Sean Dorsey is an award-winning choreographer, writer and dancer. Celebrated as the nation’s first out transgender modern dance choreographer, Dorsey has won audiences from San Francisco to New York with his powerful dances that provide a window into transgender and queer experience. Dorsey is also the founder and Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions, the nation’s first transgender arts nonprofit creating, presenting and touring year-round transgender arts programs.

Dorsey’s work is a signature fusion of dance, storytelling and theater. Praised as “exquisite” (BalletTanz) “breathtaking” (San Francisco Bay Guardian) “brilliance” (San Francisco Chronicle), Dorsey has gained national attention for demystifying modern dance with his accessible, deeply moving work that is followed by transgender, queer and straight audiences alike. Watch video of Dorsey’s work.

Dorsey has been awarded two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, the Goldie Award for Performance and was named “San Francisco’s Best Dance/Performance Company” by the SF Weekly. Most recently, Dorsey was named in Dance Magazine’s top “25 to Watch,” and Dorsey’s acclaimed suite of dances ‘Lou’ was named in the “Top Dances of The Year” (San Francisco Bay Guardian).

Dorsey has been named one of the Top Ten in Bay Area dance by both the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Bay Area Reporter and named one of the international dance scene’s most promising choreographers by Europe’s leading dance magazine, BalletTanz. He has received commissions from the Creative Work Fund, the National Performance Network, the New England Federation for the Arts / National Dance Project, the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Queer Cultural Center and the James Irvine Foundation.

Read more about Sean Dorsey on our Press page.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF LOVE:

Over a two-year period, Sean Dorsey Dance is creating a new concert – The Secret History Of Love.  Part I of the new work premiered April 29-May 1, 2011 to full houses in San Francisco; the full show will premiere at Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco March 29-April 1, 2012. The Secret History Of Love dances through the decades, exploring the secret and not-so-secret ways that transgender and queer people managed to find – and love – each other in years past. Secret love affairs, the history of outlawing love and the underground ways that transgender and queer people found each other through the decades are revealed in these new dances. The Secret History Of Love is being created with support from the Creative Work Fund, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, San Francisco Arts Commission and project partners The Queer Cultural Center (San Francisco), The Theater Offensive (Boston) and Links Hall (Chicago). Read more about the show or join our mailing list. Tours of the show are currently scheduled in Boston, Miami, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, Chicago and Wisconsin. We welcome your inquiries for tour bookings during 2012-2014: please contact freshmeatinfo@gmail.com.

UNCOVERED: THE DIARY PROJECT:

OTHER PROJECTS AND TOURING:

Dorsey, his choreography, and his work as Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions are the subject of a PBS/KQED-TV Spark episode. Dorsey also worked with the Wachowski Brothers (Directors, The Matrix, V for Vendetta) to choreograph a music video for Antony and the Johnsons. The song, ‘Epilepsy is Dancing,’ is featured on Antony and the Johnsons’ CD, The Crying Light.

Dorsey’s work has been presented extensively throughout the Bay Area at venues including ODC Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Dance Mission Theater, Project Artaud Theater, CounterPulse, the Jon Sims Center, 848 Community Space and the African American Art and Culture Complex; and at the National Queer Arts Festival, Fresh Meat Festival, Tranny Fest, West Wave Dance Festival and Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival. Dorsey’s work has been presented on tour at: the HOT! Festival (New York), Fresh Fruit Festival (New York), Sushi Performance and Visual Art (San Diego), Salt Lake City, Santa Barbara, HomoAGoGo (Olympia) and Out On Screen Festival (Vancouver).

BOOKINGS:

CONTACT US about bookings freshmeatinfo@gmail.com.
READ PRESS ARTICLES about Sean Dorsey.
CHECK OUR CALENDAR for performances by Sean Dorsey Dance.
VIEW OR DOWNLOAD ELECTRONIC PRESS KIT for Sean Dorsey Dance.

WHAT THE PRESS ARE SAYING:

“I’m an elder of the transgender community, and Sean Dorsey is my pride and joy. His sensitivity to the pain that comes with transformation is as compassionate as any Zen master’s. His deadpan comic timing, his skill at seduction, his charm and boyish sexiness all make us – his audience – love him all the more. Dorsey choreographs and performs…with a skill that rivals Mark Morris.”
 - Kate Bornstein

“words and gestures drenched with the kind of raw honesty that’s made Dorsey an artistic force to reckon with”
 - SF Weekly

“Sean Dorsey is…the most refreshing phenomenon in dance theater hereabouts”
 - BalletTanz

“Dorsey’s intelligent and evocative work helps build a frame of reference to enable viewers to experience dance outside of gender. At the same time, Dorsey is helping create a movement vocabulary to signal a newly gendered body. These conscious choices form an important contribution to the process of queering modern dance.”
 - Critical Dance

“I can’t remember the last time I saw so much tenderness, romanticism, delicacy of feeling, tentative grace, truth of gesture, human longings for loyalty, affection, and abiding relationship surrounded by such claims to be shocking, bold, futurist, subversive.”
 - DanceView Times