Leslie Seiters

buildingbloc arts collective is a collective of artists and activists working in collaboration with people imprisoned in California and community organizations doing art and social justice work in the bay area. We choose to use art because we believe that it can be a powerful voice for social change and because art can hopefully make knowledge accessible across the lines of race, class, gender, age and geography. Currently buildingbloc is collaborating( via letters ) with 160 people imprisoned in California and the organization Critical Resistance.
buildingbloc@riseup.net

group A was established in 2003 by Choreographer and Artistic Director Alyssa Lee as a dance company committed to placing dance in close contact with other art forms. Through collaboration with multiple artists group A has presented installations and technology-based works, dances with unconventional items, and contemporary conceptual works.

Liberator Publication is a community based organization that focuses on providing youth and young adults with a creative outlet. We intend to inspire our community and our dynamic young performers by sparking community advocacy through theatre performance.
We believe in living out our dreams...instead of simply dreaming them!

Choreographer Raissa Simpson is a dancer with Robert Moses’ Kin and artistic director of Push Dance Company. Simpson and her Company have been honored with grants and awards since founding the company in 2005. Her works varies and can be described as “reflective contemporary choreography,”- Dance Spirit Magazine

Push Dance Company provides visual stunning athleticism to the broadest audience possible with its Annual Performance, Short Stories, offering emerging choreographers performance   opportunities, and by reaching students through performance opportunities with dance workshops.

Scott Wells has a colorful history of making dances in the San Francisco Bay Area. He started his company in 1991 with Kathleen Hermesdorf and has worked with some of the best dancers in town. Wells has choreographed dances with boxers, skateboarders, improvisers, frisbees, balls and chess pieces. He has slid across tables, slammed on the walls and broke chairs in half. He “had the audience howling with delight” in most every show. He has a fresh, accessible style that is, after 15 years, just about to grow up.

• In 2004 Wells received the San Francisco Award (Izzies) for  Outstanding Choreography.
• In 2005 he was selected by Dance Magazine as One of the 25 To Watch.
• In 2006 Scott Wells & Dancers' show was selected by the SF Chronicle as one of the top ten dance performances.

Small Desk Press aims to publish writing by emerging artists. We are interested in supporting writing that challenges the conventional divisions of experimental, narrative, poetry and/or prose. Small Desk Press seeks to present an eclectic aesthetic that gives primacy to no one school or style of writing.

The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal publishes fine poetry and fiction of social content and personal experience. We publish neighborhood writers, and writers who are national and international. Our writers are from diverse cultures and are often economically marginal people. Recent issues have included Al Young, Clara Hsu, and Dan O. Our web site is www.haightashbury.org/poetry.html

Change of State Performance Project is a collaboration between dance and theatre artists Andrea del Moral and K. Qilo Matzen. We make performance that transcends the boundaries of theatre, dance, and grassroots social-political movements. We are equally dedicated to creating innovative, precise performance and enticing people with challenging, constructive ideas.

HumilitySwim's 2007 season features a  solo-for-camera work, 52 Negotiations, (March 2007), a monthly Local Access TV Show, CITV: Contact Improvisation Television, (begins Winter 2007), a commissioned sitework, Home In You, for Queer Arts Festival (June 2007), and bimonthly experimental interactive tours of SF's Mission district art spaces with Organic Site Shake as part of the Red Poppy Art House’s MAPP program. HumilitySwim also offers drop-in classes and training intensives in Contact Improvisation; 2007 intensive dates will be announced in February.

Krista DeNio (choreographer, performer, director) has produced work in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1997. The work: post-apocalyptic, narrative-driven movement theater; the visual and visceral are weighted equally with storyline/content, movement/choreography, and sound design.  The viewer should feel enveloped in an experience--emotional, raw, thought-provoking and unapologetic--a call to action.

The Bay Area Labor Heritage/Rockin’ Solidarity Chorus
The chorus, founded in January 1999, sings old and new labor songs, in a range of styles, including gospel, South African, folk (from Woody Guthrie to 21st century bards), Broadway, Norteno, and rock & roll. Members are a mix of unionists, Wobblies, unaffiliated folks, academics, activists, anarchists, and archivists. We range in age (so far) from 25 to 75. We sing about all kinds of work, as well as peace and other contemporary issues.

Precarious Theatre/Matthew Graham Smith Presents
Our work is focused on character-driven stories. We are attracted to stories that have relevance to our communities here and now and stories that allow us to explore new physical and theatrical realms. We seek to create theater that attracts new theatergoers, not just those who already regularly attend the theater. We seek to create a theatrical experience that defies expectations of what we call theater.

Isak Immanuel/Floor of Sky
Born in the United States, Isak Immanuel grew up in the contrasting environments of the mesas of Taos, New Mexico and the ghettoes of East Los Angeles. As an interdisciplinary artist and dancer he has taken part in extensive solo and collaborative works throughout the SF Bay Area and internationally. In 2003 he began the performance and exhibition series Floor of Sky Projects as a means to examine the state of spirit and body in a constantly shifting city/time/landscape; from the immediacies of civic identity to the distances of myth, it is an approach to an intimate and civic dialectic with a hybrid of images, movement, sound, texture and light. Work has recently been done in Taiwan, Seoul, the Czech Republic, Berlin, Paris and San Francisco.

ZERO PERFORMANCE & CIRCO ZERO

Keith Hennessy makes activist ritual spectacle. He directs Circo Zero in an interdisciplinary mash-up of circus, contemporary dance, live music, performance and visual art. With a focus on experimentation and research, Zero Performance evolves artistic language, builds community, and nurtures a vision of live performance relevant to everyday life.
www.circozero.org

Shanique S. Scott has performed in venues as diverse as theater festivals, AFRO SOLO theater festival, 2004 and 2005, the San Francisco theater festival 2006. She has also performed in upscale comedy clubs such as New York Comedy Club, Stand Up New York Comedy Club, and The Punch line in San Francisco . She has also performed in high schools, prisons, group homes and halfway houses. "PRISONS", her present one woman show was premiered at The Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts in San Francisco and The La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley. Her talent has also been well received and recognized by Broadway actor and chair of the theater department at the University at Buffalo, Stephen Henderson and L.A. Director Stephen Semien. Shanique also has a Masters Degree in Theater and Women's Studies.

We Players presents performance events that transform public spaces into realms of participatory theater. Using the works of Shakespeare to discuss current issues in local landscapes, we invite the audience to engage physically and awaken to the spectacular world around us.

Jesse Olsen is a composer, performer, improvisor, teacher, and activist, who works to bring together his diverse experience and influences to create art that transcends discipline and genre. In addition to being a vehicle for Jesse's own work, Deconstruct My House is an organization committed to presenting and fostering music-centered creative work that inspires and challenges its audience’s hearts, minds, and bodies; that is socially and politically relevant; and that takes risks, asks questions, and pushes the boundaries of its form.

"Directed by Maya Gurantz, Temescal Labs (formerly Ten Red Hen) creates engaging, relevant, dynamic new theater that interrogates both the form of live art-making and the world around us.   Our inaugural show, {The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon, played to sold out audiences and garnered great reviews from all the major Bay Area publications.  CLOWN BIBLE was recognized as the Best Show of 2007 in the East Bay Express, and the Berkeley Daily Planet hailed us as "the most original" theater company in the East Bay."