Join CounterPulse for a double bill evening featuring works by our 2017 Edge Residency artists.
Arletta Anderson and Adam Smith. Photo by Yvonne Portra.
weather // body is a multidisciplinary visual poem created and performed by Arletta Anderson & Adam Smith that looks at physical and environmental change over time. This piece asks how we consider our bodies in relationship to the spaces around them and how that changes as we age. We call on memory and its failings, create imagined futures, and remember who we are in the present moment now.
Throughout weather // body, a sonic, visual, and visceral landscape is built, rearranged, swept up, and discarded. Structural inspiration pulls from climate change, weather patterns, and star fields. The movement is rooted in virtuosic dance and pedestrian tasks, examining the body as both a means of labor and a poetic vessel. Text elements are sourced from multi-generational interviews that have been abstracted and honed to their core elements. An electric guitar serves to score the piece — at times it is a thunderous hurricane of sound, and others, a firefly in the distance.
At its core, weather // body is both a violent protest against and a quiet contemplation on change.
Photo by John Shamberg
The Scarlett Cushion centers on the exploration of human resilience, seeking to craft, through the arc of performance, a felt experience of resilience among participants/audiences in their new work, The Bell in the Blood.
Resilience is a quality of living-being-ness and intelligence intrinsic to living organisms that, just as in the form of an immune system, continuously realigns and moves us toward homeostasis. We witness resilience in young children as they move through different states of mind and continuously return to a clarity of being, present in the moment. Yet, as adults, we become slow in understanding how to access this quality. Our work is one of performative inquiry, bringing the investigation of resilience into the center of cultural discourse surrounding identity and social change.
Please join us for these special evenings
Artist reception on Friday April 21st after the show, meet the artists and hang out. Small bites provided by Picnic on Third!
Talk back with Scarlett Cushion on Saturday, April 22nd after the show with panelists, Rupa Marya, composer for Rupa & the April Fishes and a physician committed to ending health inequities, Aude Bouagnon, PhD candidate in the Biomedical Sciences at UCSF, and Robin Gurung, leader of the Bay Area Bhutanese Youth Refugee Group.
Panel description
In the spirit of intersecting disciplines, we’ve invited an unusual combination of panelists to share their personal experiences with regard to resilience in their respective areas of work. Our guests life/career experiences span the fields of science, medicine, cultural activism, mothering and healing/support strategies in refugee communities. Please join us for this unique conversation.
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Edge Residency 2017 is supported by Ken Hempel Fund for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and The Kenneth Rainin Foundation
[Cover photo by Yvonne Portra.]