to belong via ownership. We moved into the house before it was finished. My Gran Mama, Rosetta Rankin from Forest, Mississippi, wept, “Lawd have mercy on us. I was raised to never move into an unfinished house. It’s a bad sign. This house will never get finished.” The house was livable, just unfinished. Our unfinished house welcomed all to our table as Mama believed that she “cooked like Jesus;” there would always be enough for us and whomever knocked on the door. In 1970, I moved to California to live with my biological mother in Berkeley. I would visit my unfinished house every year. Daddy Hicks’ intention was to finish the house, but his nephew over time succumbed to alcoholism and became unreliable. Daddy died in 1975. And Mama never wanted “another man up in my house.” Financially there was no money or skilled bodies to complete what was started. When my Mama died in 1996, I walked down the old stairs to the basement with its dirt floor, the open studs that represented two guest bedrooms, a den, a bathroom, the narrow, low sliding glass windows encrusted with cobwebs, dust, and outdoor splatters, an old couch with piles of unfolded clothes, a clothes- line strung to dry clothes in winter from the old washing machine balanced on unused cinder blocks and I cried a sorrowful, pitiful woe-is-me sobbing. As I have grown into the moral aesthetics of my homeplace the house feels magical to me now – it had everything living and useful inside and outside including dirt. We are the public, the private, individual and the collective. None of us are unique in our longing for a homeplace and a public space where we are able, as bell hooks says, “to recover our wholeness” and “be affirmed in our minds and hearts.” Yes, the settler empire’s extractive wars continue to amass mounds of rubble and slash wounds upon the lands where we struggle to live the lives we are born into as diverse crea- tures of the earth. It represents a lack of architectural imagination within bankruptcy of the embodied hungry ghosts of progress. Hope is also a design: Once upon a time the World Honored One was walking with gods and devas and humans, when he paused. He pointed to the ground and said, “This is a suitable site to build a temple.” The god Indra then plucked a blade of grass from nearby and stuck it into the ground at the spot where the Buddha had pointed. Indra declared, “The temple is built!” The World Honored One smiled. ELLEN SEBASTIAN CHANG is a multi-faceted creative force, renowned for her impactful contributions as a director and writer. Her current projects are “the boiling” in collaboration with writer SunHui Chang and visual artist Joan Osato, slated for premiere at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in 2025, and “Post Pardon: the opera” with librettist Arisa White and composer Jessica Jones at Waterville, Maine’s Gordon Center for Creative and Per- forming Arts in 2025.
“…we have to understand that imagination shapes the world and so those of us who have been oppressed by how others imagine the world, the supremacists the patri- archs, the war mongers, the capitalists, we have to imagine something so compelling that it moves us beyond and out of the compliance with our own entrapment in these systems that do not love us.” — ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN What is the design of public and private spaces? What is the “pattern language” of these codified systems which represent our diverse cultures? Public remains the politized language that represents all of us in a democracy, taxpayers’ dollars generated for the public good that elects our public servants and yet… On closer inspection it feels like code for a kind of peo- ple struggling for access to a permissible life that has a value publicly and privately. Public becomes code for the masses as others, poor, poorly educated, poorly fed, poorly housed, lacking in health care, lacking in import- ant work, lacking access, black, brown, yellow, queer, dis- abled, immigrant, on the streets and corners and benches of built space – you know them as those people in public schools, transportation, libraries, needy for public wel- fare and public defenders. We are a jumble amassed in a Jenga-like structure where the invisible hand pulls a piece that can crash our worlds. Which creates the feeling of pri- vate 4 as so very aspirational, as in private property, private corporations, private equity funds, private sector, private reserve, private island, schools, universities, rooms, parties, exclusive access to that good life that is steeped in the leg room of first class. And if that is the case then why would we invite the public into our private realms? And this is why art and architecture are so very import- ant and very dangerous. “We are not simply receivers of aesthetics ... we are makers of aesthetics. Art has a social purpose [and] art belongs to the people. It’s not something that is hanging out there that has no connection with the needs of man. And art is unashamedly, unembarrassingly, if there is such a word, social. It is political; it is economic. The total life of man is reflected in his art.” — CHINUA ACHEBE The Unfinished House: a personal memory of my childhood home. My Gran Daddy, Willie Hicks from Selma, Alabama, and his nephew John built a cinder block house for us on a small, purchased lot on the high desert dusty sage-brushed lands of the Umatilla, Palouse, and Cayuse of Eastern Washington. Cinder blocks at that time in the early 60’s were humble, cheap materials accessible to the working class in pursuit of the American hopeful dreams of a place
PLACE. PEOPLE. PROGRESS. PALACE. Now as acknowledgement of Then. Before all of us, this Place was soil, sand, river, bay, live oak, buckeye, poppy, elderberry, swallowtail, sea turtle, otter, mule deer, badger and more. This Place birthed its People as Muekma, Ramaytush, Rumsen, Miwok, Mutsen, Awaswas and more. In the quest for more, a People birthed of another Place came sailing, marching, and charging, as Spanish, Colonizers, Settlers, Prospectors, or Westward Ho’s. With an intention to occupy Place and reimagine People birthed in Place as savages, slaves, chattel, coolies, wetbacks, or sweetly as salt of the Earth, in need of control and management. This was now a Place in the process of Progress. Called it New World, Yerba Buena, Gold Mountain, Barbary Coast, The Paris of the West, First World, Fog City, The City but never call it Frisco or San Fran. The Palace 1 is built and rebuilt as reflection of the beauty and aesthetics of occupying people who came sailing, marching, and charging in the quest for more. Here we are on the steps of the Palace…. In this “now” can we rematriate ourselves within and without Palace?
1 Middle English: from Old French paleis, from Latin Palatium, the name of the Palatine hill in Rome, where the house of the emperor was situated.
ARCHITECTURE. PUBLIC. PRIVATE.
“Neoclassicism in the US is directly related to the con- struction of whiteness. It was whiteness that was sought after in the many plantation houses that chose the style, justifying it as an emulation of ancient Greek ‘culture’ to separate themselves from the Indigenous peoples whose land was stolen, and the enslaved African people forced to build and work in them. Thomas Jefferson’s excitement with the work of the Beaux Arts school in Paris was motivated by a desire to make America ‘Euro- pean,’ and white.” 1 Everyone and all bodies, in all cultures and societies, engages with the built world of architecture and interior design. Those high-minded ideas and concepts are sim- ply a built place made functional or useful, beautiful, or becoming, sacred, or cherished. A place fashioned from human imaginations designed in an alchemical collabo- ration with the divine materials of the world, be it mud, be it clay, be it straw, bamboo, or redwood, be it stone or steel, be it glittering glass or reinforced concrete. Let us, also, humbly remember that all creatures design and build; perhaps this is the heart of our shared planet, a gar- den palace, where we all began before we invented cities and city halls. Here we are in 2024 in the San Francisco Bay Area, within this modern urban city landscape where our rela-
tionships to land, architecture, interior design and built structures are strictly legislated and monitored by the bureaucratic bodies controlling and managing the status quo. What avenue is open to us people, citizens, and the public, who still have dreams (plans) for how we want our lives to be dignified and respected in this place we call home? Do all avenues and roads lead to City Hall, aka “The People’s Palace?” 2 This Beaux Arts structure is the symbolic locus for the paperwork for legitimacy of our dreamed (planned) lives: marriage, birth, and death cer- tificates, permits for buildings or inspections, starting and closing a business, public health, animal welfare and more. ZACCHO Dance Theatre is inviting us into the Pal- ace as a site of recognition, reflection, and creative civic responses. The People’s Palace is the location we reimag- ine our relationship to public and civic spaces: How we love us. How we belong and make beautiful public 3 space together, as an act so compelling that fear of differ- ence dissolves within our embraced wonders, curiosities, and possibilities. We are the original architects, interior designers, landscapers, and gardeners. We, also, have an aesthetic rooted in our patterns of the language of beauty and morality. There is an Indigenous wisdom and skills that lies dormant in all of us together.
2 “The People’s Palace,” named after Mayor “Sunny Jim” Rolph’s vision to provide a spectacular City Hall for San Franciscans. 3 late Middle English: from Old French, from Latin publicus, blend of poplicus ‘of the people’ (from populus ‘people’ and pu- bes ‘adult’).
1 The Members of the Architecture Lobby. (2020, February 7). The Architecture Lobby Statement on Trump’s Executive Order Affecting Federal Architecture . https://architecture-lobby.org/news/t-a-l-statement-on-trumps-executive-order-affect- ing-federal-architecture/
4 late Middle English (originally denoting a person not acting in an official capacity): from Latin privatus ‘withdrawn from public life,’ a use of the past participle of privare ‘bereave, deprive,’ from privus ‘single, individual.’
18
in dance SPRING 2024 18
SPRING 2024 in dance 19
In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
unify strengthen amplify unify strengthen amplify
44 Gough Street, Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.dancersgroup.org
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker