The Dancing Dead perform at Community Park through the afternoon. If you have seen a crowd of zombies suddenly fall into step together at this festival, that is them.
They are the Pamela Trokanski Dance Workshop, and they are among the longest-standing partners this festival has. The choreography is original and it is properly spooky: not a Thriller routine borrowed off the internet, but pieces made for this, by a choreographer who has been making work in this town for forty years.
The studio
Pamela Trokanski has run the Dance Workshop in Davis since 1984. Out of it grew the Pamela Trokanski Dance Theatre in 1985, The Third Stage in 1994 and the Apprentice Company in 2009. The studio is at 2720 Del Rio Place and has its own theatre in the building, the Louise H. Kellogg Memorial Theater, with proper tiered seating, which is a rare thing for a dance school to have.
The Third Stage is the one to know about. It is a multi-generational contemporary company whose dancers range in age from 7 to 83, and it is built deliberately around the non-traditional dancer: people who do not have the body, the age or the training that concert dance usually insists on. That is an unusual thing to build a company around and a very Davis thing to do.
Classes take any age and any level of experience. If watching the Dancing Dead makes you want to try it, that is the door.
