FRESH Exchanges: Alternative Conservatory ft. Sarah Bouars, Kristianne Salcines

FRESH 2018 Exchanges offer nine interactive, inclusive, and insightful gatherings in the frameworks of RIPE [raw + intimate performance experiments], POTLUCK/Social Practice, and Alternative Conservatory at the Red Poppy Art House between January 9th and 25th. Each Thursday, Alternative Conservatory is a time to unwind, connect, absorb, consider, listen, and discuss with FRESH artists notorious for disarming paradigms and thinking outside the box. For the January 25th Exchange, Sarah Bouars and Kristianne Salcines present their workshop, Empathix: Bending Binaries, Bodies and Building Bridges.

By queer POCs for queer POCs, Empathix is designed to create an atmosphere for serious physical research in togetherness. We will be doing everything together for each other. This workshop will consist of a series of interactive movement practices/play followed by a facilitated discussion around participants’ experiences to build trust and intimacy, which we hope will allow us to work towards a community. Everyday, we will begin with breathing together, practicing yoga, qigong, taiji, and meditation practice, then leading to physical exercises and practices that focus on play, love, visibility, coexistence, trust, empathy, and serious, sweaty, beautifully-ugly inducing moving. Come join us to sweat and heal together.

Sarah Bouars and Kristianne Salcines are both queer people of color, intersectional feminists, and are at home in the field of dance/performance-art/choreography. In this workshop, we want to develop further our concept of “care and share,” which we created in September 2016 during Queeries into collective feminism at Ponderosa in Stolzenhagen, Germany. “Care and share” strives to use performance as a tool for community building, as well as for healing and developing an empathic eye and deconstructing the perceptions of subject and object. It allows us to open up to a much broader idea of what performance, performer, and audience might entail or mean. We are working with a concept developed by us called “queer futurism,” which includes deep ecology, rituals, utopian dreaming, somatic approaches as Tantra, sex magic, ecosex, and a lot of love and radical softness.

 
ABOUT FRESH FESTIVAL 2018:
FRESH Festival 2018 is San Francisco’s 9th annual festival of experimental dance, music, and performance from January 5-27, 2018. The festival offers four weekends of risk-taking main-stage Performances, three weeks + weekends of immersive studio Practices, and 14 social and interactive Exchanges, hosted by Joe Goode Annex, Red Poppy Art House and F8 Nightclub in San Francisco, and Finnish Hall in Berkeley. FRESH 2018 is inspired by and transmitted through the curiosity of 50+ cutting-edge artists from the Bay Area and beyond.
 

 
Time: Doors 7:00PM / Event 7:30PM
Admission: By donation ($5-10) – No one turned away for lack of funds