Three community arts groups have teamed to turn your Mid-Market experiences into a live multimedia performance on the facade of UC Hastings Law School at 333 Golden Gate Ave.
The project, #SFPublicCanvas, is a collaboration between BANDALOOP, the vertical dance company known for dancing on Oakland’s City Hall; Jonathan Rowe, founder and creative director of Madrone Studios; and Illuminate the Arts, the group behind the Bay Lights project.
With open rehearsals scheduled to kick off at 8pm tomorrow on the exterior wall at 333 Golden Gate, we asked Amelia Rudolph, the founder and artistic director of BANDALOOP, to share more details on what you can expect to see from this high-flying collaboration, which will officially premiere in early 2016.
The idea for #SFPublicCanvas was formed in response to The Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s Imagining Central Market initiative, a $100,000 grant to implement a “large-scale, interactive installation that explores the themes of identity and place in San Francisco’s Central Market district.” While The Luggage Store won the grant last August, #SFPublicCanvas received seed funding to host open rehearsals for their performance
“The concept is really an invitation to conversation. A many-to-many conversation,” Rudolph explained.
The public is invited to share what inspires and challenges them in the Mid-Market area and what changes they’d like to see using the hashtag #SFPublicCanvas on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. The team from Madrone Studios will create a video “mashup” of the content, which will be projected onto the Hastings Law School building and provide the backdrop for BANDALOOP’s choreography.
Photo: Bandaloop
“We’re discovering that it’s not that easy to get people to speak up in this way,” she said. “I think these open rehearsals are really going to help announce this conversation and initiate it.”
Rudolph is particularly excited to open up the creative process between collaborators and include the public. There will be a lot to watch and opportunities to participate, she said, but, “It’s not a show, and it’s not polished.”
What you will see is collaborators—from sound designers, to a live painter, to the dancers—“trying to discover things,” she said. “You will be seeing people navigating and investigating the movements that we can’t quite do yet.”
You will also see failure. “We are exposing that, which is scary and exciting.”
Rudolph has been working on the choreography since last July. “It is still raw, but moments are very beautiful already.” One piece of choreography is based on concepts like trust, struggle, “being held by others”, as well as Rudolph's own observations of how people get along and the intensity of the Mid-Market area. She described another piece as kinetic and physics-based, exploring technology and synergy.
As for the crowdsourced content submitted so far, “People are finding the beauty that is there,” Rudolph said. Many of photos they’ve received highlight street art and plants, as well as a past protest on Market Street.
Photo: meleelem / Instagram
Rudolph has her own Mid-Market inspiration for the project as well. “My dream would be that our capitalist system, so be it, could somehow economically value the whole health of the whole community and change its paradigm so that even the profit margins of the corporations included and valued the dignity of a lot more people,” she said. She's also eager to see more sharing among "those with capital, those with technology, those with ability", and knowledge-sharing between community groups and corporations.
Open rehearsals will be viewable at 8pm, April 1-4, but it's not too late to lend your voice to the project using the #SFPublicCanvas hashtag. The collaborators plan to spend a year deepening relationships in the community and collecting additional content before the performance premieres next year in the same location.
“This is really the beginning of a super exciting playspace and project that’s open to everyone,” Rudolph said.
