ADULT:
First Work in progress showing Feb 1-3rd at CounterPULSE. ADULT is an attempt to create a work that visually and choreographically honors/satirizes/queers/exploits/cradles collectively expressed ideas about living and dying, whilst structurally reconfiguring how we understand the building of a career, previously based on an accumulation of pieces (a fear of scarcity?), and
now based on a long-term inquiry into how ideas and interests and affinities simply do grow and change. We hysterically celebrate that we ultimately make the same piece over and over again, we costume ourselves as the monsters that we always knew we were, we reject the construct of a finished work and instead invest in the rigor of a truthfully fragile composition that exists in a LIVE space. It is a reflection of how we see our world and our lives already beginning to wind
down to an end, and we are exploring the states of life and death in that context of experience.
Feb 1-3rd Work in Progress at CounterPULSE
March- Headlands Residency
Summer-Europe/sex/swimming/dance/
Fall Premiere TBD

Performer/collaborators: Julie Phelps, Emily Leap, Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit, Jorge De Hoyos, Hana Erdman (Berlin/SF), Gabriel Todd, Ruairi O’Donovan (Cork), Empress Jupiter, Keith Hennessy, with additional guest artists at each venue.

Unstable structures supported by unsustainable systems, this dance cannot stand up on its own. Turbulence (a dance about the economy) is a bodily response to economic crisis.

Turbulence engages the frictions between economic crisis, disaster capitalism, debt, precarity, propaganda, torture, union busting, magic, collaboration, war, and physical performance.

Instigated before the recent Occupy Wall Street actions, Turbulence is intended as both provocation and affirmation of global movement for economic justice.

Responding both to economic and ecological crises, Turbulence is an experiment not only in performance, but also in developing alternative modes of producing performance. Integrating new cast members (as generative collaborators) for each performance, the work resists fixed or predetermined outcomes. Improvisation is both survival strategy and political tactic. The economy of making dances and being a dancer will focus the investigation of this research-based performance experiment.

Accumulating dances, images, texts, and tactics with each cast, the process was tested at venues in San Francisco, Stolzenhagen and Vienna in 2011. The work will continue to be developed in Portand, SF, Stolzenhagen and Pontempeyrat through 2012.

The US premier of Turbulence will be at PICA’s TBA Festival September 12-15, 2012, followed by performances in Seattle at Velocity Dance Center Sep 20-21, in SF at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sep 27-29, and at New York Live Arts Oct 4-6, 2012.

2011 residencies include Ponderosa (Stolzenhagen, Jul 18-23), Impulstanz (Vienna, Aug 1-5), and CounterPULSE (San Francisco, Dec 10-18).

Summer 2012 residencies include Regards et Mouvements (Pontempeyrat, France), PICA (Portland), CounterPULSE (SF) and Ponderosa (Stolzenhagen).

GUEST ARTISTS
Portland: Roya Amirsoleymani, Keyon Gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto
Seattle: Markeith Wiley, Joan Hanna (tentative)
San Francisco: Ray Chung, others TBA
New York: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dana Michel (Montréal), other TBA.

Turbulence was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Projet, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MetLife Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding includes Zellerbach Family Foundation, the New Stages in Dance grant, and the SF Arts Commission OPG.

Obsessed
a weekly dance/performance class with Laura Arrington and whoever shows up.

What are you interested in and how do you participate with it? wait, what? Why do we make work? why do we perform? what does that even mean? what are you talking about? what is training, does it help? wait, help who? who needs help? well, we all need help. we do? and we all need to help eachother. we do?
this class is about us helping eachother get better at helping the work by being obsessed with what we do, be it ballet or burlesque. we’ll do a lot of stuff.
Tuesdays 10-1130ish beginning March 6th
$5-10 suggested NOTAFLOF

848 Divisidero, at McAllister

Our KICKSTARTER needs your help! Our deadline is next Wednesday 12/14 afternoon! IF WE DON’T RAISE THE FULL $5500, WE DON”T GET ANY OF THE MONEY, AND DON’T GET TO PERFORM IN AMERICAN REALNESS! NO!!!!!!! So help us if you can!!

DONATE NOW!

Hot Wings, a piece I made last year as part of the amazing Counterpulse’s Artist in Residence Commissioning Program has been invited to New York’s American Realness Festival in January of 2012. I am beyond thrilled. American Realness consistently programs my favorite artists, including beloved mentors of mine Keith Hennessy and Big Art Group, I’m literally pinching myself, thrilled to be in such esteemed company. American Realness is part of APAP a festival that gathers presenters from all over the globe. This is a very special opportunity for us.

The festival is only a month away, so due to this compressed time frame typical funding channels (grants etc) aren’t available. We have to raise about $5500 to get us there. We need the money for 5 plane tickets, approximately 25-30 hours of rehearsal space, a few props/costumes that need replacing, shipping costs for set, and a very small stipend to the incredible cast Atosa Babaoff, Rachael Dichter, Mica Sigourney, and Liz Tenuto. I’m hoping you’ll consider donating to our kickstarter campaign, no donation is too small.

*we’d like to thank KUNST-STOFF ARTS for supporting us with a generous space residency. This work was also supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, Dancer’s Group New Stages for dance program, CounterPULSE, THEOFFCENTER, Thetare Bay Area’s CA$H Grant, and Zellerbach Family Foundation

Press Release

The Dog Show
Laura Arrington and Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior
Thursday, December 8 – Sunday, December 11 at 8pm (Sunday at 7pm)at Z Space.
tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/204566

San Francisco, December 2011–The Dog Show is a shared evening of two premiere performance works; Wag by Laura Arrington and Freedom by Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior.

Wag and Freedom are interrogations of domestication, love, and our constantly fluctuating ability to create our own selves. We dig through the catastrophic nature of power, invert the ways that dominant narratives about us have become formed and locked, and work to subvert the muddying fear of our deep and dynamic capabilities as animals/doers/creators/killers. We’re fighting to learn more about our roles, and simultaneously, we’re fighting to get free.

Both works are made possible through funding from the New Stages for Dance pilot award, The Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theater Bay Area’s CA$H Grants, and production support from Z Space, CounterPULSE, TheOffCenter, and Dancers’ group.

About Arrington’s Wag:
The fox has been domesticated; friendlier and with a new coat. The dog knows to wag his tail before we get in the door. Love is a competition on TV, and queers demand the right to fight in the army and get legally married. We make shows for granting institutions and write press releases for folks we don’t know. We all work in systems and systems are always working on us. Wag measures the spaces between obedience and loyalty, exploring how we create structure in society, love, and family. Influenced by the foxes new coat and the feeling of a broken heart, Wag’s process has been one of cultivating discipline and obedience, pushing past duty in an attempt to find something else, to transcend the score, and move beyond the structure.

Laura Arrington directs Atosa Babaoff, Rachael Dichter, Mica Sigourney, and Liz Tenuto in a new performance work with lighting by Darl Andrew Packard.
Wag imagines that the world is ending. It has always been ending. It’s just happening very slowly.

About Hewit’s Freedom:
Freedom investigates the possibility of inverting dominant narratives about media-created “monsters.” It is a visual and sonic reproach to assumptions about who is good and who is evil and why. In Freedom, we embark on the execution of large visceral actions, and reconsider why our responses to such actions come out looking like they do. Are we jealous of the manifestation of impulse? Are we antagonized by sexuality? Are we quite afraid of our own selves and what we are capable of? How do “monster” narratives keep us safe from ourselves, but also securely trapped in a political system fueled by demonization, assumed pathologies, and constant moral panics? How is it that we are and are not free?

Jesse Hewit directs and choreographs in collaboration with performers Melecio Estrella, Evan Johnson, Shawnrey Notto, and Loren Robertson, with lighting by Jerry Lee Abram, sound by Robbie Beahrs, and looks by Dia Vergados.
Freedom is a contemporary confession/act of defiance about how wild and violent and capable we really are.

i love this field. i love hana. i loved berlin/vienna. stay tuned for more pics/videos.