Shawl-Anderson Modern Dance Center

The Youth Program at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center provides people ages 1.5 to age 18 with 60 classes each week in modern, jazz, hip-hop, ballet, creative movement and more. The program includes performance groups that engage in choreography or have work set on them by local professional choreographers. In the summer, SADC offers between 8-10 week-long camps and intensives for ages 5-18 so that youth can have an opportunity to immerse themselves in a dance experience, whether studying one particular form or a variety of forms over the course of a week. We engage over 30 teaching artists whose credentials range from professional dancers to college graduates and those with postgraduate degrees in dance, the arts and education. We provided dance programming for 600 youth throughout the fiscal year.

Shawl-Anderson Dance Center's professional dance programming supports local and regional artists through performance opportunities, residencies, fiscal sponsorship and space rentals. These programs are year-round and cumulatively support the work of over 75 local choreographers and performers each year. From July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024 Shawl-Anderson Dance Center presented in-person performances as programmed by the Queering Dance Festival. The Festival events are produced by a steering committee, which offered a series of events including panels, live performance and specialty classes. SADC uses its own dance studio theater space for presentations as well as other local spaces including CounterPulse in San Francisco and the Lisser Theater at Mills College/Northeastern University in Oakland. Together these programs have served approximately 75 artists and 1,400 audience members during the year. Shawl-Anderson Dance Center has also continued its fiscal sponsorship program, supporting 21 small dance companies and independent artists in securing grants and donations to support, expand and present their work. These professional programs are part of an important ecosystem in the Bay Area that allows the work of emerging dance artists and small dance companies to be created and shared for the benefit of the public.