Note: This essay was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2022 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

When I think about activism and when I became committed to advocacy and social justice, I think back to my elementary school years. The first large-scale injustice I experienced was the 1992 Rodney King beating and riots. I can still visualize the fuzzy tape and King down on the ground surrounded by officers. I can sense the fear and confusion deep in my gut. My family lived in Los Angeles County at the time, and my mom and I drove to Compton about every two weeks to get our hair done. A couple of days after the riots, we visited our hairstylist, and I saw the aftermath of a communities’ rage up close. Burned objects and trash lay on sidewalks; nervousness, anger, hesitancy, unknowingness, and damage permeated. So this is what injustice is for Black people, I thought. I was 12 years old.

As I came of age and became more serious about dance as an artist and educator, I found myself attracted to arts and social justice. I discovered my primary theoretical lens, Black Feminist Standpoint theory, in graduate school. Developed by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, this theory emphasizes the perspective of African American women. I could make dance pieces that focused on the Black female experience through this framework, including my own experiences. I also grew in understanding the implications of race, gender, and class through my minor in African American Studies and graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies. As a result, creating art that reflected social change became essential and inspiring.

In Boulder, CO, I participated in my first equity training. I had signed up to volunteer for a domestic violence shelter, and volunteers were required to participate in three weekends of anti-racism and discrimination training. It was intense. The workshops laid out stereotypes and biases primarily based on race and gender through interactive seminars, dialogues, videos, and reflection circles. I’ll never forget how one of the organization’s directors spoke about racism slowly killing her. With passion, she shared how her interactions with people who challenge her, discriminate against her, and maltreat her due to being a woman of color cause severe stress. Stress leads to health problems and unhappiness, leading to a shorter life span. Prior, I had never viewed racism this way. Racism as a stress factor made a lot of sense. My upbringing, and experiences like these, helped convince and prepare me to be an equity advocate.

Photo courtesy of Cherie Hill

I have discovered that advocating for race and equity can feel good and not so good. Sometimes when I call out wrongful policies or inequitable decisions, I do not think twice about it. I know my push for equity will positively impact. Other times, I feel nervous and worry about what people think. I sense impatience from some of the people in the room. If you are a Black person or POC, this may resonate.

I recall my first year on the California Dance Education Association (CDEA) board, which was my first time being a “president.” As president-elect, I helped represent our membership by visiting the state capitol to observe and comment on the 2020 California Arts Standards Framework draft document. The framework is a guide to support public school educators using the PreK-12 arts standards.

As I sat in the room (public visitors had to pre-register and remain quiet during the committee proceedings), I felt pings of intimidation; it was my first time in the California Department of Education building. However, after a few hours of listening to the framework committee discuss revisions, my ears perked up when I heard them review a section in chapter 12 that cites specific identities and populations of students. The section reads:

The Arts Framework supports teachers, administrators, and other educators and supporters of arts education in developing and delivering high-quality, discrete arts curriculum and instruction that meets every student’s needs. This includes support for students with a wide range of needs, abilities, and experiences, including students who are English learners; at-promise students… lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) students; advanced learners; and students with visible and nonvisible disabilities (California Department of Education, n.d.37).

I was happy that students needing more support were explicitly stated, but I wondered why racial and ethnic minority students were not included. Numerous education studies have found that Black and Hispanic students are the least likely to have access to the arts. In addition, due to systematic racism, Black students face more challenges and barriers to receiving a high-quality education. I felt that these and more factors qualified minority students to be included in this clause.

Later that night, I prepared my public comment to be read before the framework committee. I felt nervous. The next day as I read my letter, my hands shook, my heart raced, and my voice cracked. I did not want to be “that person” bringing up race, but I was.

Upon completing my full public comment, I exhaled a sigh of relief. A few people thanked me, some avoided me, but I did what I felt I needed to do on behalf of my students. I was proud of myself, as nerve-wracking as it was. Gratefully, my work in racial equity does not always feel so precarious.

A copy of Cherie Hill’s public comment submitted to the California Department of Education’s 2020 California Arts Framework Committee.

In 2021, HMD/The Bridge Project presented an Anti-racism in Dance series, and I curated the event Dance On the Front Line: Black Lives Matter, inspired by the 2020 racial uprisings. The event provided up close and personal interviews about the experience and life of artists who danced and protested for Black Lives. Finding speakers took many months because many of the dancers who danced on the front line of the protests’ names and contact information were not documented. I searched through articles and social media videos to find dance activists and asked fellow dance colleagues for any connections. When I found someone’s contact information, it was usually their social media handle. I would send them a direct message, hoping they would see it and respond. Thankfully, I was able to get in touch with three voguers from Chicago who protested in support of Black and Black Trans Lives Matter.

During the online event, the artists shared video footage of their protests and details about what prompted them to dance in front of rows of police cars. We learned more about how these protests and videos viewed all over the world impacted their lives. They also shared insight into the history and style of voguing, and the people they are influenced by. The conversation turned out to be refreshing and authentic. When asked why I would want to curate an event like this and why in 2021, I responded:

“The public murder of George Floyd galvanized an international movement for Black Lives Matter. Although it took place over a year ago, the effects of last summer’s uprisings ripple throughout our arts ecosystem. Prompted by the rawness and power of folks taking their demands to the street, more and more organizations are beginning to shift toward greater equity. But the work is far from done” (Cristi, AA. 1).

The pandemic and racial uprisings led to essential conversations around race, and leaders uncommitted to equity were called out with some stepping down. Arts administrators witnessed some dance organizations implement internal policy change and exhibit greater awareness around race and privilege, but creating equity for Black lives and those on the margins is still a huge aspiration.

HMD/The Bridge Project’s Dance On the Front Line: Black Lives Matter, flyer designed by Karla Quintero

My commitment to advocacy and equity would not feel complete without applying it to my artistry. During the pandemic, I continued my research in eco-feminism and Black Feminist Standpoint theory, and I came to know the work of Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai. Wangari’s life story helped me better understand the intersectionality of colonization, oppression, and the environment. Taking over people means separating them from each other, disconnecting them from their land and resources, and eradicating them of their culture. Maathai once said, “All people have their own culture, but when you remove that culture from them, then you kill them in a way. They may be alive physically, but you kill them” (Merton, Lisa, and Alan Dater).

To share Wangari’s incredible work through my art, I directed the project “Earth Echoes,” which included the new dance film Seeds of Hope and an online panel event featuring majority-Black women working in the arts and environment.

In my creative process for Seeds of Hope, I made dance phrases connected to the knowledge and history that Wangari shares in her documentary. For example, Wangari talks about deforestation and how it is a chain that disempowers and harms people. First, cutting trees leads to a lack of water, leading to a lack of firewood, the inability to traditionally cook, and the forced consumption of highly processed food, ending in sickness, disease, and death. In response, I choreographed a dance phrase that traveled linearly through space, emphasizing this invisible chain with my body.

Another dance section is a structured improvisation I call the Planting Trees Score. The dancers spread the soil, throw the seeds, gather and pack the dirt, carry the sprout, and place it inside the earth. We experimented with performing this score multiple ways, using different body parts, counts, duration sets, and sequence orders.

A photo still from the film Seeds of Hope, choreographed by Cherie Hill and performed by Hill and Lashon Daley, filmed and edited by Alexa Burrell

Standing up for equity and inclusion is critical. As dance artists or administrators, there are numerous ways we can advocate for social justice. I am grateful for the opportunity to support racial equity in my roles as a dancer, and I encourage those reading this to find the moments where you feel inspired to do the same. Equity is not a choice if we want our field to be inclusive and vibrant; it is necessary to benefit us all.

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References:

California Department of Education. “California Arts Education Framework – Visual & Performing Arts (CA Dept of Education).” California Department of Education, https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/vp/cf/. Accessed 25 March 2022.

California Department of Education. “California Arts Education Framework – Visual & Performing Arts (CA Dept of Education), Chapter 1 page 37.” California Department of Education, https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/vp/cf/. Accessed 25 March 2022.

Cristi, AA. “HMD’s The Bridge Project Presents A Conversation with Voguers Around Dance and Social Justice.” Broadway World, 27 October 2021, https://www.broadwayworld.com/san-francisco/article/HMDs-The-Bridge-Project-Presents-A-Conversation-with-Voguers-Around-Dance-and-Social-Justice-20211027. Accessed 25 March 2022.

Merton, Lisa, and Alan Dater, directors. Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai. Marlboro Production, 2008.

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To learn more about Cherie’s work, visit www.iriedance.com.

Cherie Hill is a dance educator and choreographer whose art explores human expression in collaboration with nature, music, and visual imagery. She has published research in Gender Forum, The Sacred Dance Journal, Dance Education in Practice, andIn Dance, and has presented at multiple conferences including the International Conference on Arts and Humanities and the Black Dance Conference. An advocate for equity, she has presented work on embedding dance and equity into practice at NDEO, National Guild for Community Arts Education, and Alameda County Office of Education conferences. Cherie has held artist residencies with Milk Bar, the David Brower Center, and CounterPulse’s Performing Diaspora Residency Program.

This essay was first printed in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2022 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The post Stand Up for Racial Equity appeared first on Stance on Dance.

This year marks Stance on Dance’s 10th birthday. In honor of the occasion (and a bit of a coincidence as well), I am pleased to announce that Stance on Dance has become a nonprofit and received 501c3 status. Stance on Dance’s nonprofit mission is to educate the dance community and wider audiences about dance from the perspective of underrepresented voices and access points. One way my board and I are fulfilling our mission is by launching a twice-yearly print publication that features and supports more dance writers and thus shares more perspectives. We will also distribute copies to dance educational institutions and to our donors who make this possible.

Allow me to wax philosophic about how Stance on Dance got to this point. I started Stance on Dance as a blog in 2012. As a freelance dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, I felt frustrated with the ways dance was written about. It was often written about by people without a deep knowledge of the artform, it was often review and preview oriented (and the show is but the tip of the iceberg), and it tended to follow the money and cover major ballet and modern companies while overlooking the varied world of freelance artists who pour their energy (and often their earnings) into making their art exist.

My idea was simple enough: I would publish interviews with fellow dance artists in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as solicit and edit content from colleagues. The blog often had a tone of being “on the ground,” as opposed to the more formal reviews and previews I contributed to various publications around San Francisco. I took pride in it being by and for dance artists. I published content once to twice a week, and it generally consisted of interviews conducted by me, essays by various colleagues, cartoons drawn by my roommate Maggie Stack satirizing the dance world, and music recommendations by my friend Jake Padilla. As time went on, my friend Ryan Kelley wrote drink recommendations to pair with various shows, a calendar listing with a twist.

From the get go, I loved producing content about dance and organizing an editorial calendar. And while the bawdy cartoons and drink recommendations were fun, it was the interviews with various dance artists that gained the most traction. I had an affinity for writing, but I was by no means a trained journalist. I was a dancer. As a result of Stance on Dance’s growth during that first year, I started to look into graduate programs in arts journalism. Around the same time, the cost of living in San Francisco started to skyrocket due to the tech bubble, and I felt trapped as a dancer barely making ends meet. I decided my time in San Francisco had come to a close.

In 2013, I entered a master’s program in Arts Journalism at the University of Southern California on scholarship and, through moving to Los Angeles, Stance on Dance began to cover artists beyond the Bay Area. As I developed a more journalistic tone, the blog became more professional in its coverage, transforming from a site that was mostly circulated amongst colleagues, to an online publication that was beginning to command a serious readership. My master’s thesis was a redevelopment of Stance on Dance with a sleek redesign, a more engaged social media presence, and employment of metrics to track and understand readership.

In 2013, I also began working on what would become the book Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, where I interviewed more than 50 dance artists over the age of 50 up and down the West Coast. I worked with Portland based photographer Gregory Bartning, who beautifully captured each interviewee. Our goal was to showcase the beauty and form in a dancer of any age, as well as to demonstrate how artistry enrichens with time. The compilation was published as a hardcover book in 2017.

After graduate school, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to South Africa to cover the National Arts Festival for Cue Newspaper, a printed daily arts newspaper that existed for the duration of the festival. Aside from the experience being a cultural whirlwind, I also began to appreciate for the first time how different print is from online content. Instead of an endless vertical scroll, themes could be developed across articles with the aid of good design. The reader’s attention is also different, with more sustained focus, as opposed to distraction after receiving notifications on a device. One day during my time in South Africa, I outlined a plan for a print version of Stance on Dance. Of course, I had graduate school debt, no job, and I didn’t even know where I would live next, but the seed was planted.

Upon returning to the states, I moved to Santa Fe, NM, and took a job as the editor of Fine Lifestyles Santa Fe, a glossy magazine that covered restaurants and shops in town. I didn’t care much for the content, but I relished the experience of working closely with a team of writers, photographers, sales reps, and designers to produce a print magazine. I took careful notes on the process, always having in the back of my mind that one day I might apply these skills to a print version of Stance on Dance.

Throughout grad school, my time in South Africa, and my time in Santa Fe working for the magazine, I continued to produce weekly (and often bi-weekly) content for Stance on Dance. As a result of working on the dancing over 50 book project as well as through my various experiences post graduate school, Stance on Dance increasingly became devoted to elevating the voices of those who are often marginalized in the dance world. These include older dancers, dancers of color, dancers who identify as LGBTQ, dancers who have a disability, fat dancers, dancers who live outside major metropolitan areas, women in leadership positions, dancers working outside well-funded institutions, and dancers who practice forms outside the Western canon. Through focusing on perspectives that have traditionally been marginalized in dance journalism, Stance on Dance found its footing as a journal where ideas and ways of working that challenge the status quo are covered and celebrated.

In 2017, I embarked on a second book project, this time in collaboration with Austin/Finland based dance educator Silva Laukkanen, interviewing professional dancers with disabilities. Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance came out this spring 2022 and features 35 professional dancers with disabilities in 15 countries. Through our interviews, Silva and I deepened our knowledge of problematic stereotypes, barriers to education, access issues, and terminology preferences. These interviews are accompanied with whimsical illustrations by San Francisco based artist Liz Brent-Maldonado.

That brings us to the present. After years of publishing weekly online content covering dance artists from many practices and places, Stance on Dance is excited to announce the launch of a twice-a-year print publication that will further promote dance and the many perspectives of its practitioners. This first issue features an interview by Sophia Diehl with dance movement therapist Giulia Carotenuto, an essay by Katie Flashner on relocating her life and dance practice from southern California to Maine, an essay by Cherie Hill on advocating for equity in dance spaces, an essay by Bhumi Patel on decolonizing praxis, three original dance inspired illustrations by Camille Taft, and an interview by Nikhita Winkler with French dance artist Illan Riviere. I also have contributed an interview with Miami-based choreographer Pioneer Winter on his intergenerational and physically integrated dance company, and an interview (translated and facilitated by Lorie House) with Colombian butoh artist Brenda Polo and her collaborators who are studying the effects of butoh on the brain. We will eventually publish all this content on stanceondance.com, but I believe the design and opportunity for more sustained reading brings the content to life in a different, hopefully more enjoyable, way.

Where will you read your copy of Stance on Dance? And will you share it with your friends?

I hope you will consider supporting Stance on Dance in this exciting new format by helping spread the word or becoming a donor/subscriber. Many thanks to those of you who have supported and followed Stance on Dance in its many iterations over the past decade!

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To donate to support dance journlism and recieve two issues of Stance on Dance in print a year, visit stanceondance.com/support.

To learn more about the Spring/Summer 2022 issue or to order a single copy, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The post Stance on Dance’s Journey to Print appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero are the co-directors of The Bridge Project, a Bay Area based project that creates and supports equity driven live-art that builds community and centers artists as agents of change. Here, they talk about their programming and their distributed leadership model. Additionally, Hope recently authored the book Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance in commemoration of The Bridge Project’s 10th anniversary. She shares more about how and why she wrote the book, as well as what she hopes readers glean.

Left: Cherie Hill, photo by Robbie Sweeny, top right: Hope Mohr, photo courtesy the artist, bottom right: Karla Quintero, photo by Robbie Sweeny

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Hope, can you briefly tell me about yourself so readers can get a sense of where you’re coming from and how The Bridge Project got started?

Hope Mohr: I am a white choreographer and activist, and I was a professional dancer for a long time. I danced for about 10 years in New York City, and I moved back to the Bay Area where I’m from in 2006. I started Hope Mohr Dance because I was interested in finding my voice as a choreographer after being a dancer for other people for a very long time.

In 2010, I started The Bridge Project. It started as a feminist platform for shared dance programming, but it has evolved iteratively over time in response to changing social and political contexts, and has become equity focused and equity driven, and now very much has an equity and anti-racism commitment at the heart of its programming. Another notable evolution is that over the past year and a half, it has evolved into a model of distributed leadership.

Cherie and Karla, can you each share a little about yourselves and your entry into The Bridge Project?

Karla Quintero: I’m from New York City originally. I moved to the Bay Area in 2012. I’m a dancer and performing artist. I don’t really call myself a choreographer, but I collaborate with friends on projects that use dance as a tool for what we want to say. I work a lot with improvisation.

I also co-direct The Bridge Project. A lot of my work around community-building and bringing about change and more equity in the dance world happens within that framework. My first interaction with The Bridge Project was as a dancer in 2016. I performed Trisha Brown repertoire as part of a program that featured 10 multidisciplinary artists responding to and interrogating the work of Trisha Brown, in particular the piece Locus.

In 2017, after some conversations with Hope where I shared my background working in transportation advocacy and in nonprofits in New York, she asked if I wanted to join and work with Hope Mohr Dance. That’s when I began working with the organization in an administrative capacity. In 2020, we shifted to a model of distributed leadership. Even though I had weighed in on programs before, this was the first time I co-curated programming, and that has continued into today.

Cherie Hill: I moved to the Bay Area in 2003 to go to UC Berkeley, where I got my BA in Dance and Performance Studies and African American Studies. While I was there, I had the opportunity to work with some Bay Area choreographers like Joe Goode and Kathleen Hermesdorf. I toured with the Bay Area Repertory Dance Company, and I took Afro-Haitian dance at Laney College. After graduating, I worked in the area as a dance teaching artist, and eventually left to pursue an MFA at the University of Colorado. I started creating and producing my own works as a choreographer, and I started my small dance company, Cherie Hill IrieDance.

In 2012, I returned to the Bay to choreograph and work in dance education and community. I taught in Oakland Unified School District. I taught creative dance to moms and children in rehabilitation centers. I also taught at the Oakland and Berkeley Libraries. I did this for about eight years.

I applied to be the Community Engagement Residency coordinator for Hope Mohr Dance about two years ago. I came into The Bridge Project this way. The Community Engagement Residency is a big part of The Bridge Project where we have resident artists who are working on a project that directly impacts the community through dance.

Cherie Hill, photo by Robbie Sweeny

In 2020, Hope asked Karla and me to join her as co-directors to start this distributed leadership model. And so I joined on as a co-director and also became a curator of The Bridge Project. I was excited about this because I hadn’t thought of myself as a curator and wanted to learn more. I was definitely looking forward to this focus of more cultural and racial equity. The first project I worked on with Hope and Karla was Power Shift, which was a dance festival we did around improvisation and bringing Black, Latinx, Asian, queer, and social justice activists into our programming to learn their thoughts and their experience around improvisation.

How is The Bridge Project organized with regards to its equity driven model of distributed leadership?

Karla: Right now, the way it’s organized is there are three co-directors and we all work part-time. We’re the administrative staff of the organization. When we have a program, we share the implementation duties. We discuss curatorial decisions and make them collectively. Anyone can suggest an idea for a program or an artist we want to work or partner with. Once that happens the other staff work to support that person in realizing that vision.

Because of the way we were structured before where Hope was the founder and I was the administrative manager, I took on a lot of the grant writing and marketing work. That division of labor has stuck. But if someone new were to come in, that could be potentially reinvented and we’d have a new distribution of working together.

Cherie: Another way I see equity showing up in The Bridge Project is through our curatorial efforts. Right now, we’re doing an anti-racism and dance series, and it seems like it’s a nice balance between all our interests as curators and also the community feedback around people’s interests or questions.

For example, I received some community feedback around anti-racism equity workshops in general tending to cater more toward white people and the work they need to do, the questions they have, or the fragility that surrounds them. Some of our artists who are BIPOC shared that they do not feel like these workshops are for them even though they are showing up. I’ve felt that way myself sometimes at equity workshops. So with this series we were thinking about what BIPOC folks need in this work as well as white folks. The program is an example of that. We have events for different people who are at different stages in this work. That’s an example of how we’re thinking about equity and working together day-by-day to show programming that reflects that.

What is the relationship between Hope Mohr Dance and The Bridge Project?

Hope: Hope Mohr Dance holds the 501c3 status, so legally it’s the container for The Bridge Project, but The Bridge Project has really become the core program of the organization.

In terms of how we’ve been trying to implement equity, we’ve made a few structural moves that have been really important, including moving to pay equity. All three of us are paid the same rate on an hourly basis. We also started paying dancers as employees at the same rate we pay ourselves. Those moves felt really important in terms of walking the equity talk.

Centering artists’ voices is also essential to our model of distributed leadership. It’s not just about sharing power as a staff, but also about sharing power with artists in the community. Our Community Engagement Residency is another big part of that commitment. We’re also about to launch an Artist Curatorial Council, which will be a paid group of artists who will be given 30 percent of The Bridge Project’s budget to implement their curatorial visions. Similarly, our board is 100 percent working artists.

Hope Mohr, photo courtesy the artist

Hope, you recently authored a book, Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance. Can you share what the impetus was for the book and your experience writing it?

Hope: Christy Bolingbroke at the National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron approached me in 2018 to write a book commemorating the 10th anniversary of The Bridge Project, which was in 2020. This is the first book in their book series.

I didn’t originally know what format it would take. I thought it would be an annotated archive. Out of the work of archiving the project’s history, the content started organizing itself into case studies of different programs, relationships with artists, and lessons I have learned. Out of that, a narrative emerged about the importance of decentering whiteness and implementing new models of relationship in dance.

What do you hope readers take away?

Hope: I hope readers take away that the time is now for new models in dance that are based in relationship instead of transaction. The time is now for new models based in equity. There’s so much need in the field for change. Change is so possible.

I try to emphasize in the book that making mistakes is a big part of the work. By coming forward and saying, “I made all these mistakes and this is what I learned,” I hope people will be encouraged to do the same kind of work.

What impact have you seen from The Bridge Project?

Karla: It’s hard to talk about the impact of the program in the field because I’m more intimately connected with the ways it has impacted me or other artists we partner with. I think that for the time I’ve been involved, we’ve evolved the way we partner with artists. We focus on growing our understanding of what it means to meaningfully support artists. Our partnerships with artists have a structure at the outset, like a residency or a performance opportunity, but that structure is emerging and flexible. We’re interested in developing a relationship that allows us to meet the artist where they are in their artistic trajectory. If what they need is to be in conversation with someone with more experience, whether that’s us or someone we connect them with, we facilitate that. Or maybe they just need access to resources and funding, and we’ll facilitate that.

For me, the relationships and trust we’re building with artists is the impact. A lot of artists of color haven’t had great experiences working with institutions. Many of them feel that when they are invited into an institution, it’s to check a box. The institution is not really interested in getting to know them as artists or being responsive to their work. I hope one impact of the program is that a nonprofit can have relationships with artists that are not paternalistic or transactional, and where both parties are learning, growing, and evolving.

Karla Quintero, photo by Stephen Texeira

Cherie: In the past year and a half, in the field in general I’ve seen a change. People are speaking out more publicly, especially during the pandemic. I have deeply heard these cries about harm and wanting change. In my experience, Hope Mohr Dance has been called upon as an ally to artists to help them think through some of these situations. We’ve been on calls around how an organization can be restructured to be more socially or racially just. We’ve been asked to help when there’s been artists in a community in conflict who are trying to work something out and harm has been accused. Hope Mohr Dance is in the puddle, so to speak, with some of these issues.

We are moving with a field that wants to shift toward being more equitable. There are certain stakeholders who see us as a resource or see us as an ally. That’s been really cool for me to witness for the past year and a half.

Hope: I don’t know if I can speak to the impact of the program. I do feel like it has built relationships between artists, and I think in a way there is nothing more important. I’ve seen relationships last between artists who have been brought together by different Bridge Project programs. That is super rewarding. I know that word “community” is elusive, but it does come from artist-to-artist relationships.

As we all know, the field has undergone a reckoning over the past year. I’ll be very curious to see how much of those lessons stay as people rush back into production mode. I hope we can continue to hold a space for thoughtful approaches to building relationships among artists.

What’s next for The Bridge Project? Is there an upcoming project or focus you want to share more about?

Karla: I am co-curating an online bilingual media series with David Herrera and Mario Ismael Espinoza called Danzacuentos: Voz, Cuerpo y Raíces. It features five different artists of Latin American and Indigenous heritage. I’ve always been curious about media representation of dance artists, and particularly Latin American and Indigenous dance artists. It feels like their narratives are limited to stories of their struggles, or of triumph by way of being accepted into or by an elite institution. A lot of model minority narratives are tied with getting a job in a company, for example. As a series co-curator, I wanted to see if we could profile artists in a way that they felt like they were driving their own narrative and were able to share what they wanted about their work, lives, process, politics, identities, and heritage, and how these all intersect. I wanted to create a space where artists could feel safe to share and where we could invite people to listen without preconceived notions or biases. It’s the first time we’re co-curating something like this and it’s exciting; we’re learning a lot about how you make change in the media happen. The series website, danzacuentos.org, will include interviews with each of the artists. And then each of the artists contributed different artifacts from their creative processes: images, writing, video, playlists. We’re having a live event where people can ask the artists questions on Zoom on September 17th at 5pm Pacific.

Danzacuentos artists:
Row 1: Snowflake Calvert, Cinthia Pérez Navarro, Lyvan Verdecia
Row 2: Dulce Escobedo, Marianna Escobedo
Row 3: Co-curators Mario Ismael Espinoza, David Herrera, Karla Quintero

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To learn more about The Bridge Project, visit www.bridgeproject.art.

To order Hope’s book, Shifting Culture Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance, visit www.nccakron.org/books.

The post Shifting Toward Models of Equity appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT; PHOTOS BY ROBBIE SWEENY

Kathleen Hermesdorf is the founder and director of the FRESH Festival in San Francisco each January, which features nearly a month of experimental dance, music and performance. This coming festival, she will premier her new piece, Reckoning, to mark the 20th anniversary of making work under the umbrella of her company, ALTERNATIVA. Here she discusses the impetus for FRESH, what ‘experimental’ means, and why ‘reckoning’ is an appropriate theme to tackle the times.

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Can you tell me a little about the history of the FRESH Festival and how it got started?

FRESH sprang from an intersection of timing and space availability, along with the desire to spend more time in San Francisco, start the year off with art and our favorite artists, and with a bang.

Albert Mathias, my partner and a musician, and I had traveled a lot and were wondering how to get the people we met on tour to come to San Francisco. We started by allotting a week between Christmas and New Year to focus on training. It was us, Sara Shelton Mann and some other colleagues. We held it in what was at the time Kunst-Stoff Arts. Because of the access to that space, we could do it cheap. It started in 2009.

The performance aspect kept coming up, whether it was teachers making work on the participants or someone wanting to share something new. It ended up shifting more toward a performance festival in 2014/2015, but the practice element is still extremely important. The festival is just over three weeks long. It went from being one week between the holidays to taking up almost all of January. We shifted over to Joe Goode Annex, a beautiful space.

In 2010, around the same time FRESH began, I started PORCH with Stephanie Maher, the founder of Ponderosa in Stolzenhagen, Germany. She and I had danced together in San Francisco for years, and she and her partner were living in Berlin and had gotten a piece of land outside of Berlin with a collective of people. We launched PORCH, a three-month training program, as a portal for professional and aspiring dance artists into the field and the Berlin dance scene, as well as a bridge to San Francisco.

How do the performance and learning opportunities at FRESH Festival intersect?

There is a great deal of cross-over between the classes and performances. We have four weekends of performances, and most of the artists who perform also teach. There are additional artists doing one or the other, as well as those who offer exchanges, which might include informal performances, forums, music events, potlucks or pop-up laboratories.

I’m co-curating this year with José Navarrete of NAKA Dance Theater. He is bringing in some wonderful programming with the Deaf community, represented by Antoine Hunter and Ayisha Knight-Shaw, Byb Chanel Bibene and a cast of 20 local dancers; Regina Evans, who works with women who have been sexually trafficked; and EastSide Arts Alliance, hosting part of our Cultural Exchange/Mexico.

In 2014/2015, I started working with Ernesto Soprani, who was also in Kunst-Stoff Arts, and who did amazing design work that set a new tone for FRESH. He helped open the festival with regards to his work at THEOFFCENTER representing queer, POC and underground populations. Even though I had worked with a lot of artists from different communities and cultures, it took a while for that to open up in terms of representation in the festival.

FRESH Festival has an emphasis on experimental performance – how do you decide if something is experimental and which artists will participate?

It’s an intertwined, intersecting community, from my own community to José’s community, over to the artists being curated at the EastSide Arts Alliance doing radical imagination work. There’s a ripple effect of who comes in. I don’t seek proposals or have an application process. I look around at who’s up to something, who’s passing through town, who’s interested in the theme of the festival. A lot of it is through me – people I know and respect, and my co-curators, but there is that ripple effect of curation through the community. I don’t want all the responsibility; I don’t think it makes sense representationally. It’s very organic through the artists, the collaborators, and the people who keep coming through. It’s not about who’s cool or hip necessarily.

Over the past 10 years, how have you seen FRESH Festival change and grow?

Joe Goode Annex has limited capacity and we’re full. My hope is that in the next 10 years we’ll be moving into bigger spaces and more spaces. FRESH Festival has been growing alongside my ambitions and desires to offer artists themes and reasons to try new things. Whatever artists get pigeonholed into – the grant or the cycle – it’s important to try something new. What are you interested in? I’ll make it happen. This is what I mean by experimental. A lot of it comes out of discussions and dialogues with people wanting to change things up, so I want artists to use the opportunity to try something new.

The word “experimental” has been around for so long, but what does it mean now in 21st century America with the blowing up of feminism, racial politics, and realizing what representation means? In some ways, what I’m doing is selfish: I want to be a part of the now and learn from the next wave; I want to make work every year and I want to be around my colleagues, meet new people, and learn from other artists, so I created this unique little arena. I find it easier to get funding for a lot of artists than just for my project.

You are also celebrating the 20th anniversary of ALTERNATIVA by creating a new piece, Reckoning. Can you share a little more about what ideas you’re exploring in the piece, and why you chose the theme to represent this year’s FRESH Festival as a whole?

I’m super excited about it. I mostly work with Albert as a duet, but I also work with others from time to time under ALTERNATIVA. For the past two to three years, I’ve been cultivating this group of people I’ve met through Ponderosa every summer. They’re from Hungary, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Israel, Denmark – all over. Some of these actors, dancers and musicians are coming to San Francisco and we’re going to make a piece with them and five dancers based here. It will be improvisational, partly because we can’t afford a long rehearsal process. I’ve been doing processes with them over the past two or three years where we meet for at least a week and we inhabit a space, take it over, and perform for two or three hours by opening it up to the public.

The theme for last year’s festival was ‘Antidote.’ This year, ‘Reckoning’ is a bit of a harder edge. We have to face the music, do the math, deal with reality, and clean up these messes. I’m not sure exactly what my piece will entail, but it will be slightly nostalgic looking at the history of ALTERNATIVA. I’m going to bring back a lot of props and costumes. It’s going to be quite interdisciplinary. I think there are going to be 13 performers, and we’re going to take the whole evening on the last weekend of the festival.

For me, this theme is super personal. A harder edge is something I see inside, outside and all over. Reckoning can mean accountability, a belief system, a truth. It resonates for me with how the world is right now. I’m done being nice and accepting the powers that be.

As far as it being the theme of the festival, some people take it very seriously. Other artists use it as an instigation to make something new. Others have something else in mind, but we’ve decided it fits. I choose themes that have many entendres.

You’ve worked in Europe and around the US – I’m wondering if you can reflect on what “experimental” or “cutting edge” mean in different geographic places?

I think it comes out in different ways. In Europe, people work more in the social sector and there’s a different culture around the arts. In the States, we’re more reactionary as we encounter new things. However, experimentalism is where advocacy, activism and art get mixed up and play out in different forms and frames. I’m excited about that intersection. Europeans tend to have more patience for things; Americans want to be smacked in the face right away. Attention spans are different. But a lot of Europe is also going through what we are in the States right now politically with feminism, fascism, race issues, climate change and immigration. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we all have to share the burden and culpability. It’s a serious reckoning.

Europe generally has more arts funding than the US. In lieu of resources, what can dance artists and advocates in the US do to make sure we have a vibrant and rigorous dance community despite not having lots of funding?

I would say an independent experimental scene faces similar challenges almost everywhere in terms of funding, whether you’re in Berlin, Amsterdam, New York or San Francisco. FRESH is a response to that: make something new, taste your limits, talk about what’s going on, test it on an audience, talk to other artists. This is how I believe I can contribute to creating a vibrant scene in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

The FRESH Festival is sort of like a Brigadoon – a place where we can just be artists for 24 days, long enough to make or break a habit, or more. FRESH is modeled on my favorite parts of some of my favorite festivals – Bates, ImPulsTanz, Ponderosa – and one of the main things I like about those models is that they go on for a long time, at least three weeks. People have enough time to network and make connections.

San Francisco has changed so much due to tech gentrification over the past decade. Why is it important to you to continue to contribute to the dance scene there by building this festival? 

I’m not pleased with how things have been going. The city has changed so much, and I travel so much, I barely recognize it when I come back. There are enough people here still doing great things and making things happen that I can commit to FRESH. I don’t know if I will stay in the Bay Area forever. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I do still believe in the primitive streak in the Bay Area. There’s still more possibility if we can get away from the capitalism of it.

To the techies, I say this: You came to my city, you took over, and now you call yourselves “the creatives.” But if you are willing to deal with homelessness and support the arts, we can get along. It doesn’t have to be us versus them; take, for instance, Kinetech Arts, which is a multidisciplinary dance and tech company. Maybe we can inspire each other. I haven’t figured out how to have that perfect relationship with the tech industry yet. There’s an element of reckoning to it.

What are you personally most looking forward to at this year’s Festival?

With these big anniversaries, I’m mostly excited for that sense of past to future overview. I’m at a time in my life where I’m having a reckoning – what’s adding up and what’s not? What needs to be weeded out and what should be recycled? I also want to have time to participate. Sometimes I get so into the producer role that I just run around the whole time.

I want FRESH to go on for another 10 years, but I probably need more partners. It keeps getting bigger and bigger. It’s becoming quite a beast and I need more collaborators, whether that’s spaces, organizations or artistic groups. I’d love to draw thousands of people every January to San Francisco to participate in experimental performance.

Any other thoughts?

I have this meta concept of the reckoning, and then I have more subterranean ones. I am featuring a lot of powerful, articulate women this year. We also have a really special relationship this year with Mexico; several artists are coming up to teach, perform and talk as part of a cultural exchange. We have amazing artists from Europe, including FAKE Company and FRESH relocated regulars Christine Bonansea and Sherwood Chen, along with a posse from Ponderosa. I’m excited to see what some of my favorite local artists will contribute to the feast, including powerhouses Amara Tabor-Smith and Larry Arrington; Byb Chanel Bibene and a cast of 20 Bay Area dancers; and Monique Jenkinson and Mica Sigourney, bringing the drag back to FRESH. There’s also the action in the RIPE [raw + intimate performance experiments] platform, featuring work by Jøse Abad and Gabriel Christian, as well as artists from the Bay Area, East Coast and Texas. FRESH 2019 will be a reunion for the future.

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To learn more, visit freshfestival.org.

The dance, music and performance makers participating in FRESH 2019 include Jøse Abad | ALTERNATIVA | Juan Manuel Aldape | Arletta Anderson | Larry Arrington | Raha Behnam | Byb Chanel Bibene | Adi Brief | Chani Bockwinkel | Christine Bonansea | Alexa Burrell | Malia Byrne | Sherwood Chen | Gabriel Christian | Abby Crain | Alex Crow | DAFUQ | Claudette Decarbonel | Karen de Luna | Nicia De’Lovely | Ryanaustin Dennis | Sofia Engelman | Kim Epifano/Epiphany Dance Theater | Regina Evans | Wiley Evans | Asha Fashalacqua | Richard Festinger | C.D. Fisher | Daria Garina | Samcia Gaye | Letitia Goodjoint | Cookie Harrist | Keith Hennessy | Kathleen Hermesdorf | Jesse Hewit | Cherie Hill | Steven Horner | Gwen Hornig | Antoine Hunter | Monique Jenkinson | David Jensen | Jonah Kagan | Debby Kajiyama | Kinetech Arts | Allison King | Ayisha Knight-Shaw | Kata Kovács | Kentaro Kumanomido | Andrew Kushin | Sriba Kwadjovie | Angelina Labate | Raymond Larrett | Claudia Lavista | Daiane Lopes da Silva | Tanja London | Twyla Malchow-Hay | Lisa Manca | Ursula Marcussen | Diego Martínez Lanz | Albert Mathias | Elaine Maurer | Delaney McDonough | Magdalena Meyers Dahlkamp | Rena Meyers-Dahlkamp | Gizeh Muñiz | NAKA Dance Theater | José Navarrete | Thomas Anthony Owen | Em Papineau | Chrysa Parkinson | Jonathan Pattiwael | ProyectoCASĀ | Proyecto al Margen | Brontez Purnell | Zoe Reich-Aviles | Randy Reyes | Sebastian Santamaría | Johnny Sapinoso | Najwa Seyedmorteza | Sara Shelton Mann | Coral Short | Mica Sigourney | Manon Siv | Adam Smith | Laurel Snyder | Farah Soltane | Andréa Spearman | Amara Tabor-Smith | Ainsley Tharp | Janine Trinidad | Jessy Tuddenham | Sophia Wang | Amy Wasielewski | Hannah Wasielewski | Marvin K. White | Ian Winters | Miriam Wolodarski | Dwayne Worthington | Weidong Yang | Pamela Z | more TBA.

The post A Festival of Reckoning appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Meet our director and editor:

Emmaly Wiederholt is a dance artist and arts journalist based in Albuquerque, NM. She founded Stance on Dance in 2012. Emmaly earned her MA in Arts Journalism from the University of Southern California and her BFA in Ballet and BS in Political Science from the University of Utah. She further trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and performed extensively around the Bay Area. Her first book, Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, was published in 2017, and her second book, Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance, was published in 2022. Emmaly is also a master DanceAbility instructor and facilitates movement groups at the UNM Hospital adult psychiatric ward, as well as is a founding member of the dance advocacy nonprofit ABQ Dance Connect. She continues to perform throughout the Southwest.

Photo by Allen Winston

Our contributors have included:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert, a performance artist and organizer in the Bay Area.

Gregory Bartning, a photographer in Portland, OR.

Liz Duran Boubion, the director of the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers in the Bay Area.

Liz Brent-Maldonado, an artist, writer, educator, and producer in San Francisco, CA.

Michelle Chaviano, a ballet dancer with Ballet North Texas.

Bradford Chin, a disabled dance artist and accessibility consultant in Chicago, IL, and San Francisco, CA.

Shebana Coelho, a writer and performer currently studying flamenco in Spain.

breana connor, an interdisciplinary artist, facilitator + healer in Albuquerque, NM.

Lauren Coons, an interdisciplinary artist, performer, healer and educator in Albuquerque, NM.

Julia Cost, a painter, textile designer, sewist, and dancer in Maui, HI.

Sophia Diehl, a dancer in New York City.

Bonnie Eissner, a writer in New York City.

Katie Flashner, a.k.a. The Girl with the Tree Tattoo, a World Champion ballroom dancer and author in ME.

Micaela Gardner, a dancer and choreographer in Baja, Mexico.

Sarah Groth, an interdisciplinary artist from Albuquerque, NM.

Cherie Hill, a dance educator and choreographer based in the Bay Area.

Lorie House, a dancer, choreographer, and lawyer in NM.

Silva Laukkanen, a dance educator and disability advocate in Austin, TX.

Mary Elizabeth Lenahan, the director of Dance Express in Fort Collins, CO.

Shannon Leypoldt, a dance artist, teacher, and sports massage therapist in Berlin.

Erin Malley, a dance artist and tango teacher based in West Michigan.

Julianna Massa, a dance artist in Albuquerque, NM.

Aiano Nakagawa, a dance artist, educator, facilitator, writer, and event producer in the Bay Area.

Jessie Nowak, a dance artist and filmmaker in Portland, OR.

Kevin O’Connor, a multidisciplinary artist in London, Ontario, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bhumi B Patel, an artist/activist based in the Bay Area.

Stephanie Potreck, a sports nutritionist and health advocate who currently resides in Germany.

Jill Randall, artistic director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA.

Kathryn Roszak, a choreographer, filmmaker, educator, and activist in the Bay Area.

Donna Schoenherr, director of Ballet4Life and Move into Wellbeing in London, UK.

Maggie Stack, a dancer and teacher in Reno, NV.

Camille Taft, a CO front range-based mover and visual artist.

Mary Trunk, a filmmaker, choreographer, and multimedia artist in Altadena, CA.

Diana Turner-Forte, a teaching artist, healing arts coach, and writer in NC.

Ana Vrbaski, a body music practitioner in Serbia.

Nikhita Winkler, a dancer, choreographer, and teacher from Namibia who currently resides in Spain.

Erica Pisarchuk Wilson, a dance artist, visual artist and poet in Albuquerque, NM.

Rebecca Zeh, an interdisciplinary artist in Sarasota Springs, NY.

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Our board:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert

Cathy Intemann

Alana Isiguen

Courtney King

Malinda LaVelle

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The post People appeared first on Stance on Dance.