Fresh Festival 2024 Performances
Featuring 2 weekends of performances by: Clarissa Rivera Dyas + ainsley elizabeth tharp, Sonja Pregrad, enNingúnlugar, Sara Shelton Mann, Jesse Zaritt, Niall Jones, mayfield brooks
enNingúnLugar
CINÉTICA
Friday + Saturday | February 9 + 10, 2024 | 8pm | @Dance Mission Theater
In a world ravaged by injustice and violence, Cinética, an unbeatable superheroine emerges.
With unparalleled power and an innate sense of justice, Cinética has dedicated her life to fighting crime and protecting the innocent. However, as their consciousness awakens, Cinética is forced to question her own role in the cycles of violence that plagues the world. She finds herself at a moral crossroads: struggling to reconcile her desire to protect, with the need of finding a more compassionate and sustainable solution to combat "evil."
This work examines the complexities of justice, morality and personal responsibility in a world filled with seemingly insurmountable challenges. Can Cinética find a way to combat violence without becoming part of the problem?
En un mundo asolado por la injusticia y la violencia, surge una superheroína imbatible conocida como "Cinética". Con un poder inigualable y un sentido innato de la justicia, ha dedicado su vida a combatir el crimen y proteger a los inocentes. Sin embargo, a medida que su consciencia se despierta, Cinética se ve obligada a cuestionar su propio papel en el ciclo de la violencia que azota al mundo. Se encuentra en una encrucijada moral, luchando por reconciliar su deseo de proteger con la necesidad de encontrar una solución más compasiva y sostenible para combatir "el mal".
Esta obra examina las complejidades de la justicia, la moralidad y la responsabilidad personal en un mundo lleno de desafíos aparentemente insuperables. ¿Puede Cinética encontrar una manera de combatir la violencia sin convertirse en parte del problema?
enNingúnlugar
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Founded in 2014, enNingúnlugar is a creative community of artists and arts organizers from México, Chile, and Colombia, dedicated to the living arts, educational avant-gardes, and the development of interdisciplinary cultural projects that are interested in the experience of being body in different contexts.
Since 2017 we have operated simultaneously as an artistic collective and cultural organization.
enNingúnlugar is a vehicle for interdisciplinary experimentation, movement research and the creation of performance resources that promote critical thinking and allow us to gather with the bodies to move and doubt.
Since 2014, we have developed creative and pedagogical research projects in collaboration with Latin American artists of different disciplines. These projects have been shared in the USA, Central America, South America, Mexico and Europe.
We are currently based in Querétaro, México, where we coordinate Casa Verde Centro Cultural Alternativo, a space that defends diversity, art, and freedom.
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Founder and coordinator of the collective enNingúnlugar and member of the board of directors of the civil association ENNINGUNLUGAR A.C. Teacher and researcher of the body and performance since 2009. A HUMANIMAL researcher, he develops his training methods at Casa Verde Central Creativa in Querétaro, México.
He has been part of the creative and performative work of the companies: Lux Boreal (Tijuana, MX), Iseli-Chiodi Dance Company (Ireland), FDR Dance Company (Netherlands/Mexico).
His work has been shared in the USA, Ireland, France, Brazil, Germany, Ecuador, Switzerland, Colombia, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, and México.
Currently a student in Physiotherapy, Chiropractic and Sports Rehabilitation.
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Anna Karen Gonzalez Huesca is a Mexican performer, teacher and movement researcher. She has been a member of the enNingúnlugar collective and enNingúnlugar A.C. since 2018, where she creatively develops artistic projects and social projects with a focus on culture and the arts, working alongside institutions such as ACNUR, CAMMI, FM4, the Secretariat of Culture of the state of Querétaro and others. She is also a member of the Continuum Training System Teachers Network and the Humanimal research team. She was a member of the Aura Dance Theatre company in 2014 and 2015 in Lithuania, where she also was invited as a choreographer. She has been an invited dancer with companies such as Delfos Contemporary Dance, Moving Borders, and Tania Perez Salas, all of these companies are based in Mexico. She has shared her classes and danced in countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Lithuania, Poland, Ecuador, Germany, France, Italy, United States, and throughout Mexico.
Clarissa and Ainsley
forever failing(workinprogress#1)
Friday + Saturday | February 9 + 10, 2024 | 8pm | @Dance Mission Theater
In our work forever failing(workinprogress#1) we are molting and reimagining our corporeality as failure, as explicit, as queer, as reverence for the past, and ways to uncover new futures in anti-colonial reimaginings. Together we highlight failure as a form of protest, as a way to negate capitalism’s obsession with the perfect product and uncover new mythologies of becoming. We are activating our identities then letting go of what is already perceived by the “audience.”
Clarissa and Ainsley
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ainsley elizabeth tharp is a Bay Area(Ohlone land) based alchemist+artist+activist.
she grew up in a small Texas town called Victoria(Karankawas land), she carries with her influence from catholic school, celtic folklore, mexican/tijuana culture, and white southern trailer trash. She’s a multimedia witch working to build new systems and queer futures as an artist and collaborator. She creates visual alchemy as performance using various modes and media, such as movement, magic, ritual, video, projection, lighting, and the sculpting of readymade objects. Her work investigates queerness as a form of failure, failure as a tool for utopia, and utopia as an idea to strive for but is so unknown that it may never exist.
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OBJECT OF
DANCE
What could a drag persona called ‘Object of Dance’ talk to us about?
What is a drag of contemporary dance? In this solo I am trying to stretch the concept of a drag from the body (identity) towards movement, speech and dance as a (theatre) performance. I am appropriating, estranging and modifying the way I perform - gender, body, presence, materiality, movement - by splitting the roles of an author, spectator and performer into fragments smaller than a singularity.
‘This work lays upon Pregrad’s strong performativity, and is structured as a wild poem in movement, made of a dog’s bark, a ballet jump, a gaze returned through a mirror, an apple bite, an ox’s horn, a postmodern glitchy and flowing body and a lip-synch of an inner voice.’
Sunday, February 11
6pm
@ Dance Mission Theater
$5-$25 sliding scale
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Sonja Pregrad is a Croatian choreographer, performer, teacher and performance curator. She is a founder and producer of the festival IMPROSPEKCIJE (since 2007) that FRESH has been exchanging with for the last two years, as well as ANTISEZONA collective, running a program of performance art at Contemporary Art Museum in Zagreb.
As a performer she has been working with choreographers Meg Stuart, Boris Charmatz, Isabelle Schad, visual artist Sanja Iveković, and others. She has been continuously teaching at New Media department of Fine Art Academy and Dance department of Dramatic Art Academy in Zagreb and at ROAR Berlin independent program.
This practice of making by translating has been developed through her ongoing teaching in dance and visual art contexts. It has also been very inspired by the non-stopping practice by American artist and mentor Jeanine Durning. She believes every moment we put our commitment into is a seed containing our life’s work. And it’s a play and a practice to sharpen our perception in how we work with it.
Sonja holds an MA Solo Dance Authorship from Universitaet der Kunste Berlin. For her choreographic and performance work she has received three Croatian National Theatre Awards and 5 nominations, three Croatian Dance Associations Awards and a special mention of 26th Slavonian Biennale, and has also been awarded for the organisation and curation of the festival Improspekcije (since 2007).
Sara Shelton Mann
in collaboration: Sara Shelton Mann, Jesse Zaritt
sound designer: Niall Jones
within the heart / you get lost
Friday + Saturday | February 16 + 17, 2024 | 8pm | @Dance Mission Theater
1. we take a trip
2. you get lost
3. we draw our way out
1. you have a dream
2. we get lost / it’s a dead end
3. the water is rising / you draw your way out
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Sara Shelton Mann moved to New York City and began dancing at 21. She toured with Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis in the 1960’s. She moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia to find out what she would create without N.Y.C. developing an interdisciplinary approach to creativity and art making. She moved to San Francisco, California in 1979 and created a group, Contraband bringing together artists and disciplines woven together as an experimental performance research tribe. The desire was enlightenment through art/healing through art.
Among her awards are a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 6 Isadora Duncan Awards,Djerassi Artist in Residence Awards, Headlands Center for the Arts Residency 2016,Lifetime Achievement Bay Guardian Award, 10 Women who made a Difference, Bay Guardian Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2016). Sara has practiced dowsing as a healing modality since 2010, is a Master NLP practitioner, and has a Master Certification in Intuition Medicine . She holds a certification as a Shamanic GiGong Practitioner and with the Institute of Spiritual HealingFoundation and Level 1) Her Moving Alchemy training is an ongoing teaching project and is influenced by certifications and studies in the metaphysical and healing traditions over many years. Sara’s performance work is a platform for collaboration and research in consciousness.
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Jesse Zaritt’s work engages drawing as dancing - a visual and physical practice linked to dreaming, drafting, and materializing futures. His choreographic, performance and teaching practices research the ways in which excessive, contemplative and resistive dance practices change how movement arises in the world and how dancing participates in processes of social transformation. A series of solo works made between 2008 and 2022 interrogate attachments to Jewish ritual and community, seeking to queer dominant paradigms of familial/national belonging, religion, gender and sexuality.
Zaritt currently works in creative dialogue with Sara Shelton Mann.
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Niall Jones (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is an artist working and living in New York City. Niall constructs, inhabits, and explores the theater as a mode and location of instabilities. Niall received a Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer in 2017, and more recently, a 2021 Grants-To-Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. Recent works include: A Work for Others at The Kitchen OnScreen (2021);Fantasies in Low Fade at The Chocolate Factory, New York (2019); Sis Minor: The Preliminary Studies at Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Germany (2018); Sis Minor, in Fall at Abrons Arts Center, New York (2018); Splendor #3 at Gibney Dance, New York (2017). Niall received a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.He teaches at the University of the Arts School of Dance in Philadelphia, where he is also Producer and Co-Curator of The School for Temporary Liveness (Vol. 1 & 2).
in collaboration: Sara Shelton Mann, Jesse Zaritt
sound design: Niall Jones
mayfield brooks in collaboration with Camilo Restrepo and electric cellist Dorothy Carlos
Whale Fall: lamentations
Friday + Saturday | February 16 + 17, 2024 | 8pm | @Dance Mission Theater
Whale Fall is an ever evolving interdisciplinary work of film, installation and dance that was born from the sonic dissidence of Black grief. Do we give ourselves time to grieve? How can grief be decomposed and transformed? Whale Fall is a scientific term describing the process of a whale's decomposition after it dies and falls to the ocean floor while providing nutrients for thousands of sea creatures. For this project, the Whale Fall becomes the decomposed dance, the space of grief and regeneration, the lamentation, the ecstasy, the song and the sonic release. This excerpt is a live vocal and movement lament.
mayfield brooks + Dorothy Carlos
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mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their dance film, Whale Fall, and was a 2022 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. To learn more about their work go to www.improvisingwhileblack.com
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Dorothy Carlos is an experimental cellist and electronic musician working in improvised performance and multi-channel sound in New York City and Chicago. Her work utilizes randomized electronics and extended techniques to explore fragility and imaginaries. Recent solo performances have been presented by e-flux, Experimental Sound Studio Chicago, Big Ears Festival, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dorothy has been featured as an artist and collaborator in projects presented at the Swiss Institute (New York), Zhou Brothers Art Center (Chicago), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Artists Space (New York), and the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (Fall River, MA) and has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Experimental Sound Studio Chicago, Avaloch Farm, the Next Festival for Emerging Artists, and the Living Gallery. Her work has been featured in Artforum, e-flux, The Quietus, and the Chicago Reader. Last year, Dorothy released an album on the Chicago-based label American Dreams in collaboration with artist, Brian Oakes. Other recent collaborators include Catalina Ouyang, mayfield brooks, Poncili Creacion, and Shala Miller. Dorothy holds a Bachelor’s degree from NYU where she studied classical cello and anthropology on full scholarship, and an MFA in sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Camilo Restrepo is a Colombian artist and designer, experimenter and explorer of the body and movement, swimmer and energy worker, a creative, mystical and adventurous being hungering for simplicity and for the expansion of mental, physical and energetic limits.