What the Hell Happened in San Francisco?

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT; PHOTOS BY PAT BERRETT

In 2008, I moved to San Francisco to pursue my dream of being a dancer. I was fresh out of my BFA in Ballet from the University of Utah. I ended up sharing a small room with another dancer, my soon-to-be best friend Malinda LaVelle. We took classes every day at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and, after a while, started dancing for various choreographers around the Bay Area. Eventually we moved out of our small room into an apartment with other friends, all of whom were of course dancers.

After several years, the reality of being a dancer in a very expensive city began to set in. As we neared our late 20s, many dancers in our circle, ourselves included, started to look for new paths that might offer more sustainability. I personally did what many people do when they don’t know what to do with their life: I went to grad school.

Fast forward to 2021. I’m in my mid 30s living in Albuquerque, NM. Malinda and I are still in touch, but our paths have diverged. And yet, fortuitously, she and her husband end up moving a mere seven blocks away from me and my husband. We are sitting together on a hot summer night, reminiscing about the experience of living in the Bay Area. Malinda sighs and says, “What the hell happened in San Francisco? We should make a piece about it.”

Last summer 2024, Malinda and I premiered our evening-length dance theater piece, What the Hell Happened in San Francisco? Yes, it took us three years to make the piece, but we had a lot of ground to cover. We wanted to know: What was this experience of moving to the big city to pursue our dreams really about? When did disillusionment set in? What was the cause of the disillusionment? Why does this time in our lives still reverberate all these years later?

The piece is divided into five vignettes: The Look, The Work, The Submission, The Dream, and The Rupture. Because I think there might be some universality and relevance to other dancers’ experience, allow me to share a little about each vignette and what we uncovered with the benefits of perspective and time.

The Look is about that “it” factor that I remember not knowing if I had or not, or at least wondering if I had, as it seemed to be some mystical blessing that would befall upon certain dancers. It was maddening; some intangible extra beyond technique or artistry that some dancers inexplicably had, at least for a while, and others did not. The Look is also about the façade that felt prerequisite: from wearing the ugliest flannel and oldest socks as a uniform, to dutifully listing all the companies and choreographers we had worked for, as if anyone but us was keeping score. Finally, the Look is about that feeling of always being assessed by teachers, choreographers, and directors, as well as fellow dancers. At the end of the vignette, a voice abruptly says, “Thank you!”, as if casually dismissing us from the audition we were always at.

The Work is about the internal monologue that was perpetually coursing through our brains as young dancers, a combination of work-harder mantras, health and fitness goals, weight obsessions, comparisons with other dancers, and platitudes of gratitude. Here are some lines from the voice-over: “I need to put myself out there more. I need to not let rejection get to me… I need to stretch later. I just need to get stronger. Maybe I should start cross training… I should start an anti-inflammatory diet. Is vegan anti-inflammatory? Should I give up gluten?… I just need someone to notice me. I just need one break. Then I’ll start getting more opportunities. Then it will all be worth it. It was always going to be hard. This is the art. This is the path. This is my passion. I love this so much. This is my life’s work. It’s all about the work.”

The Look and The Work felt dark to me. The desperation, the sinking feeling that after all this training and dedication, maybe I was not good enough – it hurt to revisit. And yet, when Malinda and I performed these vignettes, we were often met with laughter. I suspect it was the laughter of seeing an absurdity reflected. Although the laughter caught me off guard, I’ve come to agree; it is funny. This line of thinking and acting is funny, in a dark sort of way.

The Submission leaned further into that dark funny world we inhabited as young dancers. The power differential between all these young (mostly) women, desperate for attention and validation, and the older (often) man at the front of the room is one of the darker sides of the dance world that has started to get attention in the past five or six years since #metoo, but was completely normalized at the time. We explored the gaze of the choreographer or director at the front of the room and the dancer’s deep desire to manifest their artistic vision.

So that was the vignette: Malinda was the choreographer, and I was the dancer. I did a short phrase, and she asked me to do the phrase again, this time more interesting, now stop trying so hard to be interesting, now do it like I was at a party, now do it like it was windy and bungee cords were attached from my hips to the earth, now do it like my bones and muscles had weathered with time like the ruins of Machu Picchu, now combine it all, no wait, now do it like I had no dance training, erase my training. In the vignette, I obey, feeling dumber and more numb in my body as the choreographer looks on, giving more and more absurd prompts, and looking more and more annoyed at my lack of ability to perceive their nebulous vision.

When Malinda and I rehearsed or performed The Submission, I felt that “ick” rising in my chest, that feeling of being asked to do something for the sake of being more interesting but never achieving it, that feeling of trying to be “better” in a completely subjective form. And yet, this section was the one that always made audiences laugh out loud, and often made us crack up as well. We even performed this excerpt at the Albuquerque Funny Fiesta.

At this point in the performance, we took a break, so to speak. We returned to our mat that functioned as our small apartment and had a dance party. One of the best things I remember about being a young person was the camaraderie. That camaraderie has carried Malinda and I through more than 15 years of ups and downs. There was catharsis in putting on loud music and dancing in our kitchen, or making up unintelligible jokes until we were crying, or getting dressed up to go nowhere. If our material was getting too dark, then this was the exhaust valve. Yes, we were in the grip of an underpaid professional pursuit rife with body dysmorphia, occasional power abuse, and no sustainability outside of teaching, but we had each other and we were having fun doing it!

Malinda and I moved to San Francisco to study at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance under Summer Lee Rhatigan. Summer was the reason most students at the conservatory were there. She was an incredible teacher and mentor with a knack for giving corrections in class in such a way that they felt like philosophy. I have old journals filled with notes and comments from Summer. The reverence we had for Summer was the inspiration for The Dream vignette. Like a dream sequence in a classical ballet, we created a dream scene complete with crystal ball where we ask Summer how we can improve our technique, where we should audition, when we can use the studio, and if dance can change the world. She responds in a disembodied voice with opaque corrections and words of wisdom. Our young angst and desire to have a guide wasn’t exactly parodied, but rather it was lovingly rendered a little silly. I can now appreciate that perhaps Summer didn’t have all the answers, or at least didn’t always want to be our Dumbledore, but at the time we felt incapable of making a serious decision without consulting her.

The Rupture was the final vignette. We created the choreography by responding to the prompt: Make a dance about falling out of love. I chose the music from the ballet The Sleeping Beauty, from the wedding pas de deux in the third act. I performed that pas de deux in my final high school recital before going off to my fancy BFA program. For me the music symbolizes a time in my life when my dream was at its most untarnished. I overlaid the music with white noise that steadily gets louder and louder until it engulfs the Tchaikovsky. My dance follows the soundscape by starting dutiful and contained before getting more and more desperate and untamed.

Malinda’s approach to the falling-out-of-love task was to use a huge box of trophies her mom sent her while cleaning out her childhood closet. There are dozens of trophies of all shapes and sizes. It’s an amazing prop. Malinda sits next to the box, takes a trophy out and says, “Thank you.” She takes another, and another, and another, dutifully saying, “Thank you,” until she can barely hold all the trophies and they are weighing her down, making it impossible to move.

We set our falling-out-of-love solos next to each other. They weren’t necessarily supposed to be a contrast, but they ended up being powerful contradictions, as if Malinda’s accumulation of trophies was my lack thereof. In the vignette, I move freely but without any coveted trophies. Next to me, Malinda can’t move at all under the weight of her trophies.

Performing What the Hell Happened in San Francisco? ended up being therapeutic for both of us. I’m no longer haunted by questions of what I could have done or if I was good enough. I loved my time dancing in San Francisco, and I’m glad it’s over. I can see now the deck was always stacked against all us dancers, but we did it anyways. I’m proud of my young dancer self.

The piece ends with Summer’s voice saying a line she once said in class: “Everything is education if we let it be.” At this current point in my life when my body is starting to not always work in the ways I want it to, and my time dancing must be balanced against demands like my family and work, I can appreciate the lessons I learned from having the audacity to pursue such a bold dream as being a dancer, and from understanding that dreams aren’t always shiny.

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