A brief history of Bay Area dance

The late Bay Area choreographer Anna Halprin, who helped redefine dance in post-war America, liked to say that moving one’s body for whatever purpose – art, exercise, human connection – is fundamental to life.

“I’ve always said dance is the breath made visible, and that covers about everything because once you stop breathing and the breath is no longer visible, you stop moving,” Halprin said in the 2009 film about her life and career, “Breath Made Visible.”

The Illinois native died in 2021, more than 70 years after she moved to the Bay Area to take advantage of the region’s embrace of alternative and avant-garde ideas. She pushed for a less rarified art form that could be improvisational, accessible to anyone and rooted in daily life. In a very Bay Area way, she also created dance pieces that were inspired by nature and practiced in outdoor spaces, including the famous classes she conducted on her home’s outdoor deck in the redwoods, perched on the side of Mount Tamalpais.

“You do not have to be a professional to dance,” she said. “Everyone, at any age, no matter what their physical ability or ethnic background, can be a dancer.”

Halprin is just one of many Bay Area pioneers to strive for innovation, accessibility and diversity in dance — helping to create a rich tradition here that has long nurtured all kinds of creative movement, dance lovers say.

“Dance is everywhere in the Bay Area,” longtime Bay Area dance critic Rachel Howard once wrote.

On pretty much any day, professional artists and passionate amateurs of all ages are in studios, ballet schools or community centers. Or they are going out to clubs to salsa dance or for freeform, ecstatic “movement journeys”, or they are meeting up with friends at home or in the street — learning, creating and refining dance moves, either to express themselves, be seen or be part of a community.

In the Bay Area, dance lovers can watch or participate in a seemingly infinite variety of styles. We have some of the most acclaimed professional companies in the country, elevating everything from ballet to modern, contemporary, jazz, experimental and world dance. There’s also hip-hop and ballroom, either for social or competitive purposes, as well as a long tradition of people enjoying styles shared by the Bay Area’s immigrant communities – Latin, African, Irish, Filipino and South Asian, among others. The Bay Area is also home to two annual international festivals that celebrate world dance and hip hop.

“We like to say that, per capita, the Bay Area is the second-largest dance community — and possibly the most diverse dance community — in the United States,” said Wayne Hazzard, a dancer and executive director of the Dancers Group, a nonprofit that supports emerging and established dance artists in the Bay Area. According to a 2025 survey by the Dancers Groups, some 850 self-identified dance companies are operating in the Bay Area.

That’s up from 799 in 2012. The increase is notable, given that the COVID-19 pandemic shut down performance opportunities in 2020 and 2021, and the cost of living makes it a challenge for artists and groups to live and work here.

“I think one of the things that’s unique to the Bay Area is the street dance culture where dancers are saying, “Okay, we can’t afford to rent a studio, so we’re gonna be out in the community, and we’re gonna be out doing this on the streets and put some cardboard down and spin or do things,’” Hazzard said.

Social dancing also is thriving here, said Richard Powers, a specialist in historic and contemporary social dance who teaches full time at Stanford University. Undergraduates are rushing to sign up for his classes in such old-timey dances as waltz, tango, swing, salsa, cha-cha and two step. “After my students graduate, they’ll go to some other city and say, ‘Why can’t we find something like this here?” he said.

People who dance here, professionally or otherwise, also don’t have to fit into traditional ideas of what dancers should look like or how they should move. For nearly 40 years, the Berkeley-based AXIS dance company has created productions with disabled, deaf and neurodiverse artists that showcase “the beauty of difference.” In aerial dance, which also has its roots in the Bay Area, artists fly on trapezes or hang off the face of highrises and cliff faces to create stunning human tableaux.

Janice Ross, a Stanford Universe emerita professor in theater and performance studies, says these innovations were influenced by California’s location at the western edge of North America. For 20th century innovators like Halprin or San Francisco native Isadora Duncan, the Bay Area “was a frontier, geography and aesthetically,” Ross said. “It was far removed from the more establishment world of New York and the East Coast, which was the dance center in America.”

Here, Bay Area artists could foster their own ideas about dance. Six years after the San Francisco Ballet was founded in 1933, Mills College hosted a historic summer session to teach modern dance, laying a foundation for the women’s college to establish what Howard called one of the most influential dance programs in the United States. Mills invited 150 dance students from all over the country to spend six weeks on campus, studying with Martha Graham and other luminaries. The students included some of the most prominent artists of the next generation of dancers, including Halprin and Merce Cunningham.

In the decades after World War II, dance innovators were attracted to the Bay Area as “an incubator” of new ideas, said former San Francisco Ballet dancer Alex Keteley. Even though New York City had its “titans of dance and choreography,” Keteley, who is now an independent choreographer and teaches at Stanford, said: “I think there were people, myself included, who wanted to work in the Bay Area because we were curious about finding our own voice.”

That includes postmodern choreographer Margaret Jenkins, who returned to her native San Francisco in the early 1970s after dancing, teaching and staging works in New York City; or Sarah Shelton Mann and Keith Hennessy, who created immersive, site-specific dance works in the 1980s that advocated for political engagement and social justice on poverty, homelessness and the AIDS crisis.

Oakland established its place in U.S. dance history by becoming home to pioneers in boogaloo — a freestyle, funk-based improvisational form of street dance that predated hip hop and the Bay Area’s own genre, hyphy. Starting in the 1960s, Black youth, inspired by James Brown, The Temptations and other soul artists, performed at Black Panther rallies, while inspiring dancers from nearby Richmond to introduce moves known as popping, roboting or strutting. A couple of decades later, turf dancing emerged as another street dance that allowed for creative expression and as a way to resolve hood disputes without resorting to violence, according to a 2023 KQED report. Jerial Bay, an Oakland-based dancer, educator and promoter, organized the first turf dance competition at Laney College in 2004. He told KQED that turf dancing “is a way of telling a story. It’s an attitude.”

Speaking of Laney College, many of the Bay Area’s community colleges and four-year private and public schools also fostered the region’s dance culture, Hazzard said. Besides providing regular work to dance artists, they’ve also offered programs and diverse classes in dance and performing arts. Kathak artist Farah Yasmeen Shaikh was introduced to this classical South Asian storytelling dance while an undergraduate at San Francisco State in the mid-1990s. She took a life-transforming class with a faculty member, the late Kathak dance master Pandit Chitresh Das, and ended up joining his company and teaching at his school. She later launched a solo career as a dancer and choreographer, starting her own Menlo Park-based company Noorani Dance.

But as much as Shaikh praises the Bay Area’s vibrant, multi-cultural “dance ecosystem,” she wonders how long it can last. That’s because creative professionals struggle to make a living wage here, said Shaikh, who also is a program manager with the Dancers Group.  “I’m in the heart of the Silicon Valley,” she said. “Facebook is down the street from me, quite literally. There is just this huge disparity in the haves and have-nots.”

While Shaikh and others ponder the future of the art form in the Bay Area, they note that dance is still ubiquitous in the general culture. Fans of reality TV can enjoy the competition spectacle of “Dancing with the Stars,” while dance “has absolutely exploded on TIkTok,” said Stanford’s Keteley.

“My 11-year-old daughter shows me dances she’s learned from TikTok,” he said.

But the undergraduates clamoring to waltz or swing in Powers’ Stanford classes want the opposite of a TikTok dance experience. They don’t want to be isolated behind a screen or wonder if what they are experiencing is A.I.-generated, he explained. Instead, they want a human connection where they can be face to face and interacting with other people. In 2025, he said, dance can offer a refuge “from a world where we increasingly don’t know what is real, and do something that we absolutely know is real and physical and social.”