Open Air: JAM
What happens when dancers and musicians share a space with no script and no plan?
JAM is a live collision of improvised movement and sound; the only thing planned is that nothing is planned. Dancers and musicians will meet for the first time and spend two hours exploring together before the audience arrives. At 5pm, we JAM.
Arrive by 4:30pm to allow for parking; performance begins at 5pm. Stay for a mini dance party after.
Sliding scale $10-$30; no one turned away for lack of funds. Please RSVP in advance.
Open Air: WRECKING
One choreographer brings a piece. Two “wreckers” take it apart and rebuild it as their own. In the end, all three versions are performed live.
This time, the piece is Loves Me Not — a solo choreographed and performed by Catherine Messina that explores queer identity, limerence, and finding love. Julie Mayo and Chris Black do the wrecking. Come spend the afternoon on the DANCE DECK and watch the choreographic process unfold in real time.
Sliding scale $10-$30; no one turned away for lack of funds. Please RSVP in advance.
Eiko Otake: Performance at Woodland Cemetery
Experience Eiko's hauntingly still, ferociously alive movement as she inhabits the histories, energies, and terrain of Woodland Cemetery in a free, one-time outdoor performance. Saturday June 27th | 7pm
photo by Wm Johnston
Open Air | Open Movement: lily gold "Sheshi"
Sheshi is a duet between choreographer and interdisciplinary artist lily gold and her mother, with sound support from artist dani derks and surprise guest performers. Tuning to ancestral resilience and reviving parts lost to assimilation, their scores are transparent with tensions and explore family stories they’ve been told, as well as ones their bodies have begun to tell. While Sheshi rekindles reverence for elders it also embraces back-handed humor, working to coax exiled-aggression into balance. Leaning into play to tether the immensity of looking at ancestral trauma through a multi-generational lens, lily and Sheri offer their intimacies for resonance.
This will be Sheshi's first public in-progress showing, join us!
Open Air | Open Movement: zay thurgood & dani derks "between a rock and a soft place" // Christy Funsch "Set List"
Double Feature with works by zay thurgood & dani derks and Christy Funsch
dani and zay take on a brand new collab with their debut performance, between a rock and a soft place. The work will explore the edges of impulse, hope, desire, tension, and inescapable tenderness.
Set List (2025) collides two of Funsch Dance’s works-in-progress from 2024: PastPerfect, created in the spring in San Francisco, and experimental shards made throughout New York State over the summer. Set List careens through the debris fields of the two processes, nourishing vestigial desires from these past explorations. The past processes are embedded in the structure of the new work, where their tattered edges provide undercurrents of tension. Set Listis a work in conversation with its component parts. It values tangents over accumulation.
Open Air | Open Movement: Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener "Open Machine"
Through a system of choices, Open Machine explores the survey and navigation of dancing bodies in public spaces. Dancers travel through urban architectures and outdoor, remote environments outfitted with participatory scores. Performers direct and interpret these exterior journeys, layering them into a multi-sensory tapestry of movement, visualization, audio description, and music. Paths converge into a dynamic choreography for the stage that reimagines live gathering, decision-making, and our influence on an increasingly mediated and rapidly changing world.