Near a dying mall in downtown San Francisco, a short alleyway takes you to the South of Market cultural center at 447 Minna St., which on a recent Saturday felt like a parallel universe.

At ground level, a community festival with music and food booths filled the newly opened central park at 5M. High above, on the third floor of a once-abandoned brick building, Raissa Simpson snapped softly, demonstrated a movement phrase of swoops and lunges, and asked her dancers, “OK, who thinks they have it?”

Sitting on a sunny windowsill with a view clear across the South of Market neighborhood’s gray rooftops, she added, “It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

This floor of the Dempster Building is the new home of Simpson’s dance studio. “Welcome to the Sanctuary,” a sign across from the reception desk reads, making the realization of a dream official: Push Dance Company’s sanctuary for BIPOC artists has opened its doors to Black, Indigenous, people of color.

The public is welcome to the celebration on Sunday, Oct. 15, when Push marks its 18th season with a grand opening and a peek at Simpson’s new dance “Performable Posthumanism,” along with guest appearances. That evening viewers will get to roam a space that Simpson and her dancers have inhabited since March. But the new reality is just sinking in.

“We’re still sort of in disbelief,” Simpson said before the event, sitting in her bright new corner office.

More than three years ago, Simpson connected with the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, which was given the 10,200-square-foot Dempster Building as part of a $1 billion development of offices and condos. CAST offered Push an affordable long-term lease if it would be part of the building’s $13 million transformation, which includes a small black-box performance space and gallery on the ground floor, and CAST’s offices on the fourth. In 2021, Push even staged a performance in the Minna alley, with dancers rattling the bars of the derelict space, trying to get in. The production won an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for best ensemble performance.

The idea of a sanctuary was central from the beginning, arising from Simpson’s participation in Dancing Around Race, a discussion group for choreographers that began in 2018. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, two Push dancers asked Simpson to start a fund for Black dance artists.

“A lot of the applications (to the fund) expressed a need for a space away from some of the obstacles posed by white supremacy,” Simpson recalled. “And that broadened into the needs of what I call the global majority — Black people, Indigenous people, people of color — that they need a space where they are the source of their own wisdom, to create unapologetic art that isn’t going to be tokenized or downplayed as ‘less than.’ A space where they don’t have to ask, ‘Do I belong here?’ ”

Creating that space entails a lot more than securing square footage, and Simpson went about the work in a characteristically thoughtful way, interviewing more than 30 Bay Area organizations about how a BIPOC sanctuary should be shaped. Push then selected five artists to pilot an eight-week BASE (BIPOC Artists Sanctuary & Enrichment) residency last March. Local artists such as Nitya Narasimham, who works with classical Indian styles, and Kim Requesto, who draws on traditional Filipino dance, offered community classes and created new work performed on the 5M park stage.

“The five of us had opportunities to interact and get to know about each other’s forms,” said Narasimham, who during the residency worked with two of her longtime dancers, and three who came to the workshops and were new to her form.

“The focus was on teaching and not on the final product,” she added, calling the residency “invaluable.”

As the sanctuary opens, BASE will be selecting a new cohort of artists. Push is now offering affordable rehearsal space to other groups, planning a launch of community dance classes for January, and exploring whether Dancing Around Race can develop symposia offerings.

It’s fitting, then, that Simpson’s new dance for the grand opening expands this reclamation of space to the technological world. “Performable Posthumanism” was developed in collaboration with Philip Butler, an assistant professor at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver who included a scholarly article by Simpson in an anthology he edited titled “Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Exploration.” Butler is the creator of a Black artificial intelligence application called the Seekr Project, a chatbot he has programmed with Black perspectives and voices to offer emotional support to users.

“在精神卫生领域,只有4%的提供者are Black,” Butler explained by phone from Denver. “And Black practitioners and clinicians are overbooked and backlogged at the moment.”

Simpson and her dancers helped develop the AI by feeding it prompts from their own lives and used the bot responses to create images in movement. Audiences also get to contribute prompts during the Sunday performance, while flying drone video will be incorporated.

Simpson plans to expand the dance for additional performances at the Bayview Opera House next March.

That Simpson is creating this dance with four other collaborators while opening the new studio, building the BASE residency and teaching at Stanford University is not lost on Butler.

“Raissa is on top of her game,” Butler said. “She’s a beautiful combination of incredibly sweet and incredibly insightful.”

Delegating has helped. Last year, Simpson offered longtime Push dancer Ashley Gayle the newly created position of associate artistic director. On this recent afternoon, Gayle was in the lobby with three dancers choreographing a short, site-specific dance for the grand opening as Simpson praised her racially and stylistically diverse company members for their work in the studio.

“It feels good to know that no matter what we’re doing, no matter where we are in the process, we have this home base that is ours,” Gayle said. “A place where we can be authentic and real.”

Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.