The Bradley method. (News).

Loris Bradley took over the post of performing-arts curator of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco last May. She came to YBCA following eight and a half years as performing-arts director and presenter at Houston's DiverseWorks Artspace, a nontraditional venue dedicated to visual, performing, and literary arts. In her Texas post, Bradley, who cut her teeth on cross-cultural presenting and interdisciplinary arts administration at the National Endowment for the Arts, showcased small companies and dancers little known outside the modern dance world. Among her bookings were the Pat Graney Company and Thirty Three Fainting Spells, both from Seattle, and John Jasperse's dance company from New York.

Bradley's curatorial interests reside, she says, in "interdisciplinary, experimental work" and in "artists who don't fit" into preexisting categories. By bringing that slant to her new post, she hopes to make the performing-arts program at YBCA more distinctive. Bradley's curatorial innovations in Houston included an invitation to MacArthur fellow and Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks to debut as the director of one of her own plays. Bradley also developed an interfaith program called Father/Daughter Dances as part of the Arts Partners Residency. Designed by UCLA professor and choreographer Victoria Marks, the project joined religious leaders and their fathers or daughters to perform duets exploring some of the taboos of the father/daughter relationship.

"Early in my career I thought I was going to be more involved in cultural exchange," Bradley says. "I was working in the State Department on an internship with the United States Information Agency. But it became really clear, really quickly, that that wasn't what I wanted to do." Armed with the belief that artists and cultural workers have direct impact on their peers in other places, Bradley found her way into arts administration at the national level. At the NEA from 1986 to 1991 as a senior arts specialist, she ran a granting program called the Interdisciplinary Arts Program with a budget of $1.2 million aimed at artists working outside a single discipline. Through that program, she supported such groundbreaking work as Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach and sound sculptures by the Seattle musician Trimpin. "It was a heady time to be at the Endowment. There was a lot of emphasis on new work," she says. "It has been difficult since then to see artists lose ground."

Discussing her first three-year plan for YBCA, Bradley says her "first agenda is to support San Francisco artists." With the demise of Theater Artaud, one of the oldest alternative performance spaces in San Francisco, Bradley believes YBCA has the opportunity to fill the void in the performing-arts community, especially in dance. Part of her plan is to make both the gymnasium-sized studio space called the Forum, which was designed by renowned architect Fumihiko Maki, and the 755-seat Yerba Buena Theater, which was designed by James Stewart Polshek, more widely available for experimentation, rehearsal, and performance.

While the Yerba Buena Theater currently accommodates a fair number of self-produced rentals by local companies, such as Smuin Ballets/SF, Alonzo King's LINES Ballet, the Joe Goode Performance Group, and ODC/San Francisco, Bradley aims to reach beyond these better-heeled troupes to include struggling choreographers with no reliable home. To facilitate grassroots inclusion, YBCA will assume a limited role as a presenter and commissioning body. "We'll be producing a number of premieres" every year, Bradley declares.

Under the Wattis Artist Residency Program, selected artists will receive free rehearsal space in the Forum along with an up-front fee for a significant portion of production. Sara Shelton Mann, founder of Contraband, will inaugurate the new commissioning venture by completing an evening-length work, another in her series of dance cycles, called Monk at the Met. Such financial support is essential for grassroots artists like Mann, according to Bradley, and means a leap in exposure for previously marginalized artists, thanks to the diverse audiences that support the center.

YBCA houses more than twenty-five self-produced events, exhibits, and performance installations annually, drawing nearly a quarter-million people to the complex each year.