Under Dekkers direction, Post:Ballet shapeshifts with ease from stages in small clubs to the wide open space of large ensembles. Rightfully Ours was presented in February 2020 in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, just before the pandemic moved everyone indoors. Eight new pieces of choreography by Berkeley Ballet Theater (Dekkers and Thiessen as choreographers with guest artists from Post:Ballet Dancers) were set to choral works by eight contemporary composers, including world premiere performances of I Shouldn’t Be Up Here by Angélica Negrón and Belong Not by Aviya Kopelman. The especially noteworthy work, Rightfully Ours, was inspired by the 100th Anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. This fully-staged choral music and dance production featured seventy performers and forty singers from the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Women comprised the majority of composers and choreographers, and all of the performers wore the same costume, just in different shades of gray. Dekkers notes that much more work is left to be done, and the true message behind the production: “To make really powerful lasting change.”
Dekkers has worked as the Director of Choreography for Art Haus, a Playa performance group. Their first production featured a reimagined Rite of Spring that included a full orchestra and over forty dancers and performers. This time the venue was Burning Man 2017. The following year, Art Haus presented his work We, Human set to the American Composer Steve Reich’s Eight Lines. In 2019, during another watershed performance year for Dekkers and Art Haus, a reimagined Firebird was set on the Playa performance group, accompanied by a full orchestra, playing the original score by Stravinsky. It’s no wonder that Critical Dance magazine stated, “Post:Ballet’s choreography and artistic collaborations are risky and challenging, yet they still cling to traditional technique in a very unique and genuine way.”
Filling a club space for forty is no less daunting than reaching an audience of 10,000. “All of the shows look different but there is a thread of connection,” Dekkers says. Dekkers and Vanessa Thiessen have mastered a collaborative approach to dance that develops cohesion and fluidity among the classically-trained dancers and the diverse artists they choose to be part of their work. The consortium of diverse artists that Post:Ballet collaborates with includes composers, animators, architects, cinematographers, fashion designers, and sculptors—one reason among many why the San Francisco Chronicle heralds the multi-disciplinary collaborations as “inventive, focused, sophisticated, and anything but risk averse.”
Alessandra Ball in Dekkers' Milieu