Jesse Hewit

People! This is Jesse Hewit. Ya’ll, I’m not gonna beat around the bush: 2019 has been a doozy. It felt like the world was extra on fire. As I reflect on the big and fast and difficult swirl of the past year, I think of just how much I needed CounterPulse. I needed pulsating, breathy, sharp art. I needed clear, vibrant, community-based action. I needed to see bodies being free, and I needed to feel free alongside those bodies. At the 2019 CounterPulse

So CounterPulse is centering their second annual festival around improvisation and the pursuit of “freedom,” and this... is just a very real workout for all of me: brain, bod, heart, etc. I think it’s a bold move on our part. And I say: thank goodness for bold moves. Years ago, I used to co-teach a kind of ever-evolving, ultimately impossible pedagogy—with my sister Larry Arrington—that we called Freedom Practice. We were two young white, at-least-partially-euro-contemporary bred dance artists who decided

I don’t actually remember the first time that I met Julie, but I do have a picture in my head of sitting at my desk at the old CounterPulse, at 1310 Mission, and looking to my left and seeing her working at a desk that we rented out to Jess Curtis at the time for his admin work to happen… which was being carried out by Julie. It was probably late 2008. Soon after, I was casting a new group

An excerpt from Jesse Hewit's piece on Upstanding Others as part of the 2018 CounterPulse Festival. Originally published on SFMOMA's Open Space. Read the full piece here. The premise: Upstanding Others was an experiment that happened within the inaugural CounterPulse Festival, and it happened from March 12 through March 17, 2018. There were eight to ten people in a room (or series of rooms) every day for a chunk of hours, some chunks larger than others. Olga, Sasha, and Nina were