Contact Improvisational Dance at Mabuhay Gardens: Unlocking the Waters Within via Aquatic Intelligence and Fluid Dance with Juliana Mendonca
Contact Improvisational Dance at Mabuhay Gardens: Unlocking the Waters Within via Aquatic Intelligence and Fluid Dance with Juliana Mendonca.
6:30–8 PM contact improvisational class ·
8–11 PM contact improvisational dance folks can continue dancing.
Live musicians jam and solarpunk riffs ( words that reflect the future we wish for).
Contact Improvisational Dance at Mabuhay Gardens is an ongoing series of classes and jams, led by multiple collaborators of themab.org. Juliana Mendonca opened the series with two Fluid Dance evenings, and she returns to lead this one.
THE CLASS WITH JULIANA MENDONCA (6–8 PM)
Fluid Dance is Juliana's somatic movement practice. It grew out of her water-based work, Aquatic Intelligence (formerly Liquidanza), and tonight she brings it onto the dance floor. Through breath, rhythm, weight-sharing, and contact improvisation, we explore fluidity, relational awareness, and embodied connection: how to move with ease, give and receive weight, and listen to each other through touch.
You are invited to arrive exactly as you are, with your joy, your longing, your stillness, or your movement. Whatever lives within you is welcome. No experience needed.
What to bring: Comfortable clothes you can roll, lean, and move in, and a water bottle.
Solarpunk riffs over live music-8-11pm, dancing continues.
What are SolarPunk riffs? Check-out a 15 minute uplink of Shared Origin, Mutual Futures from Mabuhay Gardens to see for yourself. This event was originally live broadcast to 70 countries as part of the global Origin event. Watch on YouTube, Watch on YouTube
At 8, the class opens into more than a contact jam.
Darrell from Camp Contact will also help invite the contact improvisational dance community.
Loke, of the funk jam band «As/Is», anchors the music. You may have heard As/Is at Shared Origins, Bright Mutual Future on October 17, where they scored the spoken word with "word painting": music that colors the meaning of words as they're spoken. This time the words come from the room. Loke is joined by a new circle of musicians for the night, and solarpunks riff freestyle over the groove with spoken, improvised visions of regenerative futures. The music answers the words, and dancers carry the contact practice into both.
Dance, play, play an instrument, speak, or witness. Musicians are welcome to bring an instrument and sit in.
Hear a small window from a past As/Is jam:
TEXTS FROM STEVE PAXTON, FOUNDER OF CONTACT IMPROVISATION
The image above imagines four text threads from Steve Paxton, each sent from a different moment in his life, in the colors of its era: 1975, 1986, 1986 again, and 1998. They're part of History Texts Back, a series where real words from history arrive as messages on your phone, as if they were meant for tonight. Here they are in full:
"a martial art, but without the martial... an art-cooperation." (1975)
"Improvisation is a very difficult nut to crack because it can't really be defined. It deals with the future, maybe only the next second but the future. Its definition is in the result of it." (1986)
"Maybe it isn't art... for a while. Maybe it has to exist for a while before people see the art of it or the art in it." (1986)
"I'm talking about the democracy between two people. Did I, through energy and exchange between two people find out a secret that I could share with you? Yes, it's one that was already known." (1998)
Contact improv, live music, and spoken word, improvised together in one room, isn't a familiar form yet. Maybe it isn't art for a while. Dancers, musicians, and solarpunk riffers will each be improvising and listening, with none of them leading: an art-cooperation, defined by whatever we make together that night.
A note from Bobby- This is a gathering the week of my birthday in celebration at a favorite place- Mabuhay Gardens.
I'm a San Francisco artist and community builder, and Artistic Director and Solarpunk in Residence at Mabuhay Gardens. My work comes from a belief that intuition, exuberant creativity, and authentic stretch goals can unlock phase shifts in people and in systems. I'm drawn to the unfinished task of protecting and growing the conditions where people can imagine a future fit for their future selves, in a more-than-human world. I do that by exploring everyday micro-utopias: preferred futures specific enough to be walked toward together.
So for my birthday I wanted a room where everyone gets to be an improviser, and where we meet each other in the vignettes of micro-utopian kind. We had a fractal of that at solarpunkification earlier this year when the first contact improvisational class of the year occured- Watch on YouTube.
The building has long been a center for inspirationally positive deviance- The building has hosted legends including Louis Armstrong, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dead Kennedys, Iggy Pop, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Specials, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Herbie Hancock, REM, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Green Day, Soundgarden, George Lopez, Bad Religion, and Dave Chappelle.
HOW TO ARRIVE
Thursday, November 19 6:30–8:00 PM: The Waters Within, a contact improvisational dance class with Juliana Mendonca 8:00–11:00 PM: Solarpunk riffs over a live musicians' jam, open dancing, and Bobby's birthday celebration Mabuhay Gardens, 435 Broadway, San Francisco
Let's meet in the flow.