The future is terrifying, but that’s never stopped us. Welcome to Fall 2018 at CounterPulse.

Our season launches in rejoice as we celebrate the Turk Street Mural with our Tenderloin community and Twin Walls Mural Company.

We then kick off our intrepid performance season with year two of Combustible, with Deborah Slater Dance Theater & John Fesenko and daevron & Raissa Simpson’s PUSH Dance Company confronting San Francisco’s fractured geographies and the digital divides in our everyday lives with cutting-edge new works.

Then, performance art curator Dino Dinco shakes a congregation’s values with the transcendent trans-comedy, The Homophobes: a clown show.

Later in the season, we witness legends from a future queer revolution in Beyond Gravity and explore deaf diasporas and utopias in Deaf’s IMPRISONED with award-winning African American deaf choreographer, Antoine Hunter.

In November, CounterPulse welcomes Aguas Dance Company and Cunamacué to invigorate the stage with live music, vibrant dance, story and song to offer planetary healing through indigenous spirits in RUDA/ Arruda.

Fall 2018 concludes with our Performing Diaspora Resident artists, Melissa Lewis and Cynthia Ling Lee connecting past and present xenophobic regimes while honoring the legacy of local master and hero Bruce Lee.

In Fall 2018, CounterPulse shifts with infinite tragedies embedded in our unrelenting skin, and looks to ecologies of human connection to heal us.

In Fall 2018, CounterPulse leads a resistance with transformative body-based experiences. Are you ready?

Fall 2018 at CounterPulse

Turk Street Mural Celebration
Wed, Aug 29, 6pm-8pm
We did it! Together with Twin Walls Mural Company, the Turk Street mural—Tenderloin: Stay Rooted—is UP!  We’d like to take moment to celebrate the work of the artists, community members, and partners who came together to make this mural happen.  Meet the artists, grab some food, and hang out with us in front of CounterPulse and check out the mural.

Combustible Residency Double Bill
dævron & Raissa Simpson’s PUSH Dance Company: TecTonic Shifts
Deborah Slater Dance Theater & John Fesenko: IN CIVILITY: Pt. 2
Outrage Machine
Sep 13-15 & 20-22, Thu-Sat, 8pm
Pay-what-you-can Thursdays

For the second year of the Combustible Residency we present Deborah Slater Dance Theater & John Fesenko interrogating technology’s role in transforming how we perceive and interact with the world of others in IN CIVILITY, Pt. 2: Outrage Machine. Instead of succumbing to media-fueled outrage, can we instead dance with our common humanity, enhanced by the very technology that so often is used to wedge us apart?

Next, dævron & Raissa Simpson’s PUSH Dance Company explores urban displacement and digital divides, shifting landscapes and cyber tremors in TecTonic Shifts. Sirens sound off in the face of chronic disaster with geographies fractured by evictions, increased surveillance and a legacy of redlining Black communities. Who decides what access and safety mean in the streets, circuits and software that shape a city?

death
FACT/SF
Thu-Sat, Sep 27-29, and Oct 4-6 & 11-13, 8pm
death is a 90-minute contemporary dance and immersive experience about death and the acute, isolating grief often suffered by the living. This work aims to be a celebration, a conjuring, and a collective mourning for performers and audience alike. death is the third part of Slender-White’s triptych on death, grief, and loss.

The Homophobes: a clown show
Dino Dinco
Thu-Sat, Oct 18-20, 8pm
“A misunderstood miracle shakes a conservative congregation’s values to its core when their beloved pastor becomes the center of a spectacular firestorm that will forever shatter their notions of sex, gender and intercourse between animate beings. A transcendent trans-comedy of errors featuring mad ministers, divine interventions, confused angels and maybe even the antichrist.” – S. Cook

Traumboy
Daniel Hellmann
Sat, Oct 21, 8pm
Daniel is a sex worker. In his performance he reports on his clients, his relationships and his motivations in pursuing this activity. Between documentary and autofiction, Traumboy questions taboos and stigmatization, examining the fears, fantasies and contradictions of our hypercapitalist and oversexualised society.

Social Table
Design Pro Bono at Capital One
Tue, Oct 23, 6pm
Join Capital One’s Design Pro Bono team for an evening of lightning talks about design for social impact at CounterPulse. We’ve invited speakers who are using the power of design to make a positive impact on our world and our region. Come learn about our speakers’ work with nonprofits, government agencies, and industry to serve vulnerable populations and foster a more inclusive world.

Beyond Gravity
Jess Curtis/Gravity
Thu-Sat, Oct 25-27, 8pm
Witness legends from a future queer revolution and experience new ways of being with each other at a family reunion for a post-human universe. New body-based performance works from around the world by jose e. abad, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Abby Crain, Gabriel Christian, Rachael Dichter, and Mira Kautto. An evening of intersectional performances by the amazing artists served by Gravity’s new Artist Services programs.

Social Muscle Club
Sun, Nov 4, 5pm
What if giving, receiving, communication and commitment were social muscles that
could be trained?
At Social Muscle Club you meet new people and take part in a simple sharing game. Each person offers something they can give away, and makes a request for something they want to receive. These unconditional offers and requests can be for something material or practical—anything from from fresh bread to a holiday apartment in Costa Rica—or something abstract or relationship focused, like tips on resilience or a shoulder to cry on. The giving and receiving happens around tables, amongst performance, music, food and surprises. It’s a real celebration, evocative of an exuberant wedding or a chaotic game show.

Deaf’s IMPRISONED 
Antoine Hunter, Urban Jazz Dance Company,
Rosa Lee Timm, Christopher Smith, Ian Sanborn
Thu-Sat, Nov 8-10, 8pm & Sun, Nov 11, 2pm
Four nights of amazing Deaf artists exploring the literal and metaphorical meanings of Deaf people being in a “prison within a prison.” We will be using sign language, spoken text, dance (modern and jazz), silence, film, and music, to look at life of a Deaf person in prison, life as Deaf woman of color, life as a Gay Black Deaf Man and what is Deaf Utopia/Deaf Diaspora.

RUDA/Arruda 
Aguas Da Bahia directed by Tania Santiago & Cunamacué directed by Carmen Roman. Co-produced by Stephanie Bastos.
Thu-Sat, Nov 15-17, 8pm
Ruda/Arruda, a collaboration between Aguas Dance Company representing Brazil and Cunamacué representing Peru, is inspired by the Amazon River and its plant/spirit’s medicines. The work centers around dance and music as healing medicine and is inspired by the properties of the Rue plant, a medicinal plant known for its protective qualities and powers to make manifest that which is desired. The indigenous magic that unifies these two countries will manifest on stage through live music, vibrant dance, story and song to uncover the underrepresented indigenous presence that holds its forest and plant/spirit’s medicines as an offering to heal the planet.

DanceHack Fest 2018
Kinetech Arts in partnership with CounterPulse and Raktor
Dec 1-2, Sat-Sun
DanceHack is a two-day event that brings together performers and digital artists to exchange, take risks, and feed on each other’s discipline to explore the intersection of dance and emerging technologies.

Performing Diaspora Residency Double Bill
Cynthia Ling Lee: Lost Chinatowns
Melissa Lewis: I dreamed Bruce Lee was my father.
Dec 6-8 & 13-15, Thu-Fri, 8pm, Sat 2pm
Pay-what-you-can Thursdays

The Performing Diaspora residency supports artists that are drawing on tradition as a radical way to be responsive, inclusive, and support equity. This year’s resident artists include Cynthia Ling Lee presenting Lost Chinatowns, a multimedia dance-theater work exploring the destruction, lost vibrancy, and historical erasure of Santa Cruz’s Chinatowns from 1860-1955.

Next, Melissa Lewis alongside an all-Chinese cast performs identity, martial arts technique, and cha-cha in I dreamed Bruce Lee was my father. This research-driven, interdisciplinary work considers Bruce Lee and his legacy as local master, film icon and hero.

Tickets for all events are available at counterpulse.org