Accidental partnership led to 10 years of RAWdance
"I didn't even think I'd keep dancing. I thought I'd be a doctor," willowy says as she walks down Seventh Street, sweaty and lightly bruised from intense rehearsal at .
Next to her is broad-shouldered . The two act like a long-married couple, and they do share an apartment in the Duboce Triangle, but the intimacy of their partnership is limited to the studio.
Both tall and intense, they were first paired by a visiting choreographer at their alma mater,
11 best holiday fling films, Brown, in 1998. A few years later, Rein came to crash with Smith in San Francisco, expecting to stay a year at most. But starting Thursday, the company Rein and Smith co-direct, RAWdance, will present its 10th anniversary season at Z Space, and the troupe seems here to stay.
This weekend's performances, which include a world premiere collaboration with lauded composer , will be followed by engagements at ' Bay Area Now showcase next month, and two performances at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in September.
Site-specific dancing is not new to RAWdance, which has performed in U.N. Plaza, City Hall and the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall, and traveled to Singapore, Chicago and New York.
Less visible but perhaps even more exciting: RAWdance recently received a three-year, $75,000 grant from the to develop its institutional infrastructure. Rein and Smith will soon be hiring a company manager, and they have assembled a nine-member board.
Perhaps the riveting chemistry of their partnering made RAWdance's trajectory inevitable. Reunited on the West Coast, Rein, 37, and Smith, 33, were hooked on dancing together,
True Religion Julie Skinny, moving with a style Smith calls "a combination of elasticity and muscularity."
Total trustDuring a rehearsal of this weekend's second premiere, "Burn In," the trust between these two seemed total and unusually reciprocal - not only would Smith unfurl Rein's body like a flag ("No worries," she called cheerfully when the velocity caused her to smack her face), but Rein would often leverage Smith's bulk, clutching his thighs as he stood on tiptoe to turn him full circle in slow motion, their eye contact never breaking.
Small wonder, then, that they just couldn't stop themselves from performing in local series during the early days of RAWdance. But very soon the limitations of such fly-by-night dancemaking frustrated these two insatiably curious formalists,
ESPN Partnering With Valve to, and led to a depth of creative process unusual among younger choreographers.
"All the showcases wanted new work, and then it was danced only one night," Rein says. "We wanted the chance to periodically go back and revisit what we'd made."
So Rein and Smith launched the twice-yearly Concept series, hosting informal work-in-progress showings alongside fellow choreographers, replete with popcorn. Quickly their possibilities for experimentation proliferated: For instance, Rein and Smith reworked a 2005 piece, "Schematic Process," twice in the Concept series, then transformed it from a quartet to a sextet, then performed that version at the Jewels on the Square festival in 2008.
As Smith says, "Things brew."
That's especially true of this weekend's program. The seeds for "Turing's Apple," a meditation on the power of patterns and the life of cryptologist ,
Drought Conditions Improve In, were planted in 2012, when Rein and Smith met composer Richard Einhorn (renowned for his silent film score "Voices of Light," and for collaborations with choreographers such as Ulysses Dove), during a residency at UCross, an artists' colony in Wyoming.
Einhorn worked with RAWdance via Skype for more than a year, delving into Turing's tortured biography (condemned under then-British law for his homosexuality, Turing killed himself by eating a poisoned apple), and trading bits of video and music. The threesome then spent a week together in January at Djerassi, the artists' colony near Santa Cruz. The finished work will feature the full company, including an ensemble of women who represent "pure math." (This seems fitting given that Rein, who trained until age 12 at New York's , also nearly finished a computer science major at Brown.)
Einhorn says it was more interactive than his usual experience composing for dance.
"It was a very natural process. We'd spend the evenings figuring out why Turing, this great genius of logic, was obsessed with the movie ',' " he says. "We'd work all day, and afterward we would go for a walk. Wendy and Ryan are simply super-smart and utterly charming."
Moment of change RAWdance is in a moment of change: Three longtime members will soon move on, and Rein and Smith (who also performs with the ) are looking for new dancers who can move with passion as well as ballet-based technical skill.
But at a milestone when some choreographers might ask "Why go on?" Rein and Smith seem to ask, "Why not?"
"We've always said we can question day by day whether this is worth it, and the day that it isn't, we'll think about stopping," Rein says. "It's really, really hard. But having momentum and being able to do great projects with amazing dancers and collaborators - how can you turn that down?" {sbox}
RAWdance: Two world premieres, plus guest performances by & Dancers and 's Project B. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. $25-$35. Z Space, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. (866) 811-4111 or .
Rachel Howard is a freelance writer. E-mail: