About Flyaway Productions
San Francisco, CA
Phone: 415.672.4111
E-mail: jo@flyawayproductions.com
WHAT WE DO
PERFORM We make dances that are site specific, off the ground, and politically driven. We perform in unlikely places, activating the sides of buildings above bleak city streets. Discarded needles; unhoused bodies lining sidewalks. This is where we create. Our site-specific dances impact neighborhoods because they unfold at the very place where conflict lives. For us, a building is a witness. It holds the complexity of a neighborhood’s history in its “hands,” I-beams, or concrete walls. Our tools include coalition building, an intersectional feminist lens, and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity. From 2017-2023, Flyaway created The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time.
TEACH a signature style of apparatus-based dance. We offer year round classes to adults, teens, and youth. We offer GIRLFLY, a Youth Art & Activism Program, integrating dance-making and activism. Our training with youth offers some remedy for the ways women and girls/GNC youth remain underserved in public culture as a whole. We also offer school residencies that link social justice content, school curriculum and movement innovation, where your young artists are our collaborators.
ADVOCATE and provide a bridge between the arts, gender justice, racial justice, and everyday life. We are constantly developing new forms for community engagement and coalition building with activists and non-arts partners.
COLLABORATE with Bay Area Dance Artists Bianca Cabrera, Clarissa Dyas, Laura Elaine Ellis, Sonsherée Giles, MaryStarr Hope, Megan Lowe, Jhia Jackson, and natalya shoaf. We also work in collaboration with designer Sean Riley, rigger Dave Freitag, and over a dozen women composers including Pamela Z, Madlines, Jewlia Eisenberg, Carla Kihlstedt, Van Anh Vo, Xoa Asa, and Theresa Wong.
WHERE WE PERFORM
On the sides of buildings, a three-story fire escape, a hanging umbrella, an oversized scale of justice, a circling merry-go-round, suspended steel beds, a university library, a chandelier on fire, a live billboard, a bridge replica, and on city walls. We have also made dances for rooftops, an active construction site, and the last remaining hand-operated crane on San Francisco’s waterfront. Our work is free and engages a wide spectrum of the public who do not come into theaters.
Our work has been presented by:
- Sing Sing Prison Museum in Ossining, NY
- Boom Arts, Portland, Portland, OR
- Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA
- Tenderloin Museum in San Francisco, CA
- Cal Performances in Oakland, CA
- UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, CA
- Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture in San Francisco, CA
- The Women’s Building in San Francisco, CA
- San Francisco State University, CA
- The Aerial Festival by ZACCHO Dance Theatre in San Francisco, CA
- Dancers’ Group/ON SITE in San Francisco, CA
- Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY
- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA
- ODC Theater in San Francisco, CA
- The International Aerial Festival in Boston, MA
- The SkyDancers Festival in San Francisco, CA
- Arizona State University in Phoenix, AZ
- The Aerial Dance Festival in Boulder, CO
- Sushi Performance Space in San Diego, CA
- Duke University in Durham, NC
WHAT THEY ARE SAYING ABOUT FLYAWAY
“as strong as they are beautiful to watch” – The San Francisco Bay Guardian
“substance trumps considerable spectacle” – The San Francisco Examiner
“intimidatingly creative” – The San Francisco Chronicle
“consistently inspired” – Bay Area New Group
“dancers of Flyaway are champions, demonstrating the heroic abilities of women” – Explore Dance
“a wonder of equilibrium” – The New York Times
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR JO KREITER
Jo Kreiter is a nationally recognized choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. She makes large scale public art via apparatus-based dance. She engages physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. Her work democratizes public space. Jo has spent 27 years building coalitions with women marginalized by race, class, gender, and workplace inequities. Noted partners include Essie Justice Group, SF College of the Law, Tenderloin Museum, Code Tenderloin, Au Co Vietnamese Cultural Center, MoAD, Empowerment Avenue and Tradeswomen Inc.
Recent awards include a Gerbode Award (2023);Guggenheim Fellowship (2020); Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship (2017-2019); LABA Bay Fellowship (2022) ;several NEA Grants; 2 New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Creation Grant (2017-2022); and the California Arts Council’s Creative California’s Communities Award (2017-2019). Additionally, Kreiter/Flyaway is a recipient of seven Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (2010 to 2019).
Her articles have been published in Aerial Dance, J- Weekly, Contact Quarterly, In Dance, STREET ART San Francisco, and Site Dance — the first book written on contemporary site specific performance. In the 2015 book, “Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performances” by Victoria Hunter and published by Rutledge press, Jo Kreiter’s work is highlighted in the chapter, “Civic Interventions: Accessing Community” using her work as an example of “the politically-driven work of the experienced and prolific site dance artists.”
She has recently completed The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time. PART ONE (2019), The Wait Room, honors women with incarcerated loved ones. It has been performed in San Francisco and Richmond, CA, and next to Sing Sing Prison in NY; PART TWO (2021), Meet Us Quickly With Your Mercy, calls Black and Jewish voices to work together to amplify racial justice via an end to mass incarceration; PART THREE (2022-23), The Apparatus of Repair, centers restorative justice via a creative process, from which material was transformed into public art.
She is also the founder of GIRLFLY (founded 2006), an award-winning dance and activism program addressing the lack of arts training opportunities and gender-specific social pressures faced by low-income teen girls/GNC youth. She started GIRLFLY because she felt that her generation has failed to create a full state of equity for women and girls, and GIRLFLY is her way of addressing that challenge.
AWARDS AND HONORS
- New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Creation Grant (2017-2023)
- Gerbode Award (2023)
- LABA Bay Fellowship (2023)
- Creative Work Fund (2020)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2019)
- Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship (2017-2019)
- California Arts Council’s Creative California’s Communities Award (2017-2019)
- Kenneth Rainin Foundation (2012-2023)
- SF Grants for the Arts (1998-2023)
- YBCA 100 List (2018)
- SF Neighborhood Arts Collaborative (2015 & 2017)
- National Endowment for the Arts (2010-2023)
- SF Art Commission Awards (1997-2023)
- CA Arts Council Awards (1995-2023)
- National Dance Project Award (2017, 2022)
- Wattis Foundation Grant (2009 and 2015)
- New Music USA (2015-2023)
- Artist Investigator Project of the California Shakespeare Company (2015)
- NEA Awards for new work (2008-2023)
- Center for Cultural Innovation Award (2013)
- Triangle Lab Award from Cal Shakespeare and Intersection for the Arts (2013)
- Gerbode Foundation Award for Choreography (2000 & 2012)
- CA Arts Council Creative Public Value Awards (2008-2012)
- CHIME Award to work with Elizabeth Streb (2013)
- Hewlett Foundation (2008-2010)
- Special Recognition Award from TradesWomen, Inc. (2010)
- Isadora Duncan Special Achievement (2010)
- CHIME Award (2009)
- Creative Work Fund Grant (2006)
- Meet the Composer Award (2006)
- Arts Presenters Award (2005)
- MAP Fund Grant (2003)
- San Francisco Arts Commission Public Art Commission (2003)
- Wattis Residency at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2002)
- California Dancemakers Fellowship (2001)
- California Arts Council Artist-in Communities Residency (1995-2000)
- San Francisco Bay Guardian GOLDIE Award (2000)