Tell

Thu-Sun December 8-10
8pm @ Dance Mission Theater

Co-directed by Sarah Crowell and Keith Hennessy in collaboration with Larry Arrington, Samara Atkins, Amber Julian, Sheila Russell, Ainsley Tharp, and Shaunna Vella.

Dancing towards racial healing, Tell holds space for the vulnerability, beauty, and necessity of multi-racial collaboration. The work is potent, always evolving, and will invite you to interact. Come be in process with us. Snacks will be served.

Tell is more of an offering than a “show,” it’s a community experience in a life-long journey of racial healing. Creating a space where ancestors are welcomed and multi-generational healing will be explored, Tell is an experimental process-based approach to both racial healing and dance performance.

“To want to heal is to believe that something else is possible, it is a sort of precarious leap of faith, it is also a reckoning. And this is the act, the gesture, the movement that really feels like it is at the heart of Tell: the desire for collective healing.” - Kyla Searle

Dates & Times: Thu-Sun December 8-10 @ 8pm
Location: Dance Mission Theater (3316 24th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110)
Tickets: Sliding Scale $0-30. Please choose a ticket price based on your financial capacity.

THE STORY

In 2020, after crossing paths for 30 years in the Bay Area dance community, Sarah and Keith performed together in the short powerful film The Space Between Us directed by Gabriel Diamond. Responding with words and dance to racially-charged questions of trust and safety, the film documents an intimate moment of negotiating power, race, gender, age, queerness, risk, love, and friendship. The film has been seen at over 15 festivals worldwide and has served in anti-racist DEI trainings and world building conferences.

Inspired by the film Keith and Sarah decided to gather two teams of dancers, one Black and one white, to explore potentials for racial healing through dancing and community process. The making of Tell has involved working separately in racially-caucused groups and then coming together as a multi-racial ensemble to build relationships through shared dancing, rituals, meals, conversation, and rural retreats. When we began we didn’t know if the two groups would remain separated or come together to create a single work, with the decision in the hands of the Black dancers. We recognized the possibility of both failure and conflict. Holding space for the nuanced intricacies of our identities to understand racial harm and pursue racial healing, we have stepped into cross-racial collaboration through honesty, consent, and care.

CREDITS

Co-Directors: Sarah Crowell & Keith Kennessy
Collaborators & Performers: Larry Arrington, Samara Atkins, Amber Julian, Sheila Russell, Ainsley Tharp, and Shaunna Vella
Producing Director: Alley Wilde
Co-Presenter: Dance Mission Theater
Sound Design: Joel St. Julien
Costume Design: Angie Wilson
Lighting Design: David Robertson
Projection Design: Ainsley Tharp
Stage Manager: Chi Chi O

BIOS

Larry Arrington is a dance artist working in hybrids of idea and practice at the intersections of body and astrology. www.astrologywithlarry.com 

Samara Atkins is an Oakland, CA native and has been dancing, performing, and teaching hip-hop since 1999. Her mission is to utilize dance as a somatic tool for connecting, celebrating, addressing, coping, and healing within our lived experiences. She uses hip hop and street dance as an arts practice to connect with the world, and as a vehicle of change.

Samara is Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Mix'd Ingrdnts, an all-womxn, multi-ethnic, multi-genre dance company, with a mission to educate, inspire, and empower women, youth, and the community. She and her crew have been featured in dance & event festivals such as Clusterfest, on the Harry Connick Jr. show, and KQED, as well as in news articles and received awards. 

Samara is member, lead choreographer, singer/songwriter, and emcee, of the GRAMMY-winning, four-time GRAMMY-nominated children's music group, Alphabet Rockers.

Samara is currently a teaching artist through Destiny Arts Center, a youth facilitator co-leading Power of Hope teen camps, Head Counselor of Jam Camp West, dance faculty at Jazz Camp West, touring with Alphabet Rockers, & teaches pop-up classes, facilitates workshops, and engages in community events in the Bay Area. 

IG: @Samaralou // FB: Samara Atkins  // Email: dancewithsamara@gmail.com

Sarah Crowell has taught dance, theater and violence prevention for over 30 years. At the end of 2020, she left her position as the Artistic Director at Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, CA where she served in different capacities from 1990-2020, including Executive Director from 2002-2007. She founded and co-directed the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company from 1993-2020, which has been the subject of two documentary films, and won the National Arts & Humanities Youth Program Award. Sarah has facilitated arts integration, violence prevention, cultural humility and team building professional development sessions with artists and educators since 2000, both locally and nationally. She is the recipient of the KPFA Peace award, the KQED Women’s History Local Hero award, the Bay Area Dance Week award, the Alameda County Arts Leadership award, and the National Guild for Community Arts Education Milestone award. She is also a four-time finalist for a Tony Award for Excellence in Theater Education. 

Sarah is a retired professional dancer, having performed and toured with numerous dance and dance/theater companies including Impulse Jazz Dance Company in Boston and the Dance Brigade in San Francisco.  She also co-created the dance/theater company i am Productions!

Since leaving Destiny Arts Center, Sarah has worked as a consultant for the Hewlett Foundation, St. Mary’s College, Dance Mission Theater (Liberation Academy), the Othering and Belonging Institute, Movement Liberation and The World As It Could Be, doing team building, curriculum writing, group facilitation, arts festival and conference curation, and public speaking.

Sarah believes passionately that the arts are an essential component of the journey to social justice, especially art forms that involve moving the body. She believes that movement must be part of all movements for social change.

Keith Hennessy, MFA, PhD, is a frolicker, imperfectionist, and artist working in the fields of dance, performance, activism, affordable housing, sexuality, equity, and teaching. Raised on Atikameksheng Anishnawbek lands in Canada, living in Ramaytush Ohlone lands (San Francisco) since 1982, Keith tours internationally. Hennessy’s work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by anti-racist, queer- feminist, and decolonial movements. He engages practices of improvisation, ritual, collaboration, play, and protest to respond to political crises and intense feelings. Hennessy directs Circo Zero, co-founded the dance/culture spaces 848 and CounterPulse, and was a member of Sara Mann’s Contraband, 1985-1994. Awards include Guggenheim, USArtist, NY Bessie, multiple Bay Area Izzies, and multiple residencies in the US and Europe. With a focus on the politics of relationships, Keith has negotiated shared power and creativity with Ishmael Houston-Jones, Sarah Crowell, Peiling Kao, Ryanaustin Dennis, Snowflake Towers (Yaqui, Mayan), Jassem Hindi, J Jha, Annie Danger, Gerald Casel.

Amber Julian, born and raised in the Bay, is a professional dancer of over 20 years whose style is often described as fierce and groovy. Her background and primary training is in Hip Hop and House, and she considers herself a freestyle dancer with an emphasis on somatic healing. She started dancing in Mix’d Ingrdnts Dance Company in 2013, and she was a primary multidisciplinary artist of over 7 years with Embodiment Project. She was the Artistic Director and co-founder of the first teen hip hop dance crew, Seeds, at ODC school and is currently a performing arts professor at USF. She believes that dance is medicine and a tool in moving and exchanging deep rooted energy in order to heal, make change and exude dynamic forms of visual expression.

Sheila Russell has been a healer through movement for the past three decades. She began her training in San Diego, California and continued her studies at the University California Irvine where she was blessed and honored to study under greats such as Donald McKayle and Bernard Johnson. She has most recently performed with Movement Liberation, Samara Atkins, and House Full of Black Women. She is the co-founder and artistic director of See Through Soul dance company in Oakland, Ca. See Through Soul dance company seeks to explore the subtleties, complexities, and dynamics that drive and shift relationships between beings and to heal both the performers and the audiences through performance.

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 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 is queer, transcends boundaries and norms, and surpasses the conventional yes and no. She has performed internationally worked with various artists such as Sara Shleton Mann, nathaniel moore, gizeh muñiz, Keith Hennessy, Kathleen Hermsdorf, Kim Ip, estrellx supernova, Stephanie Hewett, Clarissa Dyas, NAKA Dance Theater, and Tori Lawerence & Co. Her work is femme. Her work is messy.  Her work is a piece of the future.  

She is currently organizing and teaching with the ˈɡaT͟H(ə)riNGs class series with her collaborator gizeh muñiz, and apart of the curatorial team for KH FRESH FESTIVAL 23+24. 

Shaunna Vella is a choreographer, performer, teacher and activist that has created work in the Bay Area for over 20 years. As a queer femme artist based in Oakland, her performance work and academic scholarship is an interdisciplinary praxis of queer performance, dance and embodiment, and performance studies.  Her choreography is political and interdisciplinary, combining highly-physical movement, text, improvisation scores, musical collaborations, camp aesthetics and queer-feminist theory. Shaunna is the co-founder of Vella & Merrell Dance, and was recently nominated by The Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee for an Outstanding Performance Award for the Company in 2019. As a dancer, she has created and performed works with Rogelio Lopez and Dancers, Andrew Merrell, Stranger Lover Dreamer, Anne Bluethenthal and Dancers, Davalos Dance Company, Liss Fain Dance, Paufve Dance and Agora Dance Project. This is her first project with Circo Zero.

She is the Program Director for LEAP (Liberal Education for Arts Professionals) and is an Associate Professor in the Performing Arts at Saint Mary’s College of California where she teaches courses such as Dance and Social Justice, Art and Activism, Dance and Performance Studies, and Intercultural Choreography, as well as movement technique and production. She teaches open modern dance classes through Shawl-Anderson Dance Center on Thursday nights from 6-7:30pm. Shaunna holds an MFA in Dance from Saint Mary’s College of California.

Joel St. Julien is a Haitian-American composer and sound artist based in San Francisco. Joel has written music for documentaries, short / feature films, podcasts, and dance.  He is a firm believer in experimentation/fusion with acoustic and electronic elements in sound oscillating through escapism and the mysticism of the present tense.

David Robertson is a San Francisco based designer. He has worked with many Bay Area companies including the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, Post:Ballet, Opera Parallèle, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, Shotgun Players, The Magic Theatre, and SF Playhouse. As ODC Dance’s lighting director since 2003, he has toured with them extensively as well as created a number of original designs, including the 2019 design KT Nelson’s site specific piece Path of Miracles at Grace Cathedral. He has been the lighitng designer for the Sun Valley Music Festival’s summer symphony season in Sun Valley, Idaho since 2008.

Alley Wilde, is a culture worker engaged in a practice fusing art-administration, art-making, and radical activism. They are a white, not-disabled, queer, mixed class status, non-binary person with access to male privilege and USAmerican citizenship whose work confronts questions of power, inequity, and liberation. Their aim is to advance equity and build community through the progeneration of queer culture. Wilde was born and raised on the traditional lands of the Tongva (colonially known as Orange County) and currently lives on the traditional lands of the Chochenyo Ohlone (colonially known as Oakland).

Angie Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist working in textile-based sculpture, installation, social practice, interiors, and costume design. She is interested in the intimacy of textiles – as protective, sheltering, comforting, and expressive. Textiles as clothing and domestic objects signify identity, hold memory, and tell stories. Angie references weaving as a powerful metaphor for interconnectivity - of the universe, our communities, our bodies, and minds. In her work, she opens space for the narrative power of textiles to illustrate the interconnectivity and interdependence of humanity.

Wilson’s exhibitions often include community workshops that offer participants opportunities to experience embodied art making – by connecting to our own innate creativity, we connect to the joyful, universal flow. Together we create, move, and dialogue about how our actions affect and impact one another, political life, and the planet. She collaborates with community arts organizations, dancers, healers, musicians, and scientists to catalyze dynamic community conversations, incorporating art and movement as healing practices, empowering us to create positive change within ourselves and in our communities.

Angie Wilson received her MFA from San Francisco State University and BA in Russian from Reed College. Her work has been exhibited at Headlands Center for the Arts, de Young Museum, California College of the Arts, Toledo Museum of Art, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Oakland Museum of California, San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Kala Art Institute, Cult/Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, SOMArts, and Root Division, among others. She has been Costume Designer at the Destiny Arts Center in Oakland since 2006 and has created costumes for Lines Ballet, ACT, California Shakespeare Festival, and The History Channel. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at the de Young Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and NIAD.

Her work is featured in Queer Threads (ed John Chaich and Todd Oldham, AMMO Books, 2017) and Fray (by Julia Bryan-Wilson, University of Chicago Press, 2017).

FUNDING

Tell is supported by grants from The San Francisco Arts Commission, The California Arts Council, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, The Creative Work Fund, The National Endowment for the Arts, The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and Mellon Foundation