Javier Stell-Fresquez (Chican@, Tigua & Piro Native), Ivan “Ivy” Monteiro (Brasil), and Davia Amerasu Spain (San Francisco Bay Area native), compose a trinity of young, fierce, POC femme artists. Our collective expertise spans theater, sound and video production, dance, and organizing, as well as drag, among other forms that our queer ancestors developed in queer nightlife spaces, and backyard family barbecues.
Applying intersectional and intertribal methods, we set our triune gaze on the landfill that is our present society. Holding up umbilical and ancestral knowledge as we decolonize the future, our very existence and emergent voices defy neocolonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
©Yvonne M. Portra
Mother The Verb is a Queer/Trans performance dance, produced and created by Ivan Monteiro (Brasil), Javier Stell-Fresquez (Chican@ originally from El Paso, Tigua & Piro Native), and Davia Amerasu Spain (San Francisco Bay Area native), a trinity of young, fierce, POC femmes fucking up post-colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy one breath at a time. This trinity will be making a new experimental performance piece exploring the glorification and damnation of our many mothers, asking how we can transcend the toxins flowing in our bodies and societies.
Follow their progress and community work at Facebook.com/MotherTheVerb
Adapted from a blog posted 10/08/20 on Life As A Modern Dancer In 2018, Jo put out a call for a Black change-maker interested in engaging with a Jewish artist about racial justice and prison abolition. Rahsaan responded. In the more than 3 years we’ve been in collaboration, we’ve written 45 letters, sat down together […]
The SEED residency was a blessing of space and time to create. My artistic partner Jakob and I spent as much time as we could at CounterPulse, long hours in the space, not just for creation and play, but to live and be in the space, to be part of the environment that is CounterPulse […]
Amara Tabor-Smith (she/her/we) is a choreographer/performance maker and the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. On Tuesday September 14th as part of the CounterPulse Festival 2021, we will be hosting Embodied Divination, a movement-based workshop where participants are invited to “contemplate their body as oracle, as compass, and a site for social repair”. Limited […]
At the CounterPulse Festival this September, The Performance Primers will be hosting a virtual panel discussion and mixer titled “Queeratorial Collectives Do It Themselves“. This conversation will explore how working on a grassroots level outside conventional venues and capitalist values opens up new possibilities and invites deeper engagement among audiences and artists. Ahead of this […]
With the CounterPulse Festival 2021 just one week away, we are so excited to be opening our doors to the public once again! CounterPulse exists, above all, to make space for people to gather and to be united in collective experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us to change and shift the ways we bring people […]