If you've ever been to Booksmith, you've probably met Megan Kurashige, and if you've ever ordered ice cream at the Ice Cream Bar, you've probably met Megan's sister Shannon Kurashige.
In 2011, the sisters started Sharp and Fine, a dance company that aims to "make works of dance art that punch holes in thoughts and trigger pulls on hearts." Since then, they've kept their Haight Street day jobs, but Sharp and Fine has been growing and evolving ever since.
They've got the chops. The pair (pictured above: Megan left, Shannon right) dance with Liss Fain Dance, and they've previously worked with choreographers Alex Ketley (The Foundry) and Christian Burns (burnsWORK).
image credit: Benjamin Hersh
Megan studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance under the direction of Summer Lee Rhatigan, and has performed with Ballet Pacifica and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal. She's also a writer, and her fiction has appeared in Sybil's Garage, Electric Velocipede, Lightspeed, and Unnatural Creatures, an anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Maria Dahvana Headley. She is a 2008 graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop at UCSD.
Like her sister, Shannon is a multi-talented creative. She graduated from UC Irvine with a BFA in Dance Performance and a minor in biology. She received training at North Carolina School of the Arts and the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, and is also an artist and designer.
This weekend at ODC Theater, Sharp and Fine is putting on a production—choreographed by Megan and Shannon— of Peter and the Wolf. In keeping with their tradition of breaking the boundaries between different forms of art (last year they produced a dance based on a Neil Gaiman poem), they've teamed with Theo Padouvas, a trumpet player based in Oakland, to score the production.
It's no ordinary score. The musicians move with the dancers and portray characters on stage in an effort to "abandon the tradition of staid accompanists sitting at the edge of the stage."
image credit: Benjamin Hersh
Getting all that to gel was a unique challenge to Megan and Shannon, especially as all the dancers are women, and all the musicians are men. As Megan put it:
We asked them if working on Haight Street has provided any particular inspiration to their creative process. "We listen to a lot of jazz at Club Deluxe," was the response. "It's definitely been a part of our education and development of appreciation for jazz music.""We did some crazy workshopping. At first, we were worried about getting the musicians to move, but they never said no to the stuff that we wanted to try. We spent a few weeks working on how to slow dance with each other, a dancer with a musician and his instrument. We also made them pretend to be favorite pets and monsters. They do some incredible movement in the show, all while playing the new score, which relies heavily on their skills as badass improvisers.There's a lot of improvisation in the piece, on both the movement and the music sides. We spent many rehearsals with the dancers trying to figure out how to become the characters without set choreography, so a lot of crawling around, pretending to be a wolf, or fluttering arms and pretending to be a bird."
Here's a sneak peek at this weekend's show:
You can catch the show live at ODC Theater tonight at 8pm, tomorrow at 8pm, and Sunday at 2pm. Tickets are $23 in advance at this link, or $28 at the door.
