CounterPulse Spring 2017 brings forth a milieu of performance makers for a season of works that will be respite from and resistance to the powers that be. We make space this spring season for risk, pleasure, solidarity, conflict, and futurity. CounterPulse is your home for radical ridiculousness, dissident discomposure, and all adjacent anarchic alliterations ; )
We take stock to look forward with our collaborative presentation of Lost and Found: Bay Area Edition, with SFMOMA’s Open Space and Danspace, investigating the impact HIV/AIDS continues to have on dance and performance in the Bay Area and beyond. Isak Immanuel’s improvisations on the daily and quotidian will reflect the interests of season opener, American choreographer Meg Stuart. Futurity, faith, and value coincide in Jesse Hewit’s FAITH MATERIAL ACTIVISM. Talking whiteness gets real in Annie Danger’s The White Stuff: Elite Social Justice Boot Camp.
Our 2017 Edge resident artists, Arletta Anderson and Adam Smith and Scarlett Cushion, will premiere weather // body and The Bell in the Blood later this spring. Finally, this season features three works that take to streets: Precarious from Hope Mohr Dance, THIS IS WHAT I WANT 2017: Tender Nights, and BLESSED UNREST: an arts and social justice festival, each diving deep and locating ourselves in the Tenderloin and in our city.
In addition to a packed season of performances, we’re launching three new programs focusing on bridge-building, experimentation, and friction. Matchbox, a collaboration with CODAME, pairs artists and technologists for one-off collaborative forums. Project Space extends our 1,000 square-foot concrete basement room into a residency site for experimental ventures. And perhaps, most exciting is Block Fest, our first Friday art-y block party, facilitated by different Artist Activators each month, featuring live performance, screenprinting workshops, crochet jams, and more, all free and open to the public.
Get real with CounterPulse this spring.
CounterPulse Spring 2017 Season
Damaged Goods/Meg Stuart
JAN 20-21, 2017 FRI & SAT @ 8PM
In her solo works, Meg Stuart continues to venture into the monologue of movement, exploring everyday movements and physical conditions through improvisation. Over the past few years, she created several solos including XXX for Arlene and Colleagues (1995), soft wear (2000), Blanket Lady (2012), and Signs of Affection (2010). An evening of solo works (2013) presents a selection of these former solo works, as well as excerpts from evening-length performances.
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Lost and Found: Bay Area Edition
SFMOMA’s Open Space presents Annie Danger, Xandra Ibarra, Monique Jenkinson, Rhodessa Jones, Keith Hennessy, Brontez Purnell, Helen Shumaker, and Amara Tabor-Smith
February 4, 2017, Saturday 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
In bicoastal collaboration with Danspace Project, and in partnership with CounterPulse, SFMOMA’s Open Space gathers an intergenerational group of artists to explore themes, questions, histories, and lineages as they relate, directly and obliquely, to the impact HIV/AIDS continues to have on dance and performance in the Bay Area and beyond.
Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior with keyon gaskin + additional choreography by Abby Crain
FEB 9-11, THU-SAT @ 8PM
FAITH MATERIAL:ACTIVISM is futurist reflection on the urgent importance of believing in things that cannot be proven. Inside of a surrealist living room, two living-and-dying humans dig through physical practices of mediumship, ontological re-animation of objects/spirits, and full expression of faith, all in an attempt to re-articulate what is “real”, what constitutes proof, and what the dire importance is of creative impulse that flies in the face of contemporary systems of value, commodification, and logic.
BLESSED UNREST: an arts and social justice festival
Crescent Moon Theater Productions
FEB 24-26, FRI-SAT @ 8PM at CounterPulse, SUN offsite throughout the Tenderloin, time & location TBA.
Blessed Unrest is a three day arts and social justice festival that features workshops, panel discussions and performances by artists working at the intersection of art and social change. Featuring The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women and over 30 artists working at the intersection of art and activism.
The White Stuff: Elite Social Justice Boot Camp
Annie Danger
MAR 23-25, THU-SAT @ 8PM
The White Stuff is a full-immersion, ELITE boot camp for whites who mean well but want to go that *extra* mile. TWS is also a deluxe venue with VIPOC lounge for art lovers of color to relax, enjoy gourmet fare, and watch/trouble the action from a safe distance. Multiple interactive training stations and real-time, One Of The Good Ones certified coaching provide a fertile environment for well-meaning whites to excel at solidarity. Don’t you want to save the world??
Tickets coming soon.
CounterPulse Edge Residency 2017
APR 20-22, 27-29, 2017, THU-SAT 8PM
Double Bill
weather // body
Arletta Anderson and Adam Smith
weather // body is a multidisciplinary visual poem created and performed by Arletta Anderson and Adam Smith. The work examines physical and environmental change over time through the use of technical dance and pedestrian movement; text sourced from multi-generational interviews; electric guitar; and audience involvement.
The Bell in the Blood
Scarlett Cushion
The Scarlett Cushion centers on the exploration of human resilience, seeking to craft through the arc of performance a felt experience of resilience among participants/audiences.
A CounterPulse Family Feast & Fundraiser
May 11, 2017, Thursday 5:30 p.m. – 9 p.m
Immerse yourself in a sumptuous evening of culture, cocktails, cuisine at a CounterPulse Family Feast and Fundraiser. Featuring live performance and special exhibitions from CounterPulse artists, art-infused silent auction, custom cocktails, and family-style dinner – because change doesn’t happen on a empty stomach.
Tickets coming soon.
THIS IS WHAT I WANT 2017:Tender Nights
THIS IS WHAT I WANT/ Tessa Wills, and ABD Productions/Skywatchers Youth Project
MAY 25-27, THU-SAT @ 8PM
A series of powerful and intimate art performance walks with young Tenderloin artists, illuminating private landscapes of desire. The eighth annual bay area festival of performances about desire THIS IS WHAT I WANT, partners with ABD productions’ Skywatchers project and local youth artists who will take you by the hand and walk you through their individual landscapes of desire. Let visceral personal stories and immersive art experiences set against the backdrop of the dynamic and rapidly changing TL district offer unusual juxtapositions and ways of understanding our environment.
Tickets coming soon.
Precarious
Hope Mohr Dance
JUN 1-3, THU-SAT @ 8PM
Hope Mohr Dance celebrates its 10th anniversary with Precarious, a dance in memoriam to 443 Folsom, a vanishing artist and historic space in San Francisco. The performance will begin in proximity to 443 Folsom and end at Counterpulse, with audience members journeying from site to theater on a bus accompanied by a chorus of senior citizens. Choreographer Hope Mohr will collaborate on the project with filmmaker Sheldon Smith, composer Beth Wilmurt, sound designer Teddy Hulsker, visual artist Tracy Taylor Grubbs, and a cast of some of the Bay Area’s finest performers.
Tickets coming soon.
WIND STATIONS — a curation of missing people
Tableau Stations: Isak Immanuel + Pijin Neji + Marina Fukushima and special guests
6/15-18/2017 (Th-Sat 8pm, Sun 7pm)
As an interdisciplinary dance work, the Japan-US project engages a series of “missing person” notations, quotidian objects, and the element of wind, from, and at the edges of the everyday, looking into what is carried with and without body. The work acts between a resting air, harsh wind, wind that enacts loss, or a wind that enables a boat to sail a great distance to a new place.
Tickets coming soon.
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