Review: Dance Brigade presents ‘MATCH GIRRL’ January 17 – February 1, 2026, Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco, CA

Dance Brigade, the Bay Area's original feminist, political dance theater company, culminates its 50^th Anniversary Celebration Season with the premiere of Krissy Keefer’s Match Girrl at Dance Mission Theater, with performances on weekends through February 1. It is an alt-musical-theater reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairytale, The Little Match Girl, about a starving young match seller’s final night.  Hoping for warmth, the girl futilely burns her few remaining matches and dreams of distant comforts before succumbing to the cold of night. It is a story that continues to play out on the streets of San Francisco with complications of drug addiction amplifying the scourge of poverty.

Keefer’s Match Girrl takes place in contemporary urban America, and speaks to the greed and the myopic selfishness of the ruling class, who are amassing great wealth at the expense of much of society and the planet itself.  Over 90 minutes, Match Girrl offers a relentless exploration of class struggle while delving into the homeless crisis in San Francisco as it relates to poverty, addiction and skyrocketing housing costs, while revealing the high human cost of the ongoing lack of political will to make exacting change.  Keefer and company originally presented the piece, as a work-in-progress, in January 2024. Today, this call for action in the name of justice and compassion is all the more urgent, as income inequality, the suppression of workers’ rights, climate denial and the fracturing of peace accords and national alliances continue to escalate alarmingly.

The cast of Match Girrl performing at Dance Mission Theater

The iconography of class warfare is writ large as a rag-tag band of artists and performers fallen on hard times are trapped behind a gate.  Later, perhaps as a commentary on the egregiously inadequate funding of the arts, bejeweled masked royals in oversized crinoline gowns, toss pennies in appreciation of a trio of maniacally bouncing ballerinas. After which, in Lighting Designer Harry Rubeck’s evocative half-light, street people on their hands and knees gather these meager coins.

The show unfolds in episodic fashion, using songs, dance, poetry, rap, role-playing and rituals to convey its arguments for justice and compassion.  Like the Brechtian Theater of the early/mid 20^th Century, Match Girrl engages the audience by breaking the rules of traditional theatre and forcing them to think critically about the social and political issues at hand. While characters emerge, the storytelling methodology is eclectic. This heightened theatrical style of drama emphasizes the mechanical techniques of stagecraft over illusion. For example, we watch performers remove window covers to reveal the night sky.  A trio of aerial dancers are rolled onto stage atop A-frame ladders to attach themselves to their bungy cord supports.

The cast of ten women-identified performers embody each number with deep commitment.  Barefoot and waif-like Frances Sedayao portrays the little match girl. Her periodic striking of matches punctuates the transitions between scenes, changing the channel from one vision to the next. Biker chick Megan Lowe is the primary songstress, ably delivering the varied songs from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Whiskey Bar,” to Skeeter Davis’s “End of the World,” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” 

Compilation videos, assembled by Video and Sound Editor Lena Gatchalian, unfurl atop the back wall. Images of homeless encampments, Gaza in ruins and atomic mushroom clouds signal the approach of the apocalypse. A compelling audio and video medley of American presidents (Reagan, Clinton, Bush) speaking about the virtues of deregulation and the importance of profits, aptly sets the scene for the mortgage meltdown and banking crisis of 2008. Dancers in businessman drag strut upstage, while downstage, several women sit at desks gesturing wildly, in support of the amplified dialogue of young male bankers speaking about their unscrupulous selling of adjustable-rate mortgages to unqualified borrowers in the name of personal gain.

The cast of Match Girrl performing at Dance Mission Theater

 A section on addiction is especially moving as it juxtaposes a table of women discussing the heartache of caring for and about their drug abusing loved ones, with the narrative of an isolated addict seated alone. Facing us, speaking in a forthright fashion, Deb’e Taylor plays a drug-user recounting her many attempts at sobriety and society’s failed treatment strategies.  Punctuating the dramatized sequences are moments when the performers break the 4^th wall, reeling off sequences of startling statistics about the number of unhoused people or drug overdose deaths in the Bay Area and beyond.  Presented as facts, these data points can be distracting and would be more persuasive if their sources were referenced somewhere, be it verbally, in the projected images, or the printed program.

Dance which has always been an act of rebellion, resistance and joy, is featured throughout Match Girrl, with principal choreography credit given to Fredrika Keefer and Bianca Mendoza-Prado. Their high-energy content-driven choreographies incorporate a blend of street dance, modern dance, ballet and jazz.  The fierce hip hop quartet of the “Drug addiction” scene to the live rap stylings of Kimberly B. Valmore performing Lauren Hill’s “Ready or Not” is particularly fierce.

While times are tough and the message is sobering, Director Keefer and her cast manage to find playfulness along the way.  In the “Motorcycle gutter fairies” scene we feel the comradery and inventiveness of this crew as they vault and cartwheel over their shared motorcycle as Lowe accompanying herself on the ukelele, sings “speeding motorcycle, won’t you change me,” from Daniel Johnston’s song of the same name. Moments of beauty provide brief respite as in the lyrical danced duet “Lost Girl,” between match girl Sedayao and her protector, the balletic KJ Dahlaw, who seeks to save her beloved from the agony of addiction. Followed by “Sister/friend duet,” a modern dance of interdependence which finds Sedayao and Lowe lifting one another, pulling away and drawing together shoulder to shoulder, they tenderly complete one another.

The cast of Match Girrl performing at Dance Mission Theater

 The arc of the show carries us through the end of times in which “all vegetation will die, radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men, the sea will be poisoned” (Charles Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We,”). And yet what comes next is a beautiful silence. The entire company, now dressed in soft whites, performs a sustained unison dance in which break-out soloists offer their unique movement stylings before all succumb to darkness. Finally, the fire of life is relit and a ritualistic circling tribal dance for all emerges.

Match Girrl is thought-provoking and at times devastating. The heavy-handed didactic nature of the show leaves one’s head buzzing.  Some of the scenes land more strongly than others. The final dystopic scenes are especially gripping.  In these horrific times, speaking truth to power requires a strong and insistent voice. Thank the Goddesses that Krissy Keefer and her Dance Brigade are here to shout from the rafters and shake us all from our comfort and complicity.

Review by Jen Norris, published January 20, 2026

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Production Credits

Dance Brigade/Dance Mission Theater presents

MATCH GIRRL

January 17-February 1, 2026, Fri-Sat 7:30pm, Sun 5pm; Feb 1at 2pm

Dance Mission Theater 3316 24th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110

Created and directed by Krissy Keefer

Principal choreographers: Fredrika Keefer and Bianca Mendoza

Lighting Designer: Harry Rubeck

Sound Engineer: Jabari Tawiah

Video and Sound Editor: Lena Gatchalian,

Gate Rendering: Lisa Calderon

Cast: Sarah Bush, Johanna Gormley, Fredrika Keefer, Kimberly B Valmore, Deb’e Taylor, KJ Dahlaw, Frances Sedayao, Megan Lowe, Dominique hargrove, and Sierra Tiatia.