After a nice long break away from the keyboard, it’s good to plunge back into the cultural fray. While business closures continue to pummel the Mission, there are many indications that 2024 is going to see an outpouring of creative activity, starting with the huge turnout for last week’s opening of the exhibition “HOME” at the Drawing Room gallery.
This feast-or-famine dynamic is also at the heart of a new Dance Brigade production “Match Girrl,” which runs over the next two weekends at Dance Mission Theater, Jan. 19 to 28. Delving into the treacherous dichotomy between rising wealth and festering poverty that has come to define so much of the San Francisco landscape, the dance theater production puts a decidedly contemporary spin on the sentimental Hans Christen Andersen fable “The Little Match Girl.”
“I see the Little Match Girl as the victim of poverty, loneliness and despair,” said “Match Girrl” choreographer Krissy Keefer, who founded Dance Brigade in 1984. “Some have interpreted her as a visionary who has her own agency, but we’re looking at: What is a dream, what’s a hallucination, what’s a vision?”
Keefer describes the 75-minute piece as a “fractured fairytale about class warfare,” and it’s no coincidence that “Match Girrl” opens with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s bitterly woozy “Alabama Song.” She laced the production with more contemporary tracks, including a piece from Brian Eno/David Byrne’s phantasmagoric “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World.”
“Megan Lowe sings ‘The Sound of Silence,’” Keefer said. “She’s the chanteuse, and her character weaves in and out of the action. It’s a musical piece with quite a bit of singing, a lot of theater and a lot of dance. I developed it and wrote it and worked with dancers to choreograph it.”
In creating “Match Girrl,” Keefer was fueled by the widespread death she saw in the Tenderloin while working on mural during the height of the pandemic, particularly the contrast between the city’s mobilization to prevent Covid-19 deaths and the lack of attention paid to the mounting body count from fentanyl. But the production is also inspired by documentaries about corporate corruption and the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, like “Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room” and “The Big Short.”
“I’m trying to tell a story that references all of that, the best of times, the worst of time,” Keefer said of “Match Girrl.” “Everyone in the show has lost people, knows people who have struggled with addiction. It’s very close to home.”
The Red Poppy Art House and Esotérica Tropical
As long as I’ve been writing about the Red Poppy Art House, marveling at the diminutive venue’s oversized track record for nurturing emerging musicians, I still come across strikingly talented artists who credit the nonprofit space with launching their careers. Wandering around the Mission last October for the Mission Arts Performance Project, I ended up at the Poppy and was swept up by Esotérica Tropical, a changeable Caribbean music ensemble led and created by Puerto Rican songwriter, vocalist and harpist María José Montijo.
She returns to the Red Poppy on Saturday with Denise Solis on Afro-Puerto Rican barril drum and Sofía Magdalena on vocals and maraca (Magdalena opens the evening with a brief solo set of original songs). The concert anticipates the release of her debut album, “Esotérica Tropical,” featuring a body of incantatory songs informed by her love of Afro-Puerto Rican bomba and two decades of experience as a healer.
Over the years, she’s explored tai chi and qi gong, Daoist cosmology, meditation, and traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Her musical path and her spiritual quest are inextricably entwined, but one needn’t subscribe to any particular beliefs to be mesmerized by her songs.
Though she grew up singing and performing widely in a professional children’s choir, Montijo had given up music before her first visit to the Red Poppy in 2007 “when I was fresh off the boat,” she said. A friend took her to the venue on an open mic night, and ended up convincing her to get up and sing. “I didn’t have a harp back then,” she recalled. “I just sang a song I had made up a capella, with projections of blue clouds behind me. It was very dreamy.”
The Red Poppy became her base of operations as she’s moved back and forth between the Bay Area and Puerto Rico, where she’s working on building a following. More than a proving ground for her own music, it’s served as a portal into new sounds and concepts, like the South American folk electronica duo Lulacruza (Colombian singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Alejandra Ortiz, who now goes by Almunis, and Argentine producer and multi-instrumentalist Luis Maurette).
“That opened me up to other artists combining folkloric traditions and electronica, like Colima,” she said. “And during the pandemic, I connected and collaborated with Lulacruza. Listening to their album was my lifeline. I can’t overstate how deeply it influenced me, and [Lulacruza member] Luis Maurette ended up producing most of my album.”
On Saturday, she’ll be adding electronic textures with her laptop, offering a glimpse at the sound she’s getting ready to unleash with “Esotérica Tropical.”
