Join Bridge Live Arts for Moving Together: Collectives in Dance Panel and CER Mixer, a community-centered dialogue and celebration!

B.L.A. welcomes 7000COILS, Karla Flores, and Alice Hur to the 2024-2025 Community Engagement Residency (CER)! On November 16, from 12-3 pm, we’ll celebrate these artists’ with a free lunch, live music, and conversation about collectivism in dance.

Join former CER artists David Herrera (LatinXtensions ‘19-’20) as moderator, Hannah Ayasse (Performance Primers ‘20-’21), jose e. abad (with Stephanie Hewett ‘21-’22), Melissa Lewis Wong, and Kim Ip (both Asian Babe Gang ‘22-’23) as panelists for a conversation about the creative process and needs of local dance collectives currently operating in the Bay Area. We invite you to mix, network, and engage with B.L.A. and the CER artists.

Schedule

12-1 PM: Lunch and Mingle

1-2 PM: Collective in Dance Panel + Q&A

2-3 PM: Dance Party

Tickets

Free to Attend. RSVP requested.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

David Herrera (moderator) (he/him) is a choreographer, producer, and community leader based in San Francisco, California, whose choreographies and community impact programs through David Herrera Performance Company (DHPCo. 2007) center Latinx/e communities, voices, aesthetics, and narratives. David directs multiple community programs that benefit the larger national Latinx dance community, including leading the Latinx Hispanic Dancers United initiative and LatinXtensions mentorship.  His choreographic and community work has been supported by various private and government foundations, community organizations, and residencies. 

Hannah Ayasse (they/she) is a performing artist, educator, and occupational therapy student born and based in Huichin a.k.a. Berkeley, CA. They are one of the founding members of Performance Primers and have extensive experience collectively producing and organizing performance events in DIY and third-spaces.

jose esteban abad (they/them) is an Afro-Carribean Filipinx multidisciplinary choreographer, Vertical Dancer, DJ, and curator based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory (San Francisco). Their work explores the complexities of identity at the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, race, and geography. Rooted in collaboration and improvisation as tools of resistance and liberation, abad’s work centers QTBIPOC experimental collective process-based practices of becoming and re-membering to highlight the most intelligent technologies that exist in this world—our bodies, ancestral wisdom, and nature. They have performed and taught nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Palestine, Mexico, and Europe.

Kim Ip is a New Zealand born, Queer femme, first generation Chinese American choreographer and movement artist based in the Bay Area. She's been commisioned at Edge on the Square, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, CounterPulse, B4BEL4B Gallery, and Gray Area. She is 1/6 of Asian Babe Gang, a horizontally led Asian Queer Collective. Currently, Kim is working alongside the elders at Crescent Park in Richmond, working on a solo about her mum, and gigging in Queer Nightlife.

Melissa Lewis Wong (they/she/他 - AKA Deuce Lee) is a working artist and nonprofit administrator dedicated to liberation, movement and relationship-building. They share a tender + powerful approach to movement and photography. They are a queer, mixed-race Chinese American nonbinary dance and drag artist. Their maternal Chinese lineage is the place from which they create—in conversation with experiences in the world of queerness, mixedness and diaspora.

📸 Photo Credits, Clockwise from L to R: Kim Ip by Robbie Sweeny; Hannah Ayasse by by Lydia Daniller; jose esteban abad by Robbie Sweeny; David Herrera by Scott Horton; Melissa Lewis Wong by Stephen Texeira