Published by Dancers' Group, In Dance is discourse and dialogue to unify, strengthen, and amplify.
in dance SPRING 2022 DISCOURSE + DIALOGUE TO UNIFY, STRENGTHEN + AMPLIFY
P.08 we done/come home
P.46 Baby Baby, Come on Home
P.52 Love letter for the heart
CONTENTS
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WELCOME by BHUMI PATEL, Guest Editor
RECENTLY, I’VE BEEN OBSESSED WITH HOME . T he obses- sion runs deep through my veins. In thinking about why I’ve come to this, I think about temporarily living in a new place away frommy home of seven years; about the ways in which many of us are tentatively making our way back into the world after being home for two years; about my long standing interest in digging into the ongoing practice of making my body the home I have always looked for, connecting both with ancestors and futures. Finding and
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re-finding home in our disoriented states comes through in the articles for this issue. In the “before times,” physical home was my soft landing place after a day of driving from gig to gig. It was the place where I made dinner and had tea parties with friends. It was somewhere that I spent little, but meaningful, time. This small, second-floor apartment in Oakland is the place I’ve lived the longest since child- hood, and soon, it’ll be a place that I lived longer than the house in which I grew up. As a queer person, I feel how fraught our relationships to home can be. For many of us, coming out led to questions about where home might be after that moment of potential rupture. Which is not to equate queerness to suffering, but rather to un- derstand how challenging the dominant narrative can leave us with many questions. As a person who didn’t grow up in the Bay, I feel the deep connection that some of the writers in this issue express in their works about the Bay Area as home. As a per- son of color, I am deeply invested in the home-space necessary for BIPOC that many touch on. As someone who exists at many intersections, I often think about how to do “the work” from what bell hooks refers to as homeplace: “the one site where one can freely confront the issue of humanization, where one can resist.” In developing my own pedagogy and style of teaching improvisation, I keep coming back to queer improv and wondering what it means to queer (as a verb) and make home in the practice of improvisation. The lines between my teaching, writing, dancing, and choreographing overlap and intersect in a queer, decolonial praxis, and so it felt fitting to ask a wonderful group of queer writers to contribute to this issue. In the rebirth of Spring, I am reminded of the myriad ways we can consider home, how we find our way there, and why it matters. I make this offering of an issue considering home so that we all might think about what home means, so that queer voices are highlighted not just in June of each year, and so that we all might begin considering our bodies, our practices, and our spac- es as our homes. Theresa Harlan writes “Our ancestors, the beloveds, are calling to us, and we call back, ‘We are coming home.’” Let us listen to that call to come home.
Performances to the Community Calendar Dancers’ Group promotes performance listings in our online performance calendar and our emails to over 1,700 members. Resources and Opportunities Dancers’ Group sends its members a variety of emails that include recent community
36/ In Conversation
8 / we done/come home:
Dancers’ Group gratefully acknowledges the support of Bernard Osher Foundation, California Arts Council, Fleishhacker Foundation, Grants for the Arts, JB Berland Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Koret Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and generous individuals.
notices, artistic opportunities, grant deadlines, local news, and more.
a ritual prayer for belonging by amara tabor-smith
Andréa Spearman chats with Melecio Estrella
38/ A Love Letter to San Francisco
16 / Family in Site
by Melecio Estrella 22 / root my body grew by Jasmine Hearn 24/ Being a Body by KJ Dahlaw 26/ dancing close to home by Emma Tome 32/ Learning to Dance
A dancer’s understanding of home by Jesse Escalante 42/ given, found, finding, making, re-making, finding again by Nina Wu 46/ Baby Baby, Come on Home by Zoe Huey 52/ to remain empty at all times, an effervescent palimpsest (or love letter) for the heart by Estrellx Supernova Highlights and resources, activities and celebrations for our community—find more on dancersgroup.org 64/ In Community
DANCERS’ GROUP Artist Administrator Wayne Hazzard Artist Resource Manager Andréa Spearman Administrative Assistants Shellie Jew
Anna Gichan Danielle Vigil Bookkeeper Michele Simon Design Sharon Anderson
Or When Lessons on Transformation are Lessons on Belonging by Hannah Meleokaiao Ayasse
36/ 10 in 10
with Sir JoQ by Andréa Spearman
With love and gratitude,
Cover photo by Jessica Swanson
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PHOTO BY JIM WATKINS PHOTOGRAPHY
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we done/come home: a ritual prayer for belonging
by amara tabor-smith
dear reader,
throughout this writing i offer invitations and suggestions for how you might experience this offering beyond the page. it is intended to call the spirit of home close to you as you read. take the time to decide how you will read it, and i encourage you to stick to it. make space to move where you are invited to do so, and have a notebook/journal nearby to write when invited to do so or whenever you feel like it.
also, throughout this writing, i will be using the word family both as family in our broader understanding of the word, and family as a replacement for the word “community” which has been so heavily commodified that it has lost its meaning. lastly, if you are able, play the suggested music track at the start of each section. if it ends before you finish the section, i encourage you to play it again or to choose any other music that feels right. (shout out to Bhumi for support- ing this offering). ready? here we go.
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what is it bringing up for you right now?
1 | home(land)
take a moment and move your body to the music in any kind of way that is available to you.
TRACK: “Celestial Dance” Kahil El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio
SOUND DESCRIPTION: The instrumental music is warm and gentle, as if a stringed instrument and a steel drum are being played in a damp, lush rainforest
go ahead now. stop reading for a moment and just move to the music.
get comfortable. if it is available to you, have something warm to drink. go get it now. you have time.
did you move? if so, take a moment to write anything that came up. no more than a page. then set it aside and take a few breaths. if the music is over, keep reading. if not, don’t continue reading until the song is over. just sip your warm drink. “It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.”
“...any land loss is a cultural loss. Our lands hold our memories, our histories, our identities. When we visit our lands, our elders walk us through them, and they share oral stories that have been passed down to them. So when we’re experiencing land loss, we’re also experiencing the loss of stories, connections, and historical accounts...” —DR. JESSICA HERNANDEZ, transnational Indigenous scholar, scientist, and community advocate take a moment to remember/acknowl- edge the ancestors of the land that you call home in this moment, understand- ing that land acknowledgments can be problematic. they must be thought of as a means and not an end in our support of indigenous land rematria- tion. i invite you to treat this moment as your pledge to figure out what your role is in supporting the rematriation of colonized/stolen land back to indig- enous people. perhaps start by donat- ing to one of these indigenous orgs. take a moment to acknowledge the ancestors and living BIPOC relatives whose unseen and unacknowledged love, labor, and stewardship of the land you are on made/makes it possi- ble for you to be where you are right now. if this invitation feels any kind of ways complicated, uncomfortable or annoying, just stay with it for a moment.
— BELL HOOKS
in public and private sites and spaces throughout oakland that have been propelled by the need to address the displacement, well being, and sex-traf- ficking of black women and girls in oakland through collective rituals masking as performance. director ellen sebastian chang and i along with a group of black women artists and abolitionists started this project in 2015 sitting around a table, guided by the question, “How do we as black women, girls, and gender fluid folks find space to breathe, rest and be well in a stable home?”
sitting around that table in the house of one of the women in this proj- ect, we shared stories of how we are continuing to call oakland/bay area home through our exhaustion, anx- iety, laughter, rage, hope, doubt and creativity. processing the ancestral wounds of our historical experi- ence of displacement as black/african americans and continental africans became part of our ritual process. we came to understand that without regular attention to these wounds, we cannot holistically address the present struggles that we navigate to keep calling oakland home. the wounds of our historic experiences with displacement, violence, exodus,
genocide, and forced migration are reopened for us everytime we are displaced out of our homes, every- time a beloved is displaced away from our family , and this has devas- tated our families throughout oak- land and the bay area, destroying the cultural eco-system that has drawn many to live here in the first place. prioritizing our collective well being as fundamental to our creative process in this project over the production of art, has been a radical refusal of what bell hooks termed, “imperialist, white suprema- cist, capitalist patriarchy”. and this is how we chart our way for- ward home.
2 | home body
We laid side by side Staring into the dark night We had bundles We had seeds We had nothing When we left home long ago
TRACK: “Les Fleurs” Minnie Ripperton
SOUND DESCRIPTION: a 1970 r&b song whose lyrics and instruments encompass the openness and “free love” mantra of the time period. One could imagine resting or dancing in a field of flowers while listening. INVITATION: when you finish reading this section, do a free write or poem on memories of growing up. it might bring up difficult feelings or fond mem- ories. stay with it for at least one page. play this track on repeat or choose one that reminds you of your adoles-
i’ve been engaged in a deep inquiry with the notion of “home” and place making since ellen sebastian chang and i embarked on a creative jour- ney almost 7 years ago with a group of black women in what became “House/Full of Blackwomen”. this project has been an episodic jour- ney. a series of performance rituals
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cence. if it feels right, call the name of an ancestor (blood or chosen) who helped make your memory of home joyous or helped you survive it. whis- per their name and thank them. i was born and raised in san fran- cisco. the home i grew up in was complex. throughout my teen years, following my parent’s divorce, i lived with my mother in a flat on castro street. it was a dysfunctional place of love, addiction, black feminist par- enting, depression, support, economic struggle as well as being a gather- ing point for family and family . it was a place of refuge, and also a place where i experienced emotional neglect, where my mother in regular fits of rage and despair would scream that at any point we could end up homeless and that she didn’t know if she wanted to live anymore. it was also a place where i knew my budding identity as an artist, as a queer teenager was accepted lovingly and without hesitation. our home was shared at various times with cousins, relatives, friends of siblings, and where even my mother’s hairdresser and his boy- friend lived with us for a time. our house was always full of music, loud conversations, arguments and pot- luck meals. this experience taught me how to live collectively with others. it shaped my value for fam- ily interdependence. it also taught me about the harm of codependency and codependent relationships but that is a story for another article. though i lived in new york on several different occasions through the years, i would always gravitate back home to the bay. when the assault of hyper gen- trification in the late 90s priced me and most of my family out of san francisco, i moved to oakland where there was a thriving queer BIPOC family and
no shortage of house parties, festivals, and underground spaces. almost every night there were djs spinning in clubs throughout the town where we were welcome. oakland is where i found my spiritual family and came into my spir- itual practice in the Yoruba Lukumí tradition. many of us felt like oakland would always be ours, that what hap- pened to san francisco could not hap- pen here. and then i noticed realtors starting to buy up property in the lower bottoms (west oakland) and advertis- ing it as “east san francisco.” i watched friends, my own sister and many oak- land family members lose their homes, victims of predatory lending in the early and mid 2000s. the writitng was always on the wall, many of us (myself included) were just too naive to see it, were in denial or didn’t believe we had the power to do anything about it.
you are encouraged to moan and/or cry if needed. stay with these feelings if you can.
housed folks born and raised in oak- land. those figures may be even higher due to the covid. this has weighed heavy on our hearts, especially during this never-ending pandemic, and we find ourselves even in this moment continuing to navigate tremendous loss: jobs, housing, and the deaths of family and family members. when house/full member and Boom Shake co-founder monica hast- ings-smith passed from cancer last year, after being diagnosed a year ear- lier, we all went into survival mode. taking pause and struggling to find each other during pandemic isola- tion. trying to move through grief in our own ways. trying to take pause to grieve while the grief continued roll- ing like a river. please stop reading and take a moment to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths before continuing on. this would be a good time to rock and/or hum while you breathe. again, take your sweet sweet time with this before you continue reading. House/full of Blackwomen table gath- erings over zoom trying to see each other through the blur of screen-weary eyes our connection unstable no one to offer you water or sit next to you and hold your hand when you are sobbing there is only the breath of the middle in out in out… how do we recover place and belonging in this bewildered time? in out in
is nothing new. what i know is we must keep doing the collective work of repairing our relationship to each other and this earth called home. we must do this work not because we know we will survive displacement/ climate catastrophe/race and gender violence/covid/the tyrannies of man’s war but because if we don’t, we surely will not survive. i have been rethinking home as not necessarily connected to a particular physical structure or place (though that too is important) but home as a spirit of belonging that holds us wher- ever we are. a state of being and being well. an interdependent web of family connections. connections like under- ground tree root systems, connected systems that we can lean into, love in to, heal with, and transmute this hell of imperialist, white supremacist, cap- italist patriarchy and beckon a black indigenous queer eco feminist NOW. and how do we co-create communal safe spaces so our families have places to land on our nomadic journey? to do so we must engage in the emo- tional and ancestral healing work so that the untended wounds of inter- nalized racial superiority and racial inferiority that we all carry don’t create unnecessary drama and chaos that would undermine our efforts to steward home spaces together in ways that are collectively healing. we need each other. we have always needed each other. and we need each other now more than ever. in activist language, we talk about “struggling together” towards our liberation. but many of us don’t really know how to struggle together as a practice that is not harmful to ourselves or others. it is critical that we learn to do this now, and in ways that do not negate our rest, our joy and our pleasure in the process.
4 know place like home
take a few deep breaths before read- ing on.
TRACK: “Black Folk” Tank and the Bangas
breathe…breathe…breathe
SOUND DESCRIPTION: a jazzy neo-soul mid-tempo song that illustrates the Black experience, joy and pain, through lyrics and spoken word.
Suspend we notions of time We can’t keep track of that here In this place Dis’place There is only the breath of the middle In Out In Out Motion And stillness
INVITATION: ok, now we need to shift this energy. please do not read on without taking a moment to dance to this track. maybe you dance to the whole thing before reading on. no matter if you are black or not, dance to this track as a ritual for black and BIPOC homefullness, for our collec- tive recovery from imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. afterward drink water and stretch your body a little before reading on. “There’s no place like home” — DOROTHY AFTER WYTCH GLENDA REMINDED SHE/THEM THAT SHE/THEM DIDN’T NEED NO FUCKIN’ WHITE MALE PATRIARCHY TO GET HER/THEM HOME. THE POWER WAS ALWAYS WITHIN HER/ THEM. THAT YOUNG WYTCH JUST HAD TO BE REMINDED TO CLICK THEM HEELS. “Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” — BELL HOOKS
Should we fight? Or should we go?
House/Full of Blackwomen as a project will come to a close with a final episode titled, “this too shall pass” in febru- ary 2023. when we gathered around that table in 2015, all of us either lived in oakland or in the surrounding bay area. since that time, some of us no lon- ger live here. some of us were displaced. some got weary from the never-ending survival hustle that it takes to stay here and moved out of state. ellen, my collaborator and mentor, was the first to go. priced out of the west oakland home she shared with her husband and daughter, and then displaced from the west oakland space where they had a family restau- rant that they created called, FuseBox which was a home joint for so many of our oakland family . since that first gathering, we have watched oakland continue down the same path of violent gentrification that happened in san francisco more than 20 years ago, creating a 47% rise in the unhoused population since 2017, many of whom were formerly
3 | when it hits home
TRACK: “Grow” FaceSoul SOUND DESCRIPTION: an acapella song
composed of multiple layers of a male voice both humming and singing with a deep timber and pas- sionate spirit.
INVITATION: before reading on, put the music track on repeat or have another track of your choosing that moves you to follow while reading this section. go to a place in your mind that felt like home but no longer exists, no longer available to you or no longer feels like home. close your eyes and see it for a moment before reading on. what about it felt like home to you? did you ever grieve this loss? can you locate where you feel this loss in your body?
i will not end this on a note of pessi- mism. i cannot. i know better. nothing is certain, especially not now. and that
if it is possible, rock or shift that part of your body and try to keep reading
out…… stillness
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and there can be no space for “cancel culture” in this collective home mak- ing. “cancel culture” is the child of imperialism and dictatorship. we will have to be in deep evolving practices of recognizing where our racial, economic and/or gender privi- lege is causing harm, and then be reg- ularly proactive in refusing such ben- efits or figuring out how to use these benefits to dismantle them. paramount in this process are repara- tions for black and indigenous folks. we can expect that this work will not be quick, easy, nor comfortable. but it will ultimately be liberating and heal- ing for us all. though i feel a deep sense of belong- ing to the bay, it is a belonging that is not promised. and figuring out how or if i will continue to stay here is the ongoing question that i keep leaning into. buddhism and yoruba ifaism teaches that the only constant is change. change refuses our notions of sta- bility. leaning into the instability of change is crucial for us as queer BIPOC folks and white folks to con- sider in an age of an ongoing pan- demic, climate catastrophe, and polit- ical and economic uncertainty. and it asks us to do this work together. we cannot move forward in hyper indi- vidualism. individualism is unsustain- able and is a tool of patriarchy. divide and conquer. if we are going to liberate “commu- nity” from the current commodi- fied understanding, we are going to have to learn how to live mindfully interdependent with one another, as opposed to unconsciously dependent. we are going to have to re-examine how our ideas of “personal space” might be in opposition to the collec- tive spaces we need to be cultivating now for our survival. dismantling
the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy that bell hooks talked about cannot be done in iso- lation. we will all have to tend the soil where we will bury this con- struct that we have internalized, in hopes that it will become compost for our collective rebirth. family, let’s be clear: these days are dark and we have to be doing the deeper work, and we have to do this work together. we must utilize our collec- tive “ashe” (Yoruba word meaning, “the power to make things hap- pen”) to plant the seeds for the har- vest of our renewal.
everywhere is a church everywhere is a temple everywhere is a ritual ground
remember our wounds and scars be oracle and compass
our feet and hands be bibles and song
so whisper softly your jazz prayers as we jump this ship and re/turn home again
INVITATION OUTRO:
TRACK: “Brilliant Mycelium” Beautiful Chorus
SOUND DESCRIPTION: a gentle acapella song passing through hums, whispers and soft singing of nourishment and wisdom.
we have to come home to each other.
take a few slow deep breaths as you listen to the above track close out this reading with movement with prayer in silence it is your choice take a moment and listen then call one of your beloveds and arrange to meet them at a place where you can find your bare feet on some soil hold each other chanting softly, over and over “we will get through this together” and mean it. amara tabor-smith was born in San Francisco and lives in Oakland. She is a choreographer/ performance maker and the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. She describes her work as Afro futurist Conjure Art. Her interdis- ciplinary site-specific and community respon- sive performance works utilize Yoruba Lukumí spiritual technologies to address issues of social and environmental justice, race, gender identity, and belonging. amara’s work is rooted in black, queer, feminist principles, that insist on libera- tion, joy, pleasure and well-being. Her current multi year project House/full of Blackwomen will conclude with the final episode, “This Too Shall Pass” in February 2023 on the streets of Oakland.
we are (re) members of a (new) ancient tribe nomadic in mad space wanderers in this space of now constantly moving being moved priests yeyes survivors mambos of the avenues and boulevards side streets and freeway underpasses performing ceremony of discarded things talismans of remnant magic echoes of kitchens stories house parties and barber shop incantations bembes for eleggua to call the orisha who clears a way for divine and infinite possibility
summon your ancestors your gods your inner spirit tell them you want to be made ready remember
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i was born in San Francisco. My gigantic Filipinx family geography triangulates The Bay, Wine Coun- try, and the Central Valley. Ohlone, Miwok, South- ern Pomo, and Yokut Lands. Site specifically, I am Golden Gate fog, I am oak savannah with the stench of Petaluma fertilizer season, I am crates of asparagus and bing cherries in the matter-of-fact heat of Stockton. My friends Damara and Patricia at the Joe Goode Performance Group have been dance-talking with me about belonging lately. How do we belong to the body? How does the body belong to a place? My first show with Joe Goode was in 2004 – “Hometown.”While having my shy, young dancer body tossed around by fellow JGPG members Liz Burritt, Felipe Barrueto-Cabello, Marit Brooke-Kothlow and Rachael Lincoln, Joe drew me out of myself and into myself at the same time – as Joe Goode does. He choreographed a palm sweaty moment for me to crawl into the orchestra pit of YBCA, alone out there to sing a song with a picket fence encircling my ribcage. Singing is a root in my family culture – my father is a singer, his mother was a singer, her mother… FAMILY IN SITE UNEXPECTED INTERSECTIONS OF SITE SPECIFIC DANCE MAKING WITH MY FAMILY’S SAN FRANCISCO ROOTS .
BY MELECIO ESTRELLA | PHOTO BY JESSICA SWANSON
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Now at YBCA my Auntie Linda was sitting in the front row, 4 feet away. Layers of memory wrap me while I sing to her. When we were lit- tle, my dad used to have us sing for Auntie Linda in our living room. And now here I am in a Hometown picket fence spotlight looking into her eyes while I sing… “The only hometown I care about is hidden Hidden away from the hard outside
pointed to the dock next to the pavilion where we stood and said, “That is where we got off the boat.” My eyes widened as I learned, after months of rehearsal and preparation at that dock, that this was the very site of my mother’s immigration in 1948. Harboring, disembarkation, thresholds…How do we belong to a place, when we migrate, we move, when war tears through and sends us across an ocean? Harboring. My grandfather, Col. Melecio M. Santos rode a military vessel for 30 days with 8 kids to San Fran- cisco after World War II. He was war rattled, decorated, a widower, and honored by the US Army. Upon immigration he was posted as Com- manding Officer of Forts Baker, Kronkite, and Barry on the north
the work in a series of retreats danc- ing on the shore, and we brought our families with us. Our kids played in the hills and climbed on driftwood on the beach, conducting the most pure site specific research. I called my mom to chat and let her know what we were doing, and she said, “Oh Fort Barry… that was where our first house was after we got off the boat.” I didn’t realize that as the Colonel’s daughter, my moth- er’s earliest experiences of America were of playing in those hills, sneak- ing around Building 944 that is now the heart of Headlands Center for the Arts, and living in the house that is now occupied by Headlands’ Exec- utive Director, Mari Robles. Seventy years after my mother resided at Fort Barry, I was in artistic residence there,
Filipinos.” They eventually had 9 kids. I am number 8. My dad has 7 siblings. My mom has 15. With all the cousins and grandkids, we can fill a theater. We are more likely to fill a church. Andy and I got married in 2010. It wasn’t legal then, but we did it any- way: for ourselves and our people. Six months before our wedding the brilliant Erika Chong Shuch crafted an expansive project called “Love Everywhere” – a series of site spe- cific installations bringing visibility to the ongoing struggle of marriage equality. I jumped at the chance to work with Erika and the big, color- ful cast she brought together. The heart of “Love Everywhere” was a big production in the Rotunda of SF City Hall. This majestic space was animated by a cast of about 40
of us, dancing, singing, perform- ing to lyrics made from real folks’ wedding vows. My parents came to the event, and my mom said, “You know your dad’s dad (my grand- father) used to be a head janitor here? Your dad’s first job was help- ing him mop these floors.” I looked at my dad as he stood on the shiny marble floors with my head tilted in puzzlement as he nodded in affir- mation. Since that moment, thanks to the Dancers’ Group Rotunda Series, I have been in the swirl of many dance artists at City Hall, the place my grandfather cared for as a Janitor until his retirement in 1983. Thirty years later in 2013, in the presence of my parents, we had our second wedding. My husband and I signed some papers, said some vows, and shed some tears on those
floors. Those floors that held the rit- uals of performance, the rituals of marriage, and the rituals of labor of a working class Filipino family man. Love Everywhere. In 2021 Joe Goode invited me to co-direct “Time of Change” in the Haight, my mom’s neighborhood. Joe and I collaborated with Oyster Knife (Chibueze Crouch and Gabriele Chris- tian) on the show. We were looking at the hippie movement, asking “who was it really for?”And “what happened to the Black and Filipinx folks who were there before?”As we were dreaming up the work, we walked around the neighborhood together to visit possi- ble sites. One site we were considering that day was St. Agnes Church, and it ended up being a core site in “Time of Change.” I had vague memories of that church, so I texted my mom to get
It’s soft, this hometown is soft Away from the hard outside...”
Anne Huang and Rachael Lincoln led our com- pany, BANDALOOP, in “Harboring” in the Festival Pavilion ther . “Har- boring” is a vertical dance work that considers embarkation and move- ment at the threshold of land and sea. My mother and her 3 sisters volun- teered to help at the show. They are all true San Franciscans, a complex and hilarious sisterhood of Filipina Americanness – honored elders who would stay up all night playing mah jong and smoking cigarettes together. As a child in the ‘80s, I used to love watching Auntie Linda roll ladies’ hair up in curlers in her salon across the street from Fort Mason, the sharp The Bay is my hometown, my ref- uge, my family, my body. Fort Mason has a special sort of foggy ephemerality. Dances articulate over tidal flows in historic military structures, fed by pricey marina food, artists buoyed by resident arts orga- nizations. In 2013, Amelia Rudolph smell of perm chemicals burning hair into new shapes. Auntie Gina lives in the Richmond in a house that has belonged to her husband’s par- ents since the 1920s. She is an ori- gami expert, and a die-hard Giants fan. Auntie Panching lived in Cole Valley, the kindest woman I know, deeply devoted to her catholic faith – she will pray with cloistered nuns for six hours straight. When they all showed up with my mom to volun- teer at “‘Harboring,” Auntie Panching
I called my mom to chat and let her know what we were doing, and she said, “Oh Fort Barry… that was where our first house was after we got off the boat.”
end of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Headlands Center for the Arts occupies the historic buildings of Fort Barry, close enough to hear the waves hit shore in the distance. Coast Miwok Lands and protected National Seashore Area, its longtime residents are Coyote, Owl, Hawk, Monterey Cypress, and Eucalyptus. In 2018, my husband Andy, a cli- mate researcher at UC Berkeley, col- laborated with Headlands to orga- nize a thematic residency on climate change and equity. This residency brought together scientists, environ- mental justice workers, artists, and policy strategists working in the cli- mate space to live together, share work, and seed collaborations. I was fortunate to be invited to share the work of Fog Beast. This led to a three-month residency for Fog Beast to create a shoreline-based work, “These Lines Are Living,” in collaboration with Andy and shore- line geologist Dave Reid. We made
rolling on the wood floors, singing to the walls and hiking to the shore with my five year old son. As Fog Beast danced on the shifting sands of Rodeo Beach, my mom shared her memory of that site – fresh off the boat, a five year old herself on that same beach, a wave pulled her small body into the ocean, she panicked, almost drowned and was thankfully rescued by her older brother. These Lines are Living. Both my parents grew up in San Francisco. After they lived in military housing, my mother’s family moved to the Upper Haight. My dad grew up in a house near Duboce Park. In sixth grade she took dance lessons from Rita Hayworth’s Aunt on Geary St. He played in a Filipino basketball league. They first met at Park Bowl Bowling Alley on Haight Street, what is now Amoeba Records. Looking for their first apartment together, they were turned down by landlords who stated honestly, “We don’t rent to
Christy Funsch
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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
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44 Gough Street, Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.dancersgroup.org
Rootmy body grew Text, photos, and illustrations by Jasmine Hearn
This is an imagined and remembered illus- trated poem that is composed of sketches and poetics frommy recent process jour- nals. The photo is from a recent flight into occupied lands now known as Houston, TX. Root my body grew is in conversation with the upcoming archival and performance project, Memory Fleet: A Return toMatr due to premiere in Houston, TX April 2024. It references non-linear conversations I have had withMarjani Forté- Saunders, Marlies Yearby, Jo Stewart, Jennifer Harge, Byronné Hearn, Jenna Hearn, Myssi Robinson, Alisha B. Worms- ley, BennalldreWilliams, FreWuhn, Victor Le Givens, Urban BushWomen, Li Harris, Lovie Olivia, dani tirrell, BarbaraMahler, and Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency.
like a cliff that crumbled into the ocean a part of what is no longer held
tectonics keep moving keep kept and then shaken/shared
I have been saying yes to the fear of an uterus the size of a hen full of inescapable fluid
and a trail of migrating blood in between my feet while walking
this is question of where the stars are over the church steeple church as mother building as mother structure as womb as cave as forever home
emptiness in-between bladder and colon in- between organs does that did that would that hopefully not will not the space collapse? did the space collapse? did the church close? the coordinates empty? a disappearance a missing and inevita- bly a forgetting why do i forget almost every month since fourth grade the acute pain of the descending space too full for feel- ing the exact coordinates of (you) joy and grief
mother can rule her own
is this really a story about the differ- ence between violence and care or reading tension or receiving the frequency of vulner- ability and it is on all the time with every person energetic body i assumed you to have healed yourself even if its plugged with stagnant highly packed fluid stirring and pulling up towards the stars
the way I understand
is to say yes to fear and all that fear brings
I have been forgetting the left side the bobbling knee and the ill- situated sits bone I have been moving myself away from itself easy hold on tight and loose lost loose luc sensation sin sensation
whined and unwind varying levels of intimacy
with a distinct palate to what got calloused and what hurts and what tastes good.
JASMINE HEARN was born and raised on occupied lands now known as Houston, TX. They are an interdisciplinary artist, director, choreographer, organizer, teaching artist, and a 2017 and 2021 Bessie awarded performer. Jasmine’s commitment to dance is an expansive practice that includes performance, collaboration, and memory-keeping.
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even pathways of healing and repair with the body. How are we as a dance community accountable to one another? I bring up community accountability because there is no overarching infrastructure in the field of dance, locally or globally, to which we are accountable. Being an account- able community means taking responsibility for our choices and the consequences of our choices*. How can we be a more accountable community in the face of rampant dancer underemployment, job/financial instability, lack of access to adequate healthcare, and seeking justice when abuse is called out in our field? The field of dance is in a period of much needed change. Dancers, who were trained to be obedient and unquestion- ing of authority, are starting to demand rights. Dance pat- terns the body. Western concert dance training, ballet in par- ticular but extending into modern and contemporary dance, orients the body towards dominance. In the sense that there is a tradition of teaching and directing dance with required obedience to authority, use of negative reinforcement (i.e. verbal abuse, beratement, body shaming) as means of moti- vation, and relentless repetition of form. I keep thinking about the ways that the ballet and modern dance training that is patterned into my body, relate to my sense of agency. On a larger scale, I think about the ways this patterning relates to our bodiedness as a dance community. When we train dancers to blindly obey their teachers/ directors, we are not honoring the agency of our dancers. When we train dancers to expect to be touched without their consent, we are not honoring the agency of our danc- ers. When we train dancers to accept and to be grateful for any kind of dance work, regardless of the value of their labor, we create a body of dancers who do not understand their own worth or value and to accept poverty as a part of the gig. This is a problem because along with the inter- nalized lack of agency and consent plus impoverishment, dancers also are hesitant to speak up when abuse happens in our field. There was an allegation of abuse in the SF Bay dance community in the summer of 2020 that was handled very poorly, in my opinion. Rupture happened when no pro- cess of community accountability, conversation and heal- ing tended to the wound. It felt like neither the dance orga- nization where the alleged abuse occurred nor the SF Bay Area dance community at large was able to hold this rup- ture in our collective body with dignity. The dancer making the accusation is a beloved member of our community, an exquisite dancer, and a dynamic, thoughtful teacher. Now, they feel unsafe to be in SF dance spaces. This particular situation feels relevant to examine as we contemplate our bodiedness as a dance community. This is a wound in our body that has been left unhealed. I am working with an injury in my own body right now. It’s my left knee. It’s been really emotional for me to sustain an injury. I just turned 41. This injury is literally just from
overuse. Overuse of my body. Huh. That tracks. My sur- vival literally depends on my body and my ability to dance and teach dance. Learning to slow down and honor the lim- itations of my body is good work for me but not easy. My body is certainly my teacher in a new way. As much as I’d like to, I can’t muscle my way through this. I can’t ignore this injury. I can, however, listen to my body and change how I work. We can learn so much from our bodies. We are a body. We are a body that can create great beauty, transcendence even. We are a body that can make change in this world. We are a body in full frailty, resil- ience, and vulnerability. We are a body that can change, adapt and heal. We know from experience with countless injuries in the body, that we cannot heal through bypass- ing and erasing harm. When parts of our body are in pain, do we not stop and tend to pain/injury/woundedness? I ask again, how are we as a dance community accountable to one another? How do we show up for the needs of the very real human dancers who embody our work? I have my eye on the Dance Artist National Collective (DANC), a growing group of freelance dance artists orga- nizing for action toward safe, equitable, and sustainable working conditions. As a dance teacher, I also research methods of reinforcing agency in the classroom through choice making and practicing verbal consent with touch in the studio. Likewise, I want to be available for tak- ing responsibility for my choices and I want to trust that my community will hold me accountable for my choices. We can’t be a healthy body if we are not attuned to one another and accountable to one another. I’m wondering about what kinds of structures of accountability might be useful for the SF Bay dance community in holding the wellness of the body a priority? We are a body. We are connected to one another. We are responsible for the impact of our choices and actions in relation to one another. There is a serious way that our collective body is out of balance. I’m curious about how we can do better, how we can support one another and address the needs of dancers with dignity. Let us cen- ter our bodiedness in our practices and take leadership in community accountability because of the wisdom and knowledge of the body that we already possess. I know my own particular body is asking me to slow down, reas- sess how I work and take time for healing. What is our collective Body asking of us? * I got this definition of community accountability from this youtube video from the Barnard Center for Research on Women, who named the source of this definition from the Northwest Network. KJ DAHLAW is a bay area dance artist and makes work under the name of Un- ruly Body Tanztheater. They hold an MFA in Dance from Saint Mary’s College of CA and a BFA in Dance Performance from Northern Illinois University. KJ’s work examines unruliness; queer theology; the body; and practices of counter-he- gemony in the dancing body. KJ is exploring the lineage of tanztheater and has a background in ballet, modern dance, and improvisational practices.
being a by KJ DAHLAW BODY
I ’VE BEEN THINKING A LOT ABOUT THE BODY. My body. Our body. The ways that we are a body together. We, the SF Bay dance com- munity, and more broadly, as a human com- munity. I’m interested in our bodiedness. It’s interesting, right? We’re living through this time of radical wealth dispar- ity, global pandemic, deep fissure between the right and the left and it all lives in our bodies. Our bodies are dynamically con- nected to each other and the ecosystem of which we are part. We are in relationship to each other. The needs, desires, rights, dignity of all of us is related to each of us. I come from a lineage of Western contemporary dance, modern dance, and classical ballet. I love how I can feel my teachers in my dancing body. (The wisdom, craft, and techniques as well as the patterns of dominance.) I love to dance. My body loves dancing. Dance feels like this space where I get to transcend. It gives me such deep pleasure, it’s all I want to do.
But, you know what’s hard on my body? Working as a dance artist in the Bay area. I’m a freelance dance artist, dancer/choreographer/teacher, living in the East Bay: Richmond, CA. My name is KJ Dahlaw and I’m a queer, non-binary trans dance artist and parent of 2. It should come as no surprise to read that it is hard to survive as a dance artist in the Bay area. Jobs in dance don’t often pay living wages, nor are they stable. Our field has been hit par- ticularly hard by the limitations of the pandemic too, which results in less work. I currently have 7 jobs, a mixture of W2 employment and 1099 contract work. I recognize my privilege in having these jobs and it’s incredibly difficult for my own body to hold so much while raising kids and man- aging my own anxiety disorder and C-PTSD. Just being real. I want to talk about the ways in which we are intercon- nected and how our health and wellness inside of our com- munities is in relationship to the health and wellness of all. We are a body. In this context, I do want to discuss the SF Bay area dance community as a body. The field of dance is in and of the work of the body. Dance emerges from the body. We possess quite a depth of knowledge about the body and
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