One of the gifts I carry forward from the many years of working with Joe Goode is the embodied knowing that my artistic practice in the drama of show making exists in this landscape of impermanence.
to make dances at sites of familial resonance, they came through a hap- penstance ecology of collaborative artistic dreaming, venue seeking and availability, funding alignments, and mystery. I’m still puzzled by it, and probably always will be. I’m okay with not knowing – and I am okay to keep asking – How do I belong to this body? How does this body belong to a place? I give thanks to the land and collaborators that make these questions askable. MELECIO ESTRELLA is a director, choreogra- pher, educator and facilitator based in unceded Chechenyo Ohlone territory. He is artistic director of BANDALOOP, co-director of Fog Beast and longtime member of the Joe Goode Performance Group. He has had three premiers of full length work in 2021: LOOM:FIELD in Atlanta, GA, Transpire in Boise, ID, and Time of Change in San Francisco. Upcoming 2022 engagements include BANDALOOP’s 30th Anni- versary Home Season in Oakland, new work at The Virginia Arts Festival in Norfolk, VA, LAPub- licCanvas at the Ford Theater in Los Angeles, and These Lines are Living at the Animate Dance Fes- tival in Alameda. IG: @bandalooping @fogbeast
more specific - “Are we connected to St. Agnes Church?” She replied “I went to grammar school there, your father and I were married there, your older sister and brother were baptized there, Uncle Bino’s funeral was there, and you were a ring bearer at a wedding there in 1984.”When we went inside to meet the Jesuit priests of the church, we sat in a back room that I eerily recognized. I had been in that room as a 5 year old in a wedding tuxedo, 37 years earlier. Because of the pandemic, we were conducting rehearsals outdoors. We cultivated our dances at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park. From Hippie Hill, I could see the patch of grass where my family had a living wake picnic with my Uncle Bill before he died in 1993.
He was the uncle who lived in his VW bus and would show up at our house, help with landscaping, teach me gui- tar, laugh a lot, and then leave. We also made some dances in the sacred spaces of the AIDS Memorial Grove, the only place in San Francisco where it is legal to scatter ashes of loved ones. One of the gifts I carry forward from the many years of working with Joe Goode is the embodied knowing that my artistic practice in the drama of show making exists in this landscape of impermanence. Dances come and dances go. We are always in a Time of Change. These intersections with my fam- ily pathway have brought magic and meaning to the dry words – “site-specific.” I wasn’t at all aiming
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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