WHAT’S NEXT?
Community conversation about what is next for this festival and beyond

((POTLUCK))

6 - 8 pm 

@ Joe Goode Annex

QUEERING ECOLOGIES: ROT edition
Friday, Feb 21
1 - 5 pm
@ Joe Goode Annex
$45
email freshreg753@gmail.com for low income sliding scale

This is a collage, a quilt, a portal, a spell. This is not a contact jam or compositional improvisation jam. This is a space where queer energies and potentialities explore, expand, take off!! In this open-ended collaboration we will co-create, synthesize, cry in the corner, decompress, dance like nobody's watching, perform for no one, perform for each other, co-conspire and challenge what is polite. 

We will make art. 

We will collectively perform world-making, space shaping, composting, and dissolve.

 We will leave behind memories and maps for future convergence. 
This is fantasy and fiction and something in-between.

Logistics: 

1p-5p 
bring a lunch and snacks to share

1p-2p: warm-up + circle time

2-3:30p ITS SHOW TIME BABY
3:30p-5pm debrief and clean up<3 

1. We will make a mess together and we will clean up our mess together

2. I will provide some costumes, textiles, props to play with, a speaker, a camcorder, and art supplies. 

BUT>>> plzzz bring  your own costumes, props, materials, instruments, poetry, an idea, your favorite song, etc.

3. We will begin in collective decision making and process, building a manifesto together, creating roles, setting intentions for the space, and naming desires.

4. We will end holding hands and holding each other in discussion and aftercare.

I am sourcing inspiration for space holding from my teachers and my teachers teachers, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Keith Hennessey, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Sara Shelton Mann, Abby Crain, Isabel Lewis, the Architects, Tommy DeFrantz, José Esteban Moñoz (Cruising Utopia).

This jam will be held by ainsley elizabeth tharp and Kevin Lo

ainsley e. tharp’s work is experimental, feminine but not very ladylike, fixated on failure as protest, and informed by improvisation as play, impermanence as study, and mess making as necessity. She is an interdisciplinary artist and witch working in between and with fringe subcultures rooted in the Bay Area. Her work is inspired by antiracism, proto feminism, and anarchist principles and practices. ainsley’s artistic background is in the field of experimental dance, visual art, video art, and projection design.  She works towards creating and organizing low-income accessible art access spaces in the Bay Area. She is currently organizing and teaching with the ˈɡaT͟H(ə)riNGs class series with her collaborator gizeh muñiz vengel a community run donation based dance class series.  She is also a part of the curatorial & organizational team for ROT 2025 (formally known as FRESH) a festival the centers queerness, QTBIPOC, and also prioritizes donation based access to workshops and performances. 

at THE LAB in San Francisco
Tuesday door at 7p show 7:30
$10—$25 sliding scale NOTAFLOF at the door //FREE for LAB members

ROT Festival presents:
Eva Priečková (SK) + Zuzana Žabková (SK) - Weak Women
Nkechi Deanna Njaka
Emma Quan Dewey + YolkwalliCass

Eva Priečková and Zuzana Žabková are friends, collaborators and artistic mischiefs since 2011. They met in an academic environment where they challenged obedience, control and discipline over bodies and mind. They are curious in various forms of dance explorations and deviations through somatic practices, critical theories, poetry, Eastern European backgrounds, experiential anatomy, consensual touch work and long durational, non hierarchical working methods. Through the support of experimental female musicians from unnoticed artistic peripheries. They like to see and feel dance art and dance practices weaved into a daily network of connection, within communities and world in its horror and ongoing struggle. In their practice, this hard-core reality is in the conversation with human right of pleasure, joy, imagination, awe and softness. Currently based on lived experiences, they are turning their curiosity toward practices connected to collective mourning and death, decay and degeneration. To create a safe net or nest for people to come and feel embraced and welcomed with their embodied sorrow, pain and heaviness to propose connection and regeneration.

Emma Quan Dewey (any pronouns) is a Bay Area-raised dancer, choreographer, and educator putting down roots in Huichiun (Oakland). Emma’s work grounds itself in dance as an imaginative, world-building act / as a ritual to move through the intimate ways identity, power structures, and history play out at the level of the body / as an offering to be in relationship with land, ancestors, and spirits. Right now, Emma's work is most curious about moving with the energetics of the Chinese zodiac and ancestral rage.

YolkwalliCass is a multidimensional artist, designer, and performer raised and based in Irgin, Confederate Villages of Lisjan. Born on the land of the turtle~shaped pot, Tzacuatl Ayotl Michoacán, Mexico, pre-colonially P'urhepecha Nation, their practice focuses on highlighting their interweaving identities and elevating universal truths. Cass is in constant exploration of space, form, and movement in relationship with the human body, the energetic and spiritual bodies, the natural environment, and the built environment. Their work aims to re~Member the Architecture of Spirit ~ mend and re~Design the gaps constructed by a fragmented colonial cosmology.

Nkechi Deanna Njaka (she/her) is a neuroscientist, choreography artist, leading mindfulness expert and meditation guide. She is the founder of The Compass, NDN lifestyle studio and co-founder of the sleep app DreamWell. She was a 2017 YBCA Truth Fellow and a 2021 Kennedy Center Artist in Residence. She is currently Esalen Faculty, an Advisor of Chorus Meditation, and a lululemon ambassador for her work in mindfulness. Nkechi has spent the majority of her life investigating the relationship between the brain and the body and has always felt the significance of their integration. She attended Scripps College in Claremont, CA where she majored in neuroscience and dance and went on to complete an MSc. in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Research at The TransArt Institute.

Kevin CK Lo is a composer, choreographer, writer and artist living in Oakland. His work utilizes instruments, digital sound processing and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure and audience kinesthetic response while seeking to corrupt conventional compositional/performative/installative rationale. He is currently completing a PhD in Music Composition at UC Berkeley. He also organizes in the arts around the Bay, and teaches at San Jose State University.

ROT is an artist-run, independent festival of experimental dance and performance. Now curated and run collectively, the ROT festival conjures the unparalleled power of the arts as a tool of resistance to subvert and heal from ancestral and ongoing violence. freshfestival.org