CounterPulse Presents Festival 2025
September 4 – 27, 2025
80 Turk St, SF // counterpulse.org/events
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AN FRANCISCO, CA — Welcome to the fifth installment of the CounterPulse Festival! Held every other year, the CounterPulse Festival is a month-long celebration of art and community, rooted in the queer experimental dance and art scenes that CounterPulse is home to. Amidst federal and local funding cuts, CounterPulse once again commits to the artists in our community despite limited resources, foregrounding narratives of transformation, lineage, and resistance.
The artists of the 2025 Festival are rooted in queer histories of gathering, from waacking and disco, to dinner parties and sanctuaries. Through messes of plastic, clay, rope, and wood come explorations of heritage, borders, and desire. In the current moment, we all feel scarcity and uncertainty. It is a time of survival. With no funding for this Festival, CounterPulse has decided to stand firm, hosting these crucial performances at risk, stating proudly that when all seems uncertain, we must come together and imagine.
Learn more at: counterpulse.org/counterpulse-festival-2025
FULL FESTIVAL PROGRAM ⬇️
CounterPulse Artist Residency Commissioning: EDGE Residency Showcase
September 4, 5 & 12, 2025 at 8pm; September 13, 2025 at 2pm
Trashflower
By Rose and Zoe Huey
Trashflower is a transdisciplinary study on plastic, death, grief, and transformation. Weaving together up-cycled plastic sculptural elements with dance practice, we explore the porous and invisible membranes between the organic and plastic body.
a giant plastic bag / mylar trash heaps / jellyfish / fish bodies / sisters / intimacy / breathability / lack of breathability / plastic-as-performer / otherworldly creatures / cocooning / crochet / death / grief / mundane memorials / playing our way through the horrors / microplastics as roommate / love
On the Floor
By Maria Silk and Théophylle Dcx
Maria Silk and Théophylle Dcx launch their artistic collaboration with the presentation of a new duet titled On the Floor. Their choreographic research explores the queer legacies carried by the 1980s dance music genres of post-disco and hi-NRG. Entering altered states induced by dance, the duo will travel into an inner space of hedonism, exhaustion, escape, and discipline, guided by the four-on-the-floor rhythm that drives this vital music.
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Shared Skins Picture Party
September 12 at 6pm
By M Eilo
Come build your own runway worthy outfit from M Eilo’s snap together textile legos. These pieces can make garments to fit any body! Collab with fellow party goers to make outfits together then model them for each other and our professional photographer.
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TEXT2SPEECH: TEXT2IMAGE
September 4-December 31, 2025 | Opening Reception September 4 at 5pm
Curated by Fadl Fakhouri for CounterPulse Curator in Residence Program
Text2Speech is a performance and exhibition series curated by Fadl Fakhouri highlighting artists whose work centers on borders. This edition highlights linguistic borders and contemplates whether text is itself an image. How does this change how we interpret language, which originated as a collection of symbols and hieroglyphics; arguably still the case, as witnessed in contemporary language.
Follow @text_2_speech to be notified of future events.
Exhibited artists include E Rady, Chisato Hughes, Noel Maghathe, Leena Joshi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
RSVP for the Opening Reception>>>
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Groundwork Festival: Cohort A
September 11 & 13 at 8pm
The Axe: a long line of broken white people
By Alley Wilde
The Axe: a long line of broken white people is a performance of critical whiteness studies, radical genealogy, and ancestral recovery. Working through pagan ritual, folk dance, poetic chronicles, handmade costumes, and magical masks, The Axe dances with the spread of empire within Europe and how those cycles of trauma and methods of domination were exported as global colonialism.
Edging Sessions
By Derek Dimartini
Edging Sessions unravels the taut tension between desire, repression, and consumption, channeling the raw volatility of queer experience. Disrupting hetero-linear time, the piece reclaims the body as a sensuous force of resistance, intimacy, and transformation.
Groundwork Festival: Cohort B
September 18 & 19 at 8pm
EZ Sand (a dance with my dad about clay)
By Emma Lanier
EZ Sand (a dance with my dad about clay) is a duet between dance artist Emma Lanier and ceramic artist Paul Lanier. Drawing on Paul’s Anagama pottery practice and Emma’s movement practice, the duet is part of an ongoing research project that looks at intergenerational practices of artmaking in a Japanese-American family.
oya: un/drowned
By Jeunée Simon
oya: un/drowned, is an interdisciplinary project incorporating poetry, movement, music, song, that will imagine Black female survival in a world that is inhospitable. un/drowned calls on us to gather the courage to rip apart the facade of normalcy and productivity to figure out how to survive.
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And the Bull
September 13, 14, 19 & 20
By Cornelius
A performance for a kitchen table, in homes, for small groups of audience. And the Bull jumps between the epic and the mundane and from body to body-ody-ody. It’s maybe a poem, maybe a party, maybe a monologue, maybe a performance, maybe an object, maybe a joke, maybe true. And the Bull touches on themes of queer desire, loss/heartbreak, dissociation, reassociation and being together.
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Sanctuary Spaces
Sunday, September 14, 3:30- 5 (workshop); 5:30-6:30 (dialogue)
By MovingGround
The Sanctuary Spaces team will co-facilitate this workshop, utilizing arts-based, interactive, experiments, investigating our relationship with Sanctuary and creating safe spaces for humans. The following dialogue circle will be focus on the questions that the Sanctuary Spaces project centers, and the shared research uncovered within the afternoon workshop.
Workshop:
The Sanctuary Spaces team will co-facilitate this workshop, as we investigate our relationship with Sanctuary and creating safe spaces for humans, altogether. Participants will move through several locations and interactive, site-responsive experiments, including: an opening group score for warm-up and community building, followed by dialogue, movement, visual art and design based improvisations, and an interactive poetry + visual art experience focused on cultivating sanctuary through found language and “felt-sense”, [utilizing source text from Amanda Williamson’s Back to the Dance Itself]. Participants will play a vital role in the experiments and experiences created, as active researchers with the facilitators.
Dialogue:
This dialogue will include a guided community report back from the workshop participants, to share out the live, participatory research that was engaged during the workshop.
We will also center some of our project questions and research, like : How has your life (or lives of your community members) been endangered due to current governmental or social policies and rhetoric? What spaces in your communities provide safety for you now? What would an ideal sanctuary space look like for you, given your identities and values?
The nature of the dialogue may shift, based on the live and participatory interactions in the moment, in the space that we will all be creating.
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Strike & Release
September 20 & 21 @ 7:00 pm
By Alice Hur
Strike & Release reimagines waacking, a street dance stemming from underground Los Angeles queer clubs in the 1970s, by placing it in a longer-form theater context to highlight the storytelling elements of this dance. As a series of interconnected vignettes punctuated by full cast pieces, Strike & Release examines how waacking can be a conduit to folks loving and liberating the parts of themselves that others want to erase – particularly in times of sociopolitical turmoil.
This work is produced through Bridge Live Arts’ Community Engagement Residency.
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DANCE HOUSE
September 25 & 26 at 7:30pm & September 27 at 3pm & 7pm
By Saharla Vetsch
DANCE HOUSE is the club experience of your dreams where movement becomes a form of resistance, care, and collective liberation. Created by a community of 4 black queer drag/dance artists, DANCE HOUSE fuses modern dance, drag, aerial movement, and nightlife spectacle to celebrate radical self-expression and joy.
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Artists In Exile: A Story of Dance in San Francisco
September 27th at 1pm at the Roxie
By Shelley Trott and Austin Forbord
The Roxie and CounterPulse join forces to offer this 25 year anniversary screening of Artists In Exile: A Story of Dance in San Francisco which chronicles over forty years of dancemaking in the San Francisco/Bay Area. The film begins with the revolutionary Anna Halprin and highlights Bay Area choreographers who reflect a boundary-pushing spirit: Mangrove, Tumbleweed, ODC/San Francisco, Margaret Jenkins, Dance Brigade, Joe Goode, and Contraband. The film also addresses the special nature of the Bay Area’s social, political, and environmental climate; the marginalization of Bay Area artists due to the predominance of the New York dance establishment; and the unique and vital dance community that has existed and continues to grow.
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