants to answer ‘what is our purpose?’ ” Gates said. “If I don’t feel like I have a purpose, I just curl up in a ball. And I feel like there’s a good amount of purpose to what we’re doing, and it’s reflected in what I’m seeing and hearing with the dancers and the choreographer and our team.”