CounterPulse presents two weekends of original new works from 2016 residents: Zoë Klein & Stephanie Bastos. Both works explore autobiography though dance, uncovering identity, freedom, and loss.
Friday August 12, Zoë Klein gets in conversation with Laura Elaine Ellis, CounterPulse board chair, and director of the African & African American Performing Arts Coalition in a special talk back after the show.
Friday August 19, join us for a post-show hosted reception with treats from Cable Car Cakes and Chocolates and more, AND a talk back between Stephanie Bastos and Tammy Johnson, dancer, writer, and equity consultant and author of, “Step-Together-Step: An Art and Racial Justice Workshop for Liberated Artists and Their Collaborators,” a training curriculum about race and the arts.
Zoë Klein’s Born, Never Asked. sheds light on the complexity of international adoption through acrobatics, dance, spoken word, and visual imagery. Born in Colombia, raised in NYC, choreographer Zoë Klein embarks on this personal journey in order to question the importance of bloodline and how to achieve wholeness in the face of conflicting loyalties between lands, languages, families, and cultures. When upside down is no better than right side up and being stuck in-between forces international adoptees to question their purpose and existence, how do we recover connection, heal our spirit, and make meaning and impact despite our uprooted beginnings.
Stephanie Bastos’s Timeline is an intimate autobiographical performance that engages the audience through a heartfelt journey of a dancer’s life. The work is based on a true story of the artist, a Brazilian- American who dances with and without the aid of a prosthetic leg. It moves through an emotional landscape starting from childhood to the present, including the moment in which a car accident resulted in the loss of her right leg. “Timeline” illuminates themes of resiliency and vulnerability by providing a textured perspective into the human condition through movement, song, and spoken word that is accessible to all communities.
Directed by Leymis Bolaños Wilmott
About the CounterPulse Edge Residency
Edge is an incubation residency and commissioning program for contemporary choreographers whose work is deeply curious about the intersection of art practice and social change. Through progressing showings, discourse events, and culminating live performances this program is a platform for investigating relevancy and creating new knowledge. By eliminating boundaries between disciplines, between artists and audience, and between communities, Edge produces innovative performance works with transformational potential.
The CounterPulse Edge Residency is supported by the Fleishhacker Foundation, Ken Hempel Fund for the Arts, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation
Special thanks to event community partners: Pact, An Adoption Alliance, Fort Point Beer Company, Cable Car Cakes and Chocolates, and Blazing Saddles
[Photos of Zoë by Robbie Sweeny, Photos of Stephanie by Cliff Roles]