COLLECTIVENESS
Thank you so much to everyone who showed up and made KHFRESH 2022 amazing and full of vitality! Despite having to move online, we were still able to gather and share work, inspiration, remembrance, and study together! Thank you all so much for contributing your attention and artistry and love! We are so grateful.
warmly,
the KHFRESH team
The Kathleen Hermesdorf FRESH Festival is a dynamic annual platform for experimental dance, music, and performance in Yelamu, Ramaytush Ohlone territory, (San Francisco, CA).
FRESH was founded in 2009 by Kathleen Hermesdorf (1967-2020) in collaboration with Albert Mathias. In the wake of Kathleen’s recent and unexpected passing, a team of longtime FRESH fans and collaborators, have stepped up to honor the festival’s legacy and lead it into the future.
The 2022 festival’s theme is Collectiveness. It will feature in person and virtual practices, performances, exchanges, collective actions, movie screenings, and parties! We are excited to start the New Year in conversation and practice together. We are honored to present work by emerging, established, local and global artists of multiple identities, because we believe that the interdependence of generations, backgrounds, and artistic fields creates a more powerful, sustainable and dynamic arts ecosystem.
We invite you to gather with us this January as we come together to honor what we have lost and dream into the future together.
KHFRESH Festival 2022 Video Archive
amara tabor-smith and Regina Evans
Miguel Gutierrez
You seem like
RIPE
RIPE featured artists: Bertha Cecilia Mariana Durán Partida, Carmina Márquez, Daniel Martínez, Erin Chih-Fang Yen
casaā
Albert Mathias
Snowflake Calvert & Europa Grace
Seeds and Sequins
FAKE Company
Aftermath: Reckoning/Rebirth
Race, Equity and the Arts Here and Now
a discussion between Tammy Johnson, Elena Serrano, and Hope Mohr about racial equity and the arts
Sara Shelton Mann
KHFRESH Dance It Out
Dance party with DJs Ori Diwata and Madre Guía
Practices
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Walk Around the Block
From Stephanie: “I am so fortunate to be here to join FRESH and to see the spirit of Kathleen's service to the community upheld and carried on. In this spirit, I am offering some sessions of “one on one meetings” to walk around the block a couple of times...literally – at your leisure and with your own inquisitive momentum.
I am here to offer any kind of mentorship, to share, to listen to your curiosities about making dances, curating, producing, creating spaces and or to unravel the social fabric that gets woven internationally between us all .
Does that happen in the body, through our practices and conversations? Does this happen through the choreographic lenses that we politically design or abstract? Do we encourage each other to create with each other?
Meet me at the Annex!”
MIXED Practice & Kundalini Integration
This class is an intensive survey of the body as informer, educator, author and medium.
It is also an opportunity to investigate the possibilities of developing our technical skills within an improvisational and energetically focused context.
While sharing the practical technique and a non-dogmatic approach to Kundalini Yoga we articulate how it can support our concerns around embodiment. Kundalini kriyas are exercises to raise body awareness, to activate the spine, and to engage in very specific breath work. We will accentuate the use of alignment and efficiency in our postures and activate this attention while exploring repetitive motions that enhance strength and the mobility of our dancing bodies.
This mixed practice of Kundalini kriyas and contemporary technique requires an active/ passive body and an eclectic mind to be available for all the aspects of tracking yourself energetically and in relationship to the space and others around you.
This class also involves some partner exercises, which require that each participant be aware of and responsible for their own safety at all times. The enhanced quality of your physical and mental attention will hopefully create a safe foundation for us to explore as a group.
This class will have live musical accompaniment by Albert Mathias.
Stephanie Maher was based in San Francisco for 15 years, dancing with Margaret Jenkins, and in several collectives, particularly with Jess Curtis, Keith Hennessy and Kathleen Hermesdorf. She is known for her breathtaking physicality and for creating works that express a unique blend of intimacy, sensitivity, and wild humor. In 1998 Maher relocated to Berlin, Germany where she continued to perform, organize, develop and teach in the community-based settings of K77 Studios in Berlin and founded the Ponderosa Tanz/Land Festival and P.O.R.C.H. a summer school for aspiring professionals in Stolzenhagen, Germany.
Maher has been teaching improvisational work in an International setting since 1992. Her work now stretches into the realm of task orientated process, a deep study of Kundalini Yoga and Relational Aesthetics. She makes spontaneous and liminal works in the context of performing as teaching and seems to be curating an ongoing real time – life composition. Her main ongoing international collaborators are Peter Pleyer, Maria Franscesca Scaroni, Abby Crain, Meg Stuart, Tove Sahlin, Yoav Admoni & Yoshiko Chuma.
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Life Practice
This workshop starts from the premise that we bring our whole selves into the studio. Our art practice and our life practice are deeply and inextricably connected.
As we dance together, we will consider our full humanity and that of the artists around us. Our movement practice will be primarily informed by Open Source Forms and Skinner Releasing Technique; an open-ended improvisational practice that uses poetic imagery as an invitation to move. We will dance a lot but we will not spend any time judging ourselves or each other harshly. Instead we will witness each other with care and thoughtful attention. Sometimes we dance purely to move through a feeling. We will also write and reflect - on our own process, and on our hopes for ourselves as artists. We will watch, consider and read things from the works of others that may inspire our own movement in the world.
Our movements and time together will be supported by a 90s pop soundtrack with a particular focus on the Spice Girls.
Raha is an artist working across disciplines and practices towards liberatory modes of being and doing. Her artistry has been shaped by the influence of many teachers and peers including Abby Crain, Stephanie Skura, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Sara Shelton Mann, Alexa Solveig Mardon, Hadar Ahuvia, Yazmany Arboleda, Lorene Bouboushian, and Miguel Gutierrez. She is driven by her love for humanity and moved by its inevitable waves of discouragement and hope.
photo by Amelia Golden
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LOST AND FOUND: A dawning group sensory walk.
LOST AND FOUND will be a dawning group sensory walk led by Sherwood.
To bring:
+ dress for the weather, for ease of walking, for stillnesses
+ blindfold
+ phone or device to record voice memos
+ water / thermos
PROTEAN PROGRESSIONS
We cross the floor as a torrent of protean progressions predictably incessantly to unmaster to question porosity between flesh bone imagination and space to get lost with lucid discipline
Sherwood Chen has worked as a performer for and / or with artists including Grisha Coleman, Xavier Le Roy, Min Tanaka, Anna Halprin, Amara Tabor-Smith, Ko Murobushi x inkBoat, Sara Shelton Mann, David Gordon, Anne Collod, l’agence touriste, Yuko Kaseki, Jess Curtis, and Arcane Collective. He leads movement research, training and workshops for dancers and performers internationally. Forthcoming work as a performer includes Benjamin Karim Bertrand’s premiere of the quartet La fin des forêts, and the premiere music-dance sextet of the Étienne Gaillochet x Meritxell Checa collaboration La ligne pointillée.
LOST AND FOUND is a co-production of the KH FRESH Festival and The Bridge Project.
https://www.bridgeproject.art/
photo by Michał Wojtarowicz
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Practice Makes Practice
In this workshop we work with a variety of body-based somatic and sensory approaches to access self-awareness. We start by working with The Feldenkrais Method to prioritize sensation as a means for learning. Then, through movement, we tap into “uncanny” relationships of self to other and space. These exercises reflect approaches I use in my work, and they also serve as practices to negotiate what it is to be in a room of individuals together – or as Jean Luc Nancy famously put it – “the singular plural.”
Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, performer, music maker, writer, video artist, educator and Feldenkrais Method practitioner based in Lenapehoking, currently known as Brooklyn, NY. His work examines overlaps and boundaries between politics and poetics and how identity formulations create critical but incomplete ways of understanding one’s self in society. He has presented his work internationally in venues including the Wexner Art Center, REDCAT, Festival d’Automne/Paris and American Realness. He has received four New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, and he was a selected artist for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. www.miguelgutierrez.org
photo by Ian Douglas
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Morning Class
Part laboratory, part training, part communion, part dance party—in this class we will explore sensation, improvised states, articulation and phrase work, rooted in deep physicality and kinetic thrill. We will pay homage to the Kathleen/Albert classes of the past and use that electric spark to channel emerging new currents through our collective bodies. Let the deep bass rumble our bones and reverberate in the particles of our flesh. Let us move towards transformation. Let us never forget.
This class will have live musical accompaniment by Albert Mathias.
Marit BK is a longtime member of the Joe Goode Performance Group and has trained and danced alongside Kathleen Hermesdorf for decades. She has collaborated with many local artists and musicians and has toured and taught in dance institutions throughout the US, as well as performed internationally. Over the years, she has been drawn to many forms of physical practice (martial arts, rock climbing, contact improvisation, axis syllabus, to name a few) and has continued to pursue new trainings that interest her. She currently lives in Berkeley, CA with her husband and her daughter, and teaches workshops and classes here in the Bay Area.
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Moving Alchemy
Exploring the physical, energetic, spiritual body through technical improvisation the workshop will unfold. Several of Sara’s puzzles will be introduced and writing practices will inform the experiences. Solo Neutral Follow/Space and Geometry/Implied Direction/Riding the Spacial Gap/Triggers/Systems and Action.
Chi-cultivation - a practice of detox, building energy and consciousness will set the tone each day according to the material. Bring your questions, playful self and heart.
Contact? possible, energetic for sure.
Sara Shelton Mann has been a choreographer, performer, and teacher since 1967. She was a protégé of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis in New York City before moving to Canada where she met Andrew Harwood and fell in love with Contact Improvisation. In 1979 she moved to San Francisco to work with Mangrove, now Mixed Bag Productions, for which she serves as artistic director. One of its early manifestations was the company Contraband, launched as a performance group and research ground combining the principles of contact, systems of the body and spiritual practice into a unified system of research. Among her awards are a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 7 Isadora Duncan Awards, including a special achievement award for “erasing time: celebrating 30 years a radical dance legend” (Sara Shelton Mann with David Szlasa and Norman Rutherford), 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 "Goldie" Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2016). Her Movement Alchemy training is an ongoing teaching project and is influenced by certifications and studies in the metaphysical and healing traditions. Sara’s performance work is a platform for collaboration and research in consciousness.
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Afro Rhythms Movement
Afro Rhythms Movement is a crossroad between contemporary dance and African-derived dance forms, with a focus on dance aesthetic from Central Africa and particularly from the Congo. The class introduces ethnic dance forms through a contemporary lens. This course will explore movements that form a springboard to contemporary dance grounded in ethnic dance aesthetic. The class conciliates tradition and modernity in the dance movement practice. This class incorporates techniques drawn from contemporary dance and the basic movement technique of various ethnic dance forms. Afro Rhythm Movement is a translation of traditional ethnic dance forms into contemporary dance forms. Students will be introduced to the simple and specific movements through a specific warm up that would help their body prepare for polyrhythms and movement isolations. Inner rhythm and musicality embodiment are essential to this class.
Byb Chanel Bibene is a dance educator, choreographer and performer. He is the founder and artistic director of both Kiandanda Dance Theater and the Mbongui Square Festival. Bibene’s dance aesthetic is rooted in the culture and dances of the Republic of Congo. Bibene has performed internationally and toured the world.
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Digging the horizon(tal)
A zoom event.
restorative solo contact meets floor work meets sleeping meets horizontal meditation meets body scanning meets deep listening practice of audio clips and sounds and read aloud excerpts from juicy and generative and grounding and mundane and provocative passages intersecting engaged somatics, body and land discourse, and and and... guiding you to meet the earth-ground-carpet-wood-etc beneath your being whilst drawing forth the sounds and insights of dharma teachers and voices of black, indigenous and ecology studies, especially those that might awaken new perspectives for us on this crack/portal moment that is the pandemic epoch. all as we lay, roll, snooze, unwind and contemplate the horizon. a practice for resting, for landing, for coming home to ourselves, for opening our peripheral vision to our present aliveness, our future deathness, our breathing, our interconnectedness, all being awake but mightily doing/little... to soften into the restorative horizontal. rolling, maybe crawling, lengthening, relaxing, being.
taisha paggett makes things and is interested in what bodies do. They/she believes language is tricky, thoughts are powerful, and that people are most beautiful when looking up. more formally, paggett is an interdisciplinary dance artist whose individual and collaborative works re-articulate and collide specific western choreographic practices with the politics of daily life so to interrupt fixed notions of Black and queer embodiment, desire, and survival. paggett had the great honor of receiving the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Merce Cunningham Award in 2019 and their/her work has been supported by the kindness and efforts of numerous other organizations, curators, writers, mentors, friends and venues over the years including the Hammer Museum as part of Made in LA; Commonwealth & Council (LA); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LA); Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia); DiverseWorks (Houston); the Whitney Museum as part of the Whitney Biennial; Studio Museum in Harlem; Danspace at St Mark’s Church (New York); Defibrillator (Chicago); Gallery TPW (Toronto); and the Audain Gallery (Vancouver) amongst others. paggett teaches in the Dance Department at UC Riverside and lives nearby in what paggett is coming to understand as a cross-section of the original and rightful homeland of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano communities.
Performances
Snowflake Calvert & Europa Grace
Seeds and Sequins
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“Seeds and Sequins” is a Two-Spirit dance performance that began 6 years ago after being asked by Native Grandmothers to dance for sacred seeds. After two rehearsals Snowflake put this solo on hold to process and heal from colonial trauma. Growing up on occupied Turtle Island as an indigenous first generation American has created complex struggles, from carrying ancient cultures and knowledge to learning to express Two-Spirit identity with a modern-colonial twist. This piece is based off of the true story of her life at a glance. She recently had success in opening the world of Seeds and Sequins with the help of the interdisciplinary artist, Europa Grace. Europa infuses personal perspectives and challenges as a non-binary, Queer Black Trinidadian-American. This project aims to amplify personal stories of resilience from QTPOC Indigneous, Black, and Asian dancers to create better solidarity between these communities. Their vision is to create a platform for marginalized dancers to tell their stories that may not fit into the normal Hollywood tropes.
For Two-Spirit artist and community organizer Snowflake Calvert, growing up on occupied Turtle Island (an Indigenous term referring to North America) as an Indigenous first-generation American has created deep struggles. In this intimate piece, Snowflake combines contemporary and traditional dance, performance art and drag to share aspects of her complex life and heritage. She collaborates with interdisciplinary artist Europa Grace, who infuses personal perspectives and challenges as a non-binary, Queer Black American. Through this work-in-progress sharing and development process, Snowflake seeks to offer audiences a way to use movement and choreography to explore their lineages and to heal. Europa Grace (they/them) is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator based in Oakland, CA (Huichin, Chochenyo Ohlone Land). As a Yoga Teacher Trainer and Cultural Competency Consultant, Europa stretches across the intersection of spiritual, somatic and social worlds. Utilizing cello, voice, and body, their work explores the healing potential of re-associating the dissociated and displaced body-mind.
Europa Grace (they/them) is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator based in Oakland, CA (Huichin, Chochenyo Ohlone Land). As a Yoga Teacher Trainer and Cultural Competency Consultant, Europa stretches across the intersection of spiritual, somatic and social worlds. Utilizing cello, voice, and body, their work explores the healing potential of re-associating the dissociated and displaced body-mind.
photo by Lydia Daniller
FAKE Company
Aftermath: Reckoning/Rebirth
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We arrive on shore- in the aftermath of the storm. Weighing the consequences, Reconnecting, Remembering, Reckoning. There is a stillness. Tender new life emerges in the constellation of rebirth. La ternura como una revolución que nos permite estar presentes.
Aftermath engages in highly visual, deeply physical, viscerally sonic, and rigorously human improvisational and devised material, featuring Agnė Auželytė, Nicola Bullock, Shelley Etkin, Caitlin Fisher, Kata Kovács, Kentaro Adam Kumanomido, Albert Mathias, Delaney McDonough, Gizeh Muñiz Vengel, Ángela Muñoz Martínez, Sebastián Santamaría Barajas, teaque owen, Amy Wasielewski, and Hannah Wasielewski.
FAKE Company is an eclectic international group of dance, theater, music, visual, video and culinary artists whose work is embedded and embodied in ongoing improvisational practices. They gather in a fluid and flexible container of artistic freedom within creative collaboration for intensive projects that dive into, dig under, shake up and share the current state of the human condition. Initiated by Kathleen Hermesdorf, and engaging artists who discovered each other at Ponderosa in Germany, FAKE features creative interpreters from Australia, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, the United States and New Zealand.
photo by Robbie Sweeny
casaā
síses yeses
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Una exploración sobre raíces, el placer y la esencia de la reconciliación. Esta pieza fue creada a partir de los síses de nuestrxs cuerpxs creativxs
An exploration around roots, pleasure and the essence of reconciliation. This piece was created from the yeses of our creative bodies
Music by: Albert Mathias
Visual design: Ainsley Tharp
gizeh muñiz vengel (she/they) Mexicana. Movement artist, healer, caregiver and educator. Currently a student of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. She has performed as a dancer and creative collaborator with NAKA Dance Theater, Kinetech Arts, Diana Lara, randy reyes, Sara Shelton Mann, Kathleen Hermesdorf and Lizz Roman in the Bay Area; Silla Danza in Tijuana and Ocho Proyecto Gato in Mexico City. She is the co-creator of casaā, a playground for dance and performance based on free-play, along with Sebastián Santamaría. In 2017, she graduated from CDPEBC directed by Lux Boreal Dance Company in Tijuana. She complimented her training on different dance techniques in Mexico, USA and Europe. In 2015 she graduated from Universidad Panamericana, Mexico where she studied Pedagogy. She is interested in child development and birth and advocates for the value of caregiving and birth as keys in the healing and evolution of the human race.
sebastián santamaría barajas (he/she/they) Dancer, teacher and choreographer born and raised in Mexico City. He works as the Artistic Coordinator at Sunland High School for the Arts and is the co-creator of casaā and Nómada Proyecto Escénico, both platforms for exploring movement and creative processes. Their work has been shown in Mexico, USA and Russia, He participated in festivals such as FRESH Festival, American Dance Festival (US) and Performática (MX). In 2017 she joined the company Provincial Dances Theater (RU), under the artistic direction of Tatiana Baganova. He graduated from UDLAP, directed by Ray Schwartz in 2016. He has worked for artists such as Kathleen Hermesdorf, Erika Méndez, Cristina Goletti, Walter Matteini, Claudia Lavista, Karen de Luna, Vanessa Voskuil, Leilani Maciel and Lisa Kusanagi.
Sara Shelton Mann
the other side / L L
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Memories in the future. The future is uncertain but there is one. Building a house inside a room, or a world inside a bench. What was there is not there. What is isn't now, and now isn't here -- the trials of the imagination are visible only through taste in appearance. At this time still to be made.
Choreographed by Sara Shelton Mann in collaboration with Dance Filmmaker, Tori Lawrence. Dancer, Ainsley Tharp. Sound Design, Sara Shelton Mann and Benyamin Klausner.
Sara Shelton Mann has been a choreographer, performer, and teacher since 1967. She was a protégé of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis in New York City before moving to Canada where she met Andrew Harwood and fell in love with Contact Improvisation. In 1979 she moved to San Francisco to work with Mangrove, now Mixed Bag Productions, for which she serves as artistic director. One of its early manifestations was the company Contraband, launched as a performance group and research ground combining the principles of contact, systems of the body and spiritual practice into a unified system of research. Among her awards are a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 7 Isadora Duncan Awards, including a special achievement award for “erasing time: celebrating 30 years a radical dance legend” (Sara Shelton Mann with David Szlasa and Norman Rutherford), 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 "Goldie" Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2016). Her Movement Alchemy training is an ongoing teaching project and is influenced by certifications and studies in the metaphysical and healing traditions. Sara’s performance work is a platform for collaboration and research in consciousness.
photo by Tori Lawrence
Albert Mathias
Know Witholding
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Albert Mathias is a multi-disciplinary musician. He creates and performs original compositions for dance, theater, film, and video, and was music director for ALTERNATIVA, a platform for training and performance with the late Kathleen Hermesdorf. He was a member of Bebe Miller Company and Contraband, and has produced 15 records of original music, most notably with internationally acclaimed trio Live Human.
Miguel Gutierrez
You seem like
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You seem like you are ok with noise.
You seem like you’re very confident in this space.
You seem like you’re still trying to figure out what being here means.
Miguel will share from a new work in progress provisionally titled You seem like. It is maybe a solo or maybe a duet or maybe a group piece with ghosts. It explores failures of communication, mixed messages, and private torments. Certain harmonies and dissonances make (all encompassing, all consuming) grief endurable.
Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, performer, music maker, writer, video artist, educator and Feldenkrais Method practitioner based in Lenapehoking, currently known as Brooklyn, NY. His work examines overlaps and boundaries between politics and poetics and how identity formulations create critical but incomplete ways of understanding one’s self in society. He has presented his work internationally in venues including the Wexner Art Center, REDCAT, Festival d’Automne/Paris and American Realness. He has received four New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, and he was a selected artist for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. www.miguelgutierrez.org
photo by Paula Lobo
Exchanges
Conversation with amara tabor-smith
and Regina Evans
Curated and hosted by José Ome Navarrete Mazatl
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amara tabor-smith will share and discuss an excerpt from the film, House/Full of BlackWomen and Regina Evans will share and discuss an excerpt from the film, You are Beloved.
House/Full of Blackwomen is a multi year, multi site responsive ritual dance theater project that addresses the displacement, well being and sex-trafficking of black women and girls in Oakland. Created by amara tabor-smith in collaboration with Ellen Sebastian Chang and a collective of Black women artists and activists is performed as a series of episodes in public sites throughout Oakland and is driven by the core question, "how do we as Black women and girls find space to breathe, rest, and be well in a stable home?"
“BELOVED: An Insistence is a cascading flow of love, inspiration, and artistry. It exists to deliver visual beauty and care to the Beloved who are currently being seared by the brutalizing grip of child sex trafficking in Oakland, Ca. City streets and sidewalks are utilized as a foundation to install garden altars, lighting design, street pole art, poster art, sidewalk art, and murals. The installations are embedded with resources, food, water, toiletries, clothing, and PPE (masks, gloves, hand sanitizers).
To exist together, in a healthy and loving world, requires us to heed the call of deep compassion with the fullness of hands, feet, hearts and spirits. Without barriers, bounds or transactions. This is the simplicity of love. This is BELOVED.”
The film Beloved was filmed by documentarian Matthew Evearitt.
TRY: a film screening and conversation
Co-Production by Circo Zero
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a queer fantasy of improvised collaboration where body and land meet ancestry and futurity
TRY is a performance choreographed by Ishmael Houston-Jones created in deep collaboration with jose e. abad, Snowflake Calvert, Keith Hennessy, and Kevin O’Connor with music by Gabriel Nuñez de Arco and jose e. abad in an immersive installation by Monica Canilao & Kendra Azul~írís and lighting design by GG Torres. Here’s a review from the performance.
photo by Robbie Sweeny
Race, Equity and the Arts Here and Now
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A discussion between Tammy Johnson and Hope Mohr about racial equity and the arts now. Curated and hosted by José Ome Navarrete Mazatl.
Tammy Johnson is a dancer, writer, and cultural worker living in Oakland, California. As a highly visible and effective community organizer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Johnson directed economic justice, electoral reform and public education campaigns. For over a decade she was a national organizer, trainer, writer and policy analyst at Race Forward. Tammy’s gift for strategy development and ability to nurture strong relationships with groups on the ground led to a decade at Race Forward, spent advancing racial justice as a national organizer, trainer, writer, policy analyst and public speaker. She co-produced the television special Colorlines: Race and Economic Recovery with LinkTV, and has written for the Christian Science Monitor, The Huffington Post, and Colorlines.com. As an equity consultant Johnson has worked with Naka Dance Theater, SUMOFUS.org, California Shakespeare Theater, Mobilize the Immigrant Vote, The Laundromat Project, Luna Dance Institute, and Opera America. Specializing in Egyptian style bellydancing, Johnson was the 2016 recipient of Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 Residency Program. She performed as part of ChimaTEK: Hybridity Visualization Mandala, a piece created by renowned performance visual artists Saya Woolfalk. For fifteen years Johnson and Etang Inyang performed as the award-winning duet Raks Africa, and co-directed the Girls Raks Bellydance and Body Image program. Currently Johnson is the director of Project Aiwa, which promotes North African dance and culture.
Hope Mohr is a cultural worker and attorney working at the intersection of the arts and social change. She co-directs HMD's The Bridge Project with Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero. bridgeproject.art. Her lawyering practice focuses on transforming the arts into a more equitable and sustainable field by supporting artists and organizations to value-align and re-imagine structures of support. movementlaw.net
José Ome Navarrete Mazatl is a native of México City. He founded NAKA Dance Theater in 2001 and curates LiveArts in Resistance at EastSide Arts Alliance in Oakland, CA.
His work lies in the intersection of experimental art and activism. He is interested in how we use art and social justice to frame a point of view and how this lens affects our interpretation of reality. José Ome facilitates and engages in art practices that center social justice as a creative source. His practice plants seeds for artistic work that triggers audience imagination, inviting all to engage in a deep inquiry of how systems of power are formed and how they affect us.
He use multi-disciplinary performance forms -- particularly movement, poetry and architectural concepts of space -- to create a new form of expression -- one that detonates an intellectual and kinesthetic response for civic participation.
José Ome works in depth with local communities to learn from one another through art making. Together, we embody visibility by reclaiming public spaces and reconfiguring traditional performance venues. We magnify personal histories and social concerns, instigating change in existing narratives and systems and expanding our world view. View more on Instagram.
KH FRESH Festival Dance It Out
with DJs Ori Diwata and Madre Guía
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Dance party with DJs Ori Diwata and Madre Guía to celebrate the end of the 2022 KH FRESH Festival and dance us into the future together!
Help us celebrate an amazing 2022 FRESH Festival with a blow out dance party, featuring DJ's Ori Diwata and Madre Guía!
Thanks to all of the artists, audience members, co-presenters, funders, and Festival staff who have made this year's Festival so special. Let's gather one last time to dance it out and be together!
Ori Diwata is the DJ moniker of performance artist and curator jose e. abad. They use djing as an extension of their performance practice - integrating sound from various diasporic lineages and honoring music as a means of resistance, pleasure, and spiritual connection.
Madre Guía - Stephanie Hewett (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist working with movement and electronic music production. She is based in Oakland, CA (Chochenyo-Ohlone) and djs under the moniker, Madre Guía. Her current practice focuses on creating rhythms inspired by the Afro-Caribbean diasporic experience to offer a somatic roadmap towards Black liberation and healing.
José Ome Navarrete Mazatl
ether-NITY
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LiveArts in Resistance kickstarts its programming by presenting NAKA Dance Theater’s latest work ”ether-NITY” — a new experimental performance by José Ome Mazatl that hybrids reality with fiction, looking at the wounds of the past to heal and liberate the body in a funky, raw, earthy, spiritual way in unconventional urban settings. This project is presented by EastSide Arts Alliance in collaboration with the Kathleen Hermesdorf Fresh Festival 2022.
José Ome Navarrete Mazatl is a native of México City. He founded NAKA Dance Theater in 2001 and curates LiveArts in Resistance at EastSide Arts Alliance in Oakland, CA.
His work lies in the intersection of experimental art and activism. He is interested in how we use art and social justice to frame a point of view and how this lens affects our interpretation of reality. José Ome facilitates and engages in art practices that center social justice as a creative source.
His practice plants seeds for artistic work that triggers audience imagination, inviting all to engage in a deep inquiry of how systems of power are formed and how they affect us.
He uses multi-disciplinary performance forms -- particularly movement, poetry and architectural concepts of space -- to create a new form of expression -- one that detonates an intellectual and kinesthetic response for civic participation.
José Ome works in depth with local communities to learn from one another through art making. Together, we embody visibility by reclaiming public spaces and reconfiguring traditional performance venues. We magnify personal histories and social concerns, instigating change in existing narratives and systems and expanding our world view. José Ome is a 2020 Guggenheim Felllow and Co-directs the KHFRESH festival with Abby Crain.
RIPE
RIPE
The 2022 FRESH Festival RIPE [Raw + Intimate Performance Experiments] showcase will be two evenings of emerging experimental performance along with facilitated audience feedback. RIPE is an informal, low production showcase that offers emergent artists the opportunity to share works in progress, speak about their process, and participate in artist-audience dialogue. In the words of FRESH founder, Kathleen Hermesdorf, the RIPE Exchange is “made to cultivate, cross-pollinate, invigorate, create access and generate outreach within and out with the dance, music and performance communities.” In 2022, RIPE will be an opportunity to build bridges between the performing arts communities of Mexico and the SF/Bay Area and is guest curated this year by The Performance Primers and casaā.
The Performance Primers is a grassroots curatorial collective serving early-career creatives. Grounded in a no-barrier, DIY sensibility, we offer full-scale production support with a facilitated talkback to marginalized artists in all genres. We are intentionally based in Oakland, Ohlone territory, co-led by Hannah Meleokaiao Ayasse, Chibueze Crouch, and Zoe Donnellycolt. https://performanceprimers.com/
casaā has been a playground since 1997. We are a Mexico/Bay Area-based performance collective that celebrates life through improvisational dance. gizeh and sebastián’s intimate relationship allows them to explore time and space in a vulnerable and irrational way. casaa.mx
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Tintinea/It tinkles
Bertha Cecilia Mariana Durán Partida in collaboration with Tristan Garrido
Tintinea es una obra de danza contemporánea en proceso con duración de 28 min. Esta obra une en una sola narrativa a un solo en un cajón y un dueto en patineta, hermanos de un mismo proceso coreográfico que se propuso explorar el cómo sería contar un cuento al estilo del realismo mágico latinoamericano en lenguaje de movimiento (flujo de un imaginario a otro, de un tiempo a otro, entre múltiples realidades y espacios generalmente concebidos como dicótomos). Tintinea describe y transforma espacios imaginarios a través del imaginario físico en movimiento y transita entre ellos al plantearse la posibilidad de crear juntos, entre la patineta, el cajón, los intérpretes, y un foco, una máquina para rodar, volar, o bucear si es necesario.
It tinkles is a 28 min. long modern dance work in progress. This work brings together into one narrative a solo in a drawer and a duet on a skateboard. Both works have been created within the same choreographic research process which explores how it would be to tell a story in the Latin American Magic Realism style through a movement language (flow from one imagery to another, from one time to another, between multiple realities and spaces generally conceived as dichotomous). “It tinkles” describes and transforms imaginary spaces through the physical imagery in movement and travels between them by considering the possibility of creating together, between the skateboard, the drawer, the performers, and a bulb, a machine to roll, fly or dive if necessary.
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Carmina Márquez
I am in a 9-month process of initiation in which I create a woven garment/calendar/map, and collect the artifact shrapnel of the process to share with you. The process is this: I connect to my Nahua, Basque, and Sephardic lineages, tapping into their knowledge and guidance by doing what they did, touching what they touched. I learn, practice and reinterpret their prehistoric thread spinning methods, & backstrap loom weaving. I spin and weave as a way to continue the legacy of fiber art as a method of channeling new information, models of understanding space-time, and life force. Calendars that connect thousands of years of cumulative practical knowledge to the present. When I set aside the spindle whorl everything is rotating, becoming. The fiber informs the movement as the movement informs the fiber. The process integrates not only my lineages but aspects of myself as I attempt to reclaim indigeneity and femme epistemologies, navigating individuality and nested interdependence across the spiral of time.
Carmina Márquez (she/he, they, elle/ella) is a queer artist and curanderx with roots in Los Angeles and Mexico. Their performance work, fiber art, and cyclical rebirth sessions reactivate ancestral semiotic technology, channeling alternative maps for creating the future.
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Daniel Martínez
Recuerdo que era de noche y mi cuerpo se sentía rígido, como una roca. En mi mente recreaba imágenes de ataduras a experiencias, a pensamientos y emociones. Cavilaba. Quería controlarlo todo dentro y fuera de mí. Ahí fue cuando supe lo que necesitaba: soltar. No sé cómo soltar.
I remember a dark night and a rigid body. Like a rock. My mind recreating images of tight experiences, thoughts, and emotions. Overthinking overpowered me. I wanted to control my mind. Everything that happened inside and out. It was at this moment I realized what I needed: to let go. I did not know how to let go.
“Con movimiento auténtico va encontrando su camino y lugar en la danza.” Originario de Toluca, Estado de México, es egresado de la Escuela Superior de Música y Danza de Monterrey, además del máster en Diseño de Espacios y Experiencias Culturales en la Escuela Superior de Diseño de Barcelona (ESdesign). Ha participado como bailarín y coreógrafo en compañías de danza y proyectos culturales en México y EUA. Impulsado en el 2018 por la compañía The Theorists (Austin, Tx) bajo la dirección de Amy Morrow. En 2019 obtiene el estímulo de la Beca Legacy Santander. Ha recibido apoyo por la Secretaría de Cultura y el Consejo para la Cultura y las Artes de Nuevo León. Además brinda talleres y cursos en diferentes espacios artísticos y busca dirigir su trabajo hacia herramientas de improvisación y experimentación del movimiento propio.
“With authentic movement he finds his way and place in dance” Originally from Toluca, Estado de México, he graduated from Escuela Superior de Música y Danza de Monterrey, as well as a master ́s degree in Design of Spaces and Cultural Experiences at the Escuela Superior de Diseño de Barcelona (ESdesign). He has participated as a dancer and choreographer in dance companies and cultural projects in México and USA. Driven in 2018 by the company The Theorists (Austin Texas, under the direction of Amy Morrow. In 2019 he obtained the grant of the Legacy Santander Scholarship. Has received support from Secretaría de Cultura and Consejo para la Cultura y las Artes de Nuevo León. He also provides workshops and courses in different artistic spaces and seeks to direct his work towards improvisation tools and experimentation with each own movement.
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Erin Chih-Fang Yen
Paper Trails is a series of dance works that I am developing in response to learning more about the Chinese Exclusion Act’s lasting effects on Chinese American families. I learned that paper sons and daughters are those immigrants who left their family names behind, and assumed the names of different Chinese families in order to get into the United States. I became curious to know what is lost, or forgotten, when leaving a name behind.
Erin holds a BFA with Distinction in Dance from the Ohio State University. She is fluent in Laban Movement Analysis. Since moving to the Bay Area to be closer to family, Erin has experimented with diving deeper into her body’s relation to a larger history.