For the last few years, themes of TranscenDANCE’s annual youth summer intensive program have encouraged students to dig into dark issues. Resilience, assault, oppression and more inspired choreography — and group discussions — that had students facing trauma and troubling stories of their past or their communities.
“Last year, our show was on mental health, so there was a lot of heavy thematics, things like sexual assault, the MeToo movement and things like depression and suicide,” said Cat Corral, cofounder and executive artistic director of TranscenDANCE. “It was intense processing for everyone involved, and so we just felt like the pendulum needed to swing.”
The program launched nearly 14 years ago in City Heights, and has since moved to National City. With support from grants and individual donors, the summer program fully funds tuition, instruction, choreography, even meals and transportation for students from spring auditions through a summer performance. Their core, year-round programming works with partner high schools, including Hoover, Crawford, King Chavez and Sweetwater, and in neighborhoods including City Heights, National City, Barrio Logan and southeastern San Diego.
“We needed to be in a lighter space, a more hopeful and celebratory space,” said Corral, so they decided to focus on kindness this year. “Kindness can be part of the radical change we want to see in the world.”
This year’s program follows a model that TranscenDANCE has used in the past: encouraging dancers to write and tell their stories, and then finding a way to explore those stories — poetry in this year’s case — through choreography and movement.
And the happy themes haven’t changed the profound impact the program has on its students and community.
“There’s certainly vulnerability in writing and sharing these stories because they are so personal, so that is not different. But what I’m noticing is this very clear sisterly love,” Corral said.
This year’s teen group happens to be all-female, though some performances will include other alumni and choreographers. Corral observed that this year they haven’t seen the cliques and divisions that they sometimes see, and attributes that to the prevalence of empathy and compassion found in exploring kindness.
After auditioning and being accepted into the program, the dancers began taking dance classes as well as writing, poetry and storytelling instruction.
“The stories themselves are a throughline for the show,” said Corral. For example, one dancer wrote a poem at the start of the program that will be read in the performance — among other works — titled “I’m From The Lousy City Heights.” In the poem, a painter on a bus attracts attention from his neighbors and builds community as the other bus passengers discuss his art.
Many dancers come back to the program year after year, not just because they love to dance, but also because they love the community and feel safe and respected.
“This was a place I didn’t feel judged,” said Eliuth Lopez, a 19-year-old student at City College, who is in her 4th and final year with the program.
Lopez is one of a few seasoned participants to take on a leadership role. She focuses not just on her own performance and experience, but on ensuring that the others, some as young as 12, feel comfortable and supported.
“That’s what I remember from my first year,” Lopez said. “The bonding and connection. That keeps me coming back. This is my family.”
Performances are June 27 and 28 at the Lyceum Theatre.
An Ambitious Artist’s Most Ambitious Work Yet
I’ve been following Melissa Walter’s work on her latest installation for months. In fact, she’s been working on her latest project, largely on-site at ICE Gallery, and largely shrouded in mystery, since September.
“The owner/curator Michael James Armstrong has given artists a platform to create specific site conditional work … something we really don’t have here otherwise,” said Walter.
Throughout the fall and winter, Walter recruited friends and community members to join her in the space to construct tetrahedrons made of paper for the ambitious project. And she “in turn discovered the therapeutic aspects of repetitive action work,” she said. “The time together, doing the same action over and over again, gave all of us a place where we could open up and talk more freely than in most other settings.”
A former NASA designer, her works often explore spatial and scientific themes, and are visually surprising and gorgeous, and I’m excited to finally see the result of this large-scale installation, “Of All Things,” at ICE Gallery at Bread and Salt, opening Saturday afternoon.
Avocado Museums, Feminist Horror and More News for the Culture Crowd
- Ultra-decorated author (and Guggenheim fellow) Carmen Maria Machado brings her delicious and unsettling style of fiction to Mysterious Galaxy on Wednesday for a Clarion Workshop Faculty Reading Series. Machado’s short story collection, “Her Body and Other Parties” which contains the viral hit (lol) “The Husband Stitch” and was a finalist for the National Book Award, has been optioned by FX to become a TV series.
- “There’s a lot of avo-content out there these days.” But is there a pop-up avocado museum? Now there is. The CADO opens in San Marcos Thursday and runs through late September. (Pacific)
- Homelessness advocacy group and choir Voices of our City Choir presents a dinner and a show on Friday at the North Park Lions Club.
- Saturday afternoon, PGK Dance holds a free show at Arts Park at Chollas Creek, including an open workshop.
- “Real Big Deals” is a new exhibition of works by Taylor Chapin — whose pop art paintings approach consumerism and the absurd with an examining eye — opening Saturday at the Hill Street Country Club in Oceanside.
- Up next at the San Diego Art Institute, “Forging Territories” features queer black and Latinx art. The opening reception on Saturday will include a performance by Patrisse Cullors, activist, artist and cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement.
- Students at UCSD this year explored how machine learning can work with the arts. Could a machine stand in for Mozart? And then can it write my novel? (UCSD News)
- The Union-Tribune’s Summer Arts Preview is here, with a smattering of highlights for theater, dance, books, music and visual arts.
- This profile of A Reason to Survive’s new-ish ED shows a bright spot in the organization’s last few rocky years. (CityBeat)
Closing Soon
- Just one more weekend remains to experience fair food at the San Diego County Fair. Also, lots of community and juried art, photography, barn animals and more. Confession: I don’t remember ever eating anything at the fair and I’m fine with that. (NBC7)
Food, Etc.
- The third annual Nat Diego is this weekend, featuring tastings and events related to natural wines (including Friday’s ladies night at The Rose and Saturday’s grand tasting at Bread and Salt).
- This is an honest and practical look at managing CBD/THC/cannabis products with other mental health meds like SSRIs, via CityBeat’s weekly cannabis columnist.
- I read this whole thing and still am not entirely sure what to make of new innovations on beer-ish spirits and whiskeys. “Evidently, the sorts of individuals that focus on squeezing every last bit of alcohol out of their beer aren’t necessarily the most diligent historians.” (San Diego Beverage Times)
- The Fleet’s Two Scientists Walk Into A Bar (™) project hits 25 local bars this Thursday, offering scientists to answer your beer-soaked questions.
- Our fine city will be an Uber Eats drone test market beginning this summer. Come for exciting lines like “The company is also planning to land drones on the roofs of Uber Eats cars emblazoned with an identifying QR code,” stay for the inspirational San Diego renderings. (Forbes)
What’s Inspiring Me Right Now
- The Atlantic reflects on Jazzercise’s 50th bday, its roots in San Diego, diet culture and pioneering women. “Jazzercise invited women to find the ‘joy’ and ‘flair’ in working out. The program challenged an enduring machismo that still limits women’s full participation in many exercise environments.”
- YouTube “anti-haul” make-up/unboxing antidote videos are a thing. “Clark’s catchphrase—‘I don’t need it, and I’m not gonna buy it’—feels applicable to consumerism as a way of life, a mantra-like defense against self-definition via branding.” (Bitch)