Photo Credit: Rapt Productions
The recent recipient of two Isadora Duncan Awards, Resident Company Flyaway Productions is proud to announce the world premiere of Multiple Mary and Invisible Jane, an aerial dance about the experience of older homeless women created by Choreographer Jo Kreiter in collaboration with award-winning composer Pamela Z and journalist Rose Aguilar. In this unusually arresting aerial dance set on an 80 foot wall in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, Multiple Mary and Invisible Jane offers a riveting portrait of the nature of housing security and how it eludes so many older women in San Francisco.
The work aims not only to make visible "old ladies" who live on the street, but to nurture a connection between them and the available resources - including women's shelters and family based SROs - that the company's community partner, Episcopal Community Services, has to offer. The site of the performance is located at the edge of the Tenderloin and Civic Center neighborhoods, where the city's extremes of privilege and deprivation crash into each other. UC Hastings College of the Law, an institution that for decades has supported a project focusing on the needs of homeless people terminated from General Assistance Welfare, has generously donated it's wall at 333 Golden Gate Avenue to Flyaway's production. The premiere of Multiple Mary represents the second in a trilogy of large-scale pieces created by Flyaway for performance in the Central Market area of San Francisco. Like Niagara Falling, the first in the series, Multiple Mary focuses on urban poverty. While Niagara offered a national perspective on the problem, Multiple Mary provides a distinctly feminist lens. The piece has its roots in "Old, Female and Homeless", an article published in the Nation last year by collaborator Rose Aguilar. Aguilar reports that the population of older homeless women has grown dramatically in the last 20 years. "It used to be that homeless women over 50 were blessedly rare," she writes. "Today, it's the norm."
With the help of Aguilar and the Episcopal Community Services, Kreiter has gathered oral histories from women living on the streets of San Francisco, which she uses as source material in Multiple Mary. In tandem with the show's 12 performances, Flyaway will host a series of "curbside chats" bringing passersby into a conversation about homelessness. Participants in this series include Aguilar, the director of the General Assistance Advocacy Project supported by UC Hastings, as well as the women whose stories are featured in Multiple Mary. The curbside chats will take place in the two weeks leading up to the performances, as well as at post-performance receptions on the street. "The arts have a unique capacity to raise awareness and build constituencies for social justice issues, and site-specific artworks are especially adept at meeting people where they are," says Kreiter. "At its core, Flyaway's work exposes the range and power of female physicality, and from there, reaches out to communities who are confronted in some way by injustice."
Composer Pamela Z and Kreiter have worked together off and on for nearly 20 years. Z's use of the human voice as an instrument marries perfectly with Kreiter's interest in giving voice to those without. The sound score will integrate the voices and stories of San Francisco's elder homeless women. Multiple Mary runs for ten evenings, Friday to Saturday, September 12th - 13th, and Thursday to Saturday, September 18th - 20th. In addition, two noon performances will take place Wednesday and Thursday, September 17th - 18th. All performances are Free. Performers in Multiple Mary form a multi-generational ensemble including Becca Dean, Laura Elaine Ellis,
Mary Starr Hope, Erin Mei-Ling Stewart, Alayna Stroud and Esther Wrobel.
The world premiere of Multiple Mary and Invisible Jane is made possible by The National Endowment for the Arts, Grants for the Arts, The Lighting Arts and Dance Award promoted by the California Arts Council, Dancer's Group, The Zellerbach Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Flyaway's generous individual donors and Zaccho Studio's Residency Program.
Jo Kreiter is a choreographer with a background in political science. Through dance she engages imagination, physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. Her lineage includes gymnastics, Chinese pole acrobatics and 14 years as a principle dancer in Zaccho Dance Theatre. Kreiter / Flyaway is the recipient of two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, a 2013 Center for Cultural Innovation Award, an Artist Investigator Award from Cal Shakespeare, a 2012 Gerbode Award, a 2012 CHIME Across Boarders grant with Elizabeth Streb, and grants from the Creative Work Fund and the MAP Fund. Her articles have been published in Contact Quarterly, In Dance, STREET ART San Francisco and Site Dance - the first book written in contemporary site-specific performance.
Jo Kreiter has been a Resident Company of Zaccho Studio since Flyaway Production's inception in 1995, and has been hosting year round workshops at Zaccho since 1996. "Zaccho has been my artistic home for a long time. It is a fabulous studio to make dances in, especially if they are off the ground," says Kreiter. "You walk in and you immediately feel like you have left the regular world and entered a place of elegance and creativity. The sense of space is magnificent there, as are the views of the city, the afternoon light, and the people who call the studio home. You won't go wrong if you study, train or invent your master piece at Zaccho!"
