CounterPulse Presents ARC Edge 2025

‘‘Trashflower’ by Rose and Zoe Huey & ‘On the Floor’ by Maria Silk

September 4, 2025 @ 8PM PT – September 5, 2025 @ 8PM PT
September 12, 2025 @ 8PM PT – September 13, 2025 @ 2PM PT

80 Turk St. SF

Learn more and get tickets here

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — From living with microplastics and honoring dancefloor histories, the 2025 CounterPulse ARC Edge program presents Trashflower by Rose and Zoe Huey and On The Floor by Maria Silk. This year’s Edge performances invite audiences to look deeply at the dance against the grid and think thoughtfully of how we are enmeshed in a world of plastic.

CounterPulse’s Artist Residency & Commissioning (ARC) Edge program is an incubation residency and commissioning program for contemporary choreographers whose work is deeply curious about the intersection of art practice and social change.

About 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 / cacooning / crochet / death / grief / mundane memorials / playing our way through the horrors / microplastics as roommate / love

Rose Huey (they/she) and Zoe Huey (they/them)

We grew up on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land aka Oakland, CA. Shaped by our mixed-race ancestry, queer identities and shared sisterhood, our artistic practice blends dance, visual art, and improvisation. Our earliest creative collaborations were living room dance performances for our stuffed animals. In collaboration with our childhood selves we experiment with play as creative process and creative process as play. Play is a portal through which we seek to make sense of the nonsensical, dystopian, and apocalyptic world we inhabit; in our sistership we find refuge.

About On the Floor
By Maria Silk

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.

Maria Silk is an artist and choreographer based in San Francisco. Maria’s practice emerges from over a decade of immersion in Bay Area queer nightlife as a drag performer, DJ, and producer. Her performance and video work has been presented at CounterPulse, BAMPFA, the Cantor Center for the Arts, Slash, and Southern Exposure, among other local venues, as well as internationally at Fierce! Festival (Birmingham, UK) and Improspekcije (Zagreb, Croatia).

Théophylle Dcx’s practice is akin to a personal diary. Biographical, youthful, and resolutely concerned with memory, his work hyperbolically shares anger, fatigue, anxiety, joy, desires, and hopes. In response to a perpetually collapsing world emerges a visceral need to celebrate life. In this space of vulnerability, his friends become his strongest defense. Their stories intertwine with those of their predecessors, forming a collective front against a hostile society. His work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Datsuijo (Tokyo), La Ferme du Buisson (Paris), Art-O-Rama (Marseille), Forde (Geneva). Théophylle Dcx was born in 1996. He lives and works in Marseille.

ABOUT COUNTERPULSE

CounterPulse is building a movement of risk-taking art that shatters assumptions and builds community. We provide space and resources for emerging artists and cultural innovators, serving as an incubator for the creation of socially relevant, community-based art and culture. CounterPulse acts as a catalyst for art and action; creating a forum for the open exchange of art and ideas, catalyzing transformation in our communities and our society. We work towards a world that celebrates diversity of race, class, cultural heritage, artistic expression, ability, gender identity, and sexual orientation. We strive to create an environment that is physically and economically accessible to everyone. Counterpulse.org

CounterPulse’s ARC Edge residency program is made possible with support from the Ken Hempel Fund for the Arts.

Image Credit & Description:

Left: Provided by Melissa Wong Alt text: located on the beach of the Albany Bulb, one figure is laying down horizontal on the sand in the foreground of the image. Their head is supported by their elbow, legs stretched out long. They are a lighter skinned mixed race asian american. They are wearing a bright green bikini with a silver mylar balloon over their head, which is fully inflated because of the wind. The second figure is standing further back, also mixed race asian american, with skin more in shadow, arms bent with hands resting on hips, located on the far left side of the image, in a pink one piece, also with an inflated mylar balloon over her head.

Right: Provided by Robbie Sweeny Alt text: A blurry photograph taken in red light. A figure reaches her hand toward the camera, with a long feather boa covering her arm. Her eyes, painted with thick black eyeshadow, are closed in concentration.