SF International Arts Festival presents
TRIPTYCH

Great America reflects Cunningham’s experience as a second-generation immigrant navigating dual cultural identities with some missing parts. Cunningham documents the challenges of being American and Latin American in a world that wants you to identify with one community. This conflict is always present in Cunningham’s creative process, and in Great America, she uses this tension to allow viewers to understand her cultural experiences viscerally. It features performances by Jesse Escalante, Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya, and Raina Sacksteder, as well as the hit song La Bamba by Richie Valens. 

Drawing inspiration from research into fungal modes of communication and movement, Ambulatory Nature asks questions about the connections between human animals and mycelial consciousness, considering the possibility of a body that is always more than one. At once visual, sensorial, and visceral the dance invites the possibility of a body without a plan, one that is constituted through its willingness to stay in motion. Through tasks of orienting and disorienting, becoming and unbecoming, Ambulatory Nature offers a meditation on the beauty of unfixing, unraveling, failure, and decay. Featuring performances by Aura Fischbeck, Irene Hsi, Jennifer Perfilio, and Phoenicia Pettyjohn, imagery from the short film Wrought (a biofilm production) www.wroughtfilm.ca., and a soundtrack including excerpts from John Cage’s seminal poem, Mushrooms et Variationes.

"This is a time for dealing with reality as it is, not as you would have it be"

(I Ching Online.net 2015).

In their new work, This is It, Rosemary Hannon and Miriam Wolodarski allow words to frame openings into the unknown. The moving body is the material, excavating its own histories, aesthetics and influences, practicing responsive devotion and receptive influence, prioritizing kindness and patience. Collaborators since 2011, Hannon & Wolodarski’s work searches for new notions of value, turning up old mysteries and abominations. Featuring performances by Rosemary Hannon and Miriam Wolodarski.

Artist Bios

Alma Esperanza Cunningham’s work has been presented in New York, at Movement Research, Joyce Soho, Dixon Place, and Dance Theater Workshop (Lively Arts). In San Francisco, her work has been shown at ODC, Cowell, ZSpace, and Yerba Buena Gardens. She has been awarded residences at ODC, Margaret Jenkin's CHIME, CUNY Purchase dance initiative, and Safehouse AIRspace. She has also been a guest choreographer at the University of San Francisco’s Dance Department.

“it was Cunningham’s choreography that spoke volumes for me. As in the first solo, each chapter mixed recognizable dance vocabulary with unpredictable physical activity and pedestrian tasks. Deconstructing norms and assumptions of what movement can or should ‘fit’ together, Cunningham seamlessly crafted each phrase into a choreographic stream of consciousness.”

Heather Desaulniers, Critical Dance

Alma (Artistic Director, Choreographer) has been an SFUSD public school teacher at Charles Drew Elementary in the Bayview for over a decade. She also teaches dance and somatic movement to youth in the Tenderloin and at ODC in San Francisco. Cunningham is a Luna Dance Summer Institute graduate and has been independently researching the benefit of mindful movement as a daily practice to promote embodiment, joy, and academic confidence.

Based in San Francisco (Ramaytush Ohlone land), Aura Fischbeck Dance creates performance events which investigate and communicate bodily intelligence and reflect the complexity of contemporary human experiences. Called "fierce and expressively pliant" in The San Francisco Bay Guardian and "luscious . . . with a wonderful sense of spontaneity . . ." in the DanceView Times, Aura Fischbeck's choreography has been presented nationally in a multitude of series, festivals, and shared programs since 2001. Established in 2008, Aura Fischbeck Dance has created and performed over 20 original works and is fiscally sponsored by Dancers' Group.www.aurafischbeckdance.org

Aura Fischbeck (Artistic Director, Choreographer, Performer) is an interdisciplinary dance artist, performer, improviser, movement educator, and writer. She is a first-generation American of German descent and a 2nd generation dance artist whose parents, Brigitta Herrmann and Manfred Fischbeck co-founded Group Motion Dance Company. Her work investigates the complexity of her lived experience through explorations of physicality, felt states, sound, language, imagery, and task, as practices that invite noticing the interplay between perception, proprioception, and presence. She moves towards the constancy of change as a way to locate herself as one who is committed to a life in motion. Aura holds an MFA in dance from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (2022) and a BA in dance and poetry from the Naropa University.

Rosemary Hannon and Miriam Wolodarski are two shape-shifters playing possums in the performance of contemporary life. Our collaborative work, ongoing since 2011, sifts through inherited aesthetics, inevitable influences, constructed identities, and conflicted responsibilities, searching for new notions of value, turning up old mysteries and abominations. The show “Crane and the Crocodile: Sad Songs and a Heavy Jacket”, performed at CounterPulse in San Francisco in 2012, inspired our perennially in-progress work “Domestic Interrogations”, and lead to the local and international collaborations, “Last Year’s Show” and “How Do We Keep on Dancing?”. We have also developed the dance laboratory “Compostable Feminisms”.

Rosemary Hannon (Dancer, Co-Choreographer) has performed with many Bay Area dance friends. She has also spent the last 20 years working with arts education organizations. Her movement research is inspired by Contact Improvisation practice. She holds an MA in Education from University of San Francisco, an MFA in Dramatic Arts from UC Davis, and is currently working on a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis, studying scores for dancing outdoors in the wetlands.

Miriam Wolodarski (Dancer, Co-Choreographer) is the Artistic Director of the arts organization Sense Object. She holds an MFA in Contemporary Performance from Naropa University and a BSS in Political Science from Uppsala University. Her original performance work frames dance as a contemplative practice that offers practitioners, observers, and teachers opportunities to approach socio-political, emotional, and philosophical questions through the body. It has been supported by programs at YBCA, CounterPULSE, TragantDansa, Centre Cívic Barceloneta, and The Hemispheric