Alyssa Mitchel
ENDURE
Dance Mission Theater, San FranciscoAlyssa Mitchel's ENDURE
Photo Sean Anomie
October 4th, 2025
I am not a marathon runner. But over the last ten years I’ve lived in a marathoner’s orbit, so I know some things. The distance – 26.2 miles. If a race is longer than that, it is labelled an ultra-marathon. Up until just recently, there were six world major races – New York, Chicago, Boston, Berlin, London and Tokyo. Sidney is now the seventh. And there are so many training programs one can follow – a plan exists for every type of runner.
Alyssa Mitchel’s newest dance work, ENDURE, mines this beautiful, intense, crazy world. Running this past weekend at Dance Mission Theater, the piece joins six dancers, six marathoners and various multi-media devices to share the marathoning journey. ENDURE showed all the stops along the training path through movement and choreography, alongside poignant oral histories from the runners.
ENDURE began with a set of videos introducing the six marathon runners to the audience, following which the cast entered the space to perform the first of many vignettes, a structure and form that would continue for the duration of the work. This first cast statement, a quartet titled “Track Tuesday,” explored warming up. Clad in athletic gear, sneakers and wearable wrist trackers, the four cycled through high knees, kick jumps, stretches and light jogging around the stage’s perimeter. They sank into deep lunges, like at the start of a race, and sprinted from one spot to another. Motifs repeated and Mitchel injected slow motion high attitudes to mimic the carriage of the legs when running. Mutual vocabulary and unison phrases reflected the sense of community, a narrative that would serve as a throughline in the composition. Shared physicality, shared goals, shared spaces, shared interest, shared passion.
Chapters 2, 3, 5, 7, 10 and 14 (of 17 in total) each centered on an audio recording of one runner’s personal story while video of Zach Litoff’s drawings and visual art were projected on the backdrop. Simultaneously a soloist (occasionally joined by other cast members) would interpret the words through matching, literal choreography. Hands clasping indicating kinship; freedom by outstretched arms. I found a recovery sequence to be especially tender, with precise and measured movement noting the importance of rest in the sojourn toward a marathon. On the flip side, overtraining was represented as one dancer tried desperately to move supporting the entire weight of another. I also could have sworn I saw lots of tap dance steps – single backwalks, 5- and 6-beat riff rhythms and paddle rolls. After thinking about that on the way home, it made a ton of sense and was quite poetic. Investigating how the toe and heel of the foot must work in concert to create tap sounds shares a deep connection to how the different parts of the foot must function independently and interdependently when running.
I enjoyed ENDURE. It had solid choreography, talented dancers and integrated multi-media aspects. And perhaps most important, it was on track the whole time. Well done. But it was lengthy. Curtain was held for ten minutes (which unfortunately has become typical with San Francisco dance shows these days), and there were some brief opening remarks. But once the house lights did finally go down, it was another seventy-five minutes. For my taste, that’s too long for a stand-alone piece.
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