Located in SOMA in San Francisco, CounterPULSE is a non-profit theater, performance space, community center, and gallery with roots deep in the Bay Area’s provocative performance and dance scenes. CounterPULSE produces its own shows, helps support local artists and activists with its programs and can be rented for productions and rehearsals.
My current favorite definition of the word “dance” is: “Impermanence made visible.” That seems to cover the immensity and the minutia of this slippery form. I’m particularly in touch with impermanence as Dandelion moves into our premiere of Friend tonight. It strikes me as odd how performance is what I pour my most extreme efforts [...]
I’ve come to love tech week–the week leading up to a performance run in which we have tech (technical) rehearsals, dress rehearsals and last minute scramblings to finish. I notice that during this time I am highly energized with a mix of anxiety, anticipation and joy. And I notice that the main thing that keeps [...]
I’ve never felt I fit in with what I believed was THE gay community, a culture that seemed to be marked by an ease and openness around sex that I did not possess. I’ve always felt a tension between the family-oriented grown-up part of me and this coy inner-child navigating an overtly sexual community. Over [...]
The showings that Dandelion has been doing as part of our residency at CounterPULSE have taught me a lot. Here’s an incomplete list of insights, reminders, clarifying moments that I’ve gathered so far from the three monthly public showings of our Friend project: 1. Public showings are crucial to the development of the kind of [...]
For Dance Anywhere Day this year we performed a minimalist movement structure in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland. Ensemble Member David Ryther led us in an improvised piece based on a street performer he had witnessed many times in Santa Cruz. We traveled slowly around the plaza, waving and looking back and forth with [...]
