Pulp Dance Company – a review

San Francisco International Dance Festival

Pulp Dance Company

Choreographer, Director: Jenna Valez

Dancers: CJ Logel, Chelsea Oshita Van Billard, and Oona Wong Danders

San Francisco Marsh Theater

May 10, 2026

A reflection by Kristen Cosby

For the first two weeks of May, the San Francisco International Arts Festival hosted performers of dance, theater, circus, and spoken word in venues across San Francisco.  The festival’s final weekend concluded with a smattering of performances, including a local group known as Pulp Dance Company, who presented an hour-length work at the San Francisco Marsh Theater alongside a short piece (I turn forty this year) debuted by choreographic guest, Kevin Lopez.

Founded in 2019, Pulp is a San Francisco-based dance company directed by choreographer Jenna Valez.  The group uses a mixture of dance, theater, and satire to examine interior questions of identity and, in this particular show, of contradiction.

Pick a Side, Babe, by Valez’s own description, set out to “examine the social and internal structures we move through and what it means to be a human in a world that insists on definition.” With three bodies on stage, two self-identifying as female and one as male, Valez able to make use of repetition, variation, and contrast to express that inward exploration.

The ensemble – CJ Logel, Chelsea Oshita Van Billard, and Oona Wong Danders – often started a repetitive, collective phrase together, such as the opening sequence, in which they charged forward three steps, chugged to a halt, bent at the waist and placed their right hands on the ground and backed up three steps in a curve, while still dragging their right hands on the floor. This phrase was twice repeated before Danders veered away with their own movement, while the other two dancers continued to repeat the phrase.

 The phrase reappears throughout the performance, each time with a different dancer “breaking rank” in a novel way to express themselves. Breaking away from the collective to self-define occurs in many ways throughout the performance, and this tension between the sameness of categorization and irrepressible individuality drove the piece forward.  Each dancer engaged in solo sequences and spoken words that peeled back a layer of their very precise identities, much in the way they removed their outer layers of dull-colored clothing to reveal different combinations of hot-pink, blue, and bright green tops and shorts.

Logel began his personal statement by saying (in contrast to the other two dancers), “I’m a man,” and flexed a bicep in a “manly” way.  “But,” he later tells the audience, “I’m gay.”  I wondered: Do we expect different things from his body now that he’s given himself these categories?  During the song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” Van Billard and Logel stripped down to a pink shirt and blue shorts, and Logel dotted Van Billard with glitter and sparkles, oscillating from hyper masculine to hyper feminine gestures.  Later still, Logel moved into a release-technique solo sequence that defied definition. Dander then joined the sequence once he repeated it, and then performed it a third time alone. These sequences raised another question: how does a gesture or a sequence change when we see performed by a female body versus a male body?

Van Billiard’s defining of self was distinctly sexual. She straddled a chair and made thorough use of hair flips and body waves to indicate that she’s on the prowl. As she straddled the chair to the sounds of Demi Lovatos’ “Confident,” the other dancers vied for her attention. Standing on one side, Logan tried to make out with her. On the other, Danders kneels at her feet. Though clearly favoring ‘girl power,’ Van Billard kissed them both sensually, while the audience whooped in approval – why let a category or label limit your options?

Across the backstage, the space was hemmed with oranges and a giant bowl of oranges and bananas rested upon a small table. The oranges, according to Valez’s program notes, are “a shared symbol of the outer shell and inner world, of what is held and revealed.”  But they also factor hugely into this performance in other ways. Humorously, the dancers used them to display contrast by holding up oranges and banana against their bodies to highlight their different sexes. (Use your imagination.) Or when Lopez handed Van Billard an orange in the middle of the performance, as a sort of passing of the baton, as if both saying, “Here is me. This is an invitation to explore and define the messy interior self of you.” Towards the finale, Danders distributed oranges to the front row of the audience, as if implying: we have given you ourselves, our defined outer skin and our messy interior pulp. Both are true.

 As I watched, I wondered if without this explanation, would the audience clearly see the relationship between the group’s name, the objects on stage, and the mission of the piece?  I’d be very curious how this plays out in other works by Pulp. In this show, both the written and spoken words leant a necessary depth to the playful music and gestures, creating complex thoughts on the limitations of categorization and the danger of labels, and the fun of defying them both.

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