speak
by MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH
as collectively vulnerable, but still a collective. The Transform Festival doesn’t uniquely honor or highlight any particular demographic or genre of performance. Curatorially we are as provoked by dance as by theater or music. The dominant frames for our festival choices are a rabid curiosity and a complicated sense of beauty. We don’t seek to program ‘for’ a demographic, but in solidar- ity with a psychographic that shares our sense of urgency, inquiry, and aspiration of social equity. As such, you’ll Arctic, and playwrights deconstructing liquor store culture in the Tenderloin. We’ll feature a dance company like Capacitor that’s celebrat- ing 20 years of making work find DJ’s making sym- phonies to soundtrack climate change in the
THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL than private funds is public will. When YBCA describes its mission as generating culture that moves people, the bet that we are making is that we can activate how art influences the public imagination, and that we can design a pro- cess whereby highly dynamic inquiry spawns culture. The Transform Festival is artistically a concentrated slate of global performance works presented in the heart of San Fran- cisco, but civically , Transform is a curated opportunity for our community to refine, reframe, and respond to the erosion of our country’s moral infrastructure. You’ll forgive me if I glance over history to presidents past…I am newly awakened to the significance of two presidential acts. The first is a speech, offered by JFK in May of 1961 in which he announced the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy reminds us that the future is made of stumbles, hubris, and in- novators who are humble enough to pursue it. He asks us to apply un-invented systems of science WHILE inside the swirl of social tumult. He asks us to dream, together, in public. In 1965, Kennedy’s caustic and controver- sial successor, Lyndon B. Johnson instituted the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA was ratified into lawful existence via Congressional Act, a portion of which reads: “The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States… A pre-dawn tweeter most likely can’t sleep, and a man who can’t sleep, can’t dream.
Capacitor / photo by RJ Muna
questions to us that day. He centered us in the thought that public space is where beliefs are physicalized and constructed. He observed with us that we are stuck in a civic pattern where top-down resources
Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and sup- port a form of education and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located, masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants .” YBCA is an arts center in service of free thinkers and earnest leaders. About 20 months ago, an immigrant architect named Teddy Cruz addressed us at the YBCA100 Summit. At the time of his talk, we were 5 days away from the 2016 Presidential elec- tion, and I remember that the air outside tasted like stale hope. Inside our Forum though, I found myself electrified and sharp- ly determined in response to one of Teddy’s
in the Bay Area, and Okwui Okpokwasili, who has visited us with Ralph Lemon and Nora Chipaumire, but has never come to YBCA as the artistic director of her own project. Transform reflects an ethic of activating artists in our midst in a different way. We lean on questions to organize intentional communities rather than objects to magneti- cally lure audiences. We center relationships built on shared inquiry to re-imagine how an arts center can function as an activist citizen in its own community. The Transform Festival was not dreamt into the air by a sitting president, but by a soaring question… “Where is our public imagination?” How might we envision Kennedy’s moonshot speech if his aim was not space, but education, or public health, or equity. If Kennedy’s “moon” was actually immigration, what would be the role of art in getting us there? It is indeed #sad that our elected officials aren’t asking us these questions. What kind of person proposes military parades and the abolition of the federal art economy in the same week? How does the public respond to a kind of weaponized neurosis in execu- tive form? At this festival, through the lens of provocative artists, let’s imagine that the beautiful city is not a bubble. As we take our seats, we remember that views don’t make a revolution, bodies do. As the lights dim to signal a creatively pitched reality, we might find our minds racing in the dark like a night under the shadow of a new moon. MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH is a 2017 TED Global Fel- low, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He lives with his wife and two kids in Oakland, and proudly serves as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
rarely interfaced with bottom-up agency. And then he pleadingly asked us …“Where is our public imagination ?” I can’t rightly say if any of the artists in this Spring’s Transform Festival are unequiv- ocally answering that question with their art, but I CAN say that art almost ALWAYS answers that question best. Even as Kennedy invoked a collaborative path to the impos- sible, he presided over an era of nuclear brinksmanship. Even as Johnson endowed the arts with federal resources, he amplified the country’s military scale in Viet Nam. Artists are the leaders among us, generally more driven by mission than market, whose job is to codify inspired thought for public consumption. Their ideas intersect with our political world, but they design experiences that ask us to imagine ourselves conjoined in the politics and physics of a creative mo- ment. We imagine ourselves at the synaptic second of inspiration, or inside the bubble of digital love, or at the specific frequency of a Black woman rocking out on her guitar, or
Marc Bamuthi Joseph/ photo by Bethanie Hines
Okwui Okpokwasili / photo by RJ Muna
Expand every dimension of your art at Mills. Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mills College offers BA , MA , and MFA degrees in dance. From ballet to butoh, Mills encourages students to push the boundaries of: • Choreography • Theory • Pedagogy • Technology • Performance GRADUATE FACULTY Kara Davis Ann Murphy Sonya Delwaide Sheldon Smith Molissa Fenley Victor Talmadge
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DANCERS’ GROUP Executive Director: Wayne Hazzard, Program Director: Michelle Lynch Reynolds, Program Assistants : Michael D. Lee Andréa Spearman and Natalia Velarde, Bookkeeper: Michele Simon, Publication Design: Sharon Anderson
Dancers’ Group gratefully acknowledges the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, California Arts Council, Clorox Company Foundation, Delta Dental of California, Fleishhacker Foundation, Grants for the Arts, James Irvine Foundation, JB Berland Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Osher Foundation, Rainin Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Foundation, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and generous individuals
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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