DOWN ON THE CORNER

Flyaway’s artistic team and I have been creating Down on the Corner in real time, alongside the push for transformation of 111 Taylor Street, as justice is being conjured here and now. This project reflects a desire for the building currently housing people coming out of state and federal prison and formerly housing Compton’s Cafeteria to come down and go up again as a living space that actually cares for people. Divesting from a prison economy and investing in community well-being is ripe for this corner. Because years ago, Trans historian Susan Stryker dug up the unknown fact that in August of 1966, late at night at Compton’s Cafeteria, someone had enough of police brutality and threw the coffee in her cup at a cop who was treating her badly. Because GEO group needs to go down and this history of Trans Black women in resistance needs uplift.

I’m a prison-systems impacted, cisgender woman working inside an intersectional coalition. To the coalition I’ve promised what you will see this evening—public art that speaks to the “mythopoetic crossroads” inherent in this public space.* This is a deeply intersectional project, embracing both trans visibility and prison systems change. It is both local and global. I’ve called this project Down on the Corner because so much living takes place on street corners in the Tenderloin. The legacy of Trans resistance at Turk and Taylor Streets deserves more than erasure. The Trans cultural district here in the Tenderloin is the only one of its kind and what glory it will be when GEO group is replaced, via a just transition, to something the city can actually be proud of.

– Jo Kreiter

*Susan Stryker, October 2021, PlacesJournal.Org

From Our Partners

Creating the music soundscape for Down On The Corner was an amazing experience. To be able to honor our Queer siblings who stood up in the face of every kind of phobia to defend our right to exist through sound and song, was indeed, a privilege. My deepest respect and thanks to my sound engineer Chris Palowitch for his extraordinary skills as a musician and collaborator. Special thanks to my dear friend KJ Jackson for their incredible contribution of flute magic.

– Melanie DeMore

The Performance Unfolds on Two Sides

1. Haunt
2. A Conjuring of Ghosts
3. Throw a Cuppa
4. Blow Your House In
5. Cross Roads
6. Liberate Comptons

About Flyaway Productions

Flyaway Productions democratizes public space. Founded in 1996, the company makes dances that are off the ground, site-specific and justice driven. Flyaway’s tools include coalition-building, an intersectional feminist lens and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity. Recent coalition partners include the Museum of the African Diaspora, Empowerment Avenue, Essie Justice Group, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, the Tenderloin Museum and the University of California College of the Law-San Francisco. Flyaway has received major support from the Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Foundations, NEFA’s National Dance Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, MAP, the Creative Work Fund and the Rainin Foundation. From 2017-2023, Flyaway created The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time. The Trilogy was rooted in collaboration with community organizations and people directly impacted by incarceration including Flyaway Artistic Director Jo Kreiter.

About TXT Initiative

The TurkxTaylor Initiative (TxT) is an ad hoc group that came together to liberate and envision an alternative future for the historic site of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, a trans and queer uprising against police violence in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. The building is currently occupied by GEO Group, a multi-billion-dollar transnational private prison corporation that has contracts with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and claims to operate the building as a reentry service facility under the name 111 Taylor Apartments. TxT has recently launched the Compton’s x Coalition, a broad-based coalition formed with organizations and individuals invested in the past and future of the site. Through legal action, political advocacy, and public awareness, the coalition is working hard to remove GEO Group and transition its ownership to community stewardship under a framework of intersectional justice.

Biographies

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR:

Jo Kreiter (she/her) is a choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. She engages physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. Kreiter has spent 29 years building coalitions with women and gender non-conforming folk marginalized by race, class, gender and workplace inequities. Noted partners include Essie Justice Group, San Francisco College of the Law, Tenderloin Museum, Empowerment Avenue and Tradeswomen, Inc. She founded Flyaway Productions in 1996, and the award winning youth program GIRLFLY in 2006. Since 1987 Kreiter has taught youth residencies in Bay Area public schools, ongoing aerial workshops and contact improvisation classes. She has taught dance at University of California-Berkeley, University of San Francisco, Sonoma State, Arizona State, Stanford and Ohio State Universities, and currently at San Jose State University.

COMPOSER:

Melanie DeMore (she/her) is a three-time Grammy nominated singer/composer, music director and vocal activist who believes in the power of voices raised together. DeMore facilitates vocal and stick-pounding workshops for professional choirs, and community groups as well as directing numerous choral organizations across the U.S., Canada and beyond. She is a featured presenter of SpeakOut! The Institute for Social and Cultural Change and a Master Teaching Artist for Music at Cal Performances. As the Music Director for Obeah Opera by Nicole Brooks, DeMore will be touring with the company to South Africa. She is also a charter member of Threshold Choir founded by Kate Munger, a mentor to the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, and conducts song circles with an emphasis on the voice as a vessel for healing. She was a founding member of the Grammy-nominated ensemble Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir.

FILMMAKER:

Leila Weefur (he/they/she) is a Liberian-American artist, writer, and curator whose work engages with film, architecture, and the archive to examine systems of belonging. Their research, across disciplines, explores environmental geographies, transnationalism, religion, and queer worldmaking.Weefur has worked internationally with institutions including the Walker Art Center, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ICASF, CCA’s Wattis Institute, SLASH Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and completed a residency with the Bemis Center for the Arts. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is an Assistant Professor of Photo/Media + New Genres at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of the curatorial film collective, The Black Aesthetic.

DANCERS:

艾音 “Ài Yīn” Adelski (she/her) is a biracial artist of Chinese and European descent. Born in Hong Kong, raised in Shanghai and Taipei, she moved to San Francisco for college where she majored in Dance and Social Justice and double minored in Chinese Studies and Philosophy. She is currently a freelance dancer and pilates instructor based in San Francisco. Despite having training in numerous dance forms, she identifies as a Contemporary dancer. Her non-dance related movement history includes getting her black belt in taekwondo at age 14 and ski instructors license at 19. She hopes to continue to learn and grow both as a human and as an artist. 

Gabriele Christian (they/them) is a Harlem-born artist and descendent of stolen folk based in the Bay Area since 2014. They experiment within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production and community arts facilitation to locate and center BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernaculars and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They are a founding member of Bay Area performance collectives and land projects: RUPTURE; OYSTERKNIFE; and BlaQyard and current Co-Executive and Co-Artistic Director of Jess Curtis/Gravity, an arts and accessibility nonprofit centering the margins of Bay Area artmaking. 

B Dean (they/he) is an earthbound and airborne dancer, white transboy, and queer world builder based in unceded Ohlone territory (the Bay Area) for 14 years. They also perform with BANDALOOP, Sean Dorsey Dance, Joe Goode Performance Group, and Circo Zero. Under their dance project, BODYSTORM, B centers queer/trans experiences in site-specific physical thinking experiments highlighting the intelligent technology of nature and body.

Quinn Dior (she/her) is proud to dance for Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions, Erin Yen, and Keith Hennessy. Additionally, she makes her own work, which has been featured at Counterpulse, Joe Goode Annex, and the KnJ Theater at Peridance. Her work aims to reach chronically ill communities, communities of color, audiences navigating disability, and trans people. She holds a B.A. in Theater and Dance from UC Davis. 

Sonshere Giles (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and costume designer. Originally from New Orleans, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend Mills College and received an MFA in performance/choreography. She enjoys making dances based on observations of animals, landscapes, art history, and daily life experiences. From 2005-2021, she worked for AXIS Dance Company. She has shared her choreography, taught dance and performed for audiences in the United States, Germany, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Russia, Scotland, Canada, China, and Japan. Sonsherée received an Isadora Duncan Award for ensemble performance, and a Homer Avila Award for Excellence in the field of integrated dance. She is honored to have been working with Flyaway Productions since 2015.~ www.Sonsheree.com

MaryStarr Hope  (she/they) is an Isadora Duncan Dance Award winning dancer, aerialist and conceptual performance maker. Engaged in a delight with physics and flights of fancy, MaryStarr makes irreverent, virtuosic performance that enjoys disrupting preconceived ideas. Trained at CalArts and Le Conservatoire de Paris, but raised in the sticks of rural New Hampshire, she grew up producing Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas on her preschool classmates and copying Jane Fonda until dance class finally came to her small provincial town. MaryStarr has just completed a Masters of Fine Arts at Bennington College, under the tutelage of Thomas DeFrantz, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Donna Faye Burchfield, among a truly exceptional cohort of mid-career international artists. MaryStarr is a longtime collaborating artist in Flyaway Productions. Her adventures and experiments can be seen at @phreakmama on Instagram.

Jhia Jackson (she/they) is a movement-based scholar-artist. They create visceral, embodied works that challenge disciplinary distinctions and spark critical interpersonal reflection through their creative practice, j.habitus. She enjoys exploring and celebrating the art of being, and can be found dancing on buildings, in parks, with her family, on an empty dance floor…just about everywhere. They are a current doctoral candidate in sociology at UCSF and have previously earned a MS in bioethics from Columbia University and BA in dance, sociology, and ethics from Loyola Marymount University. ~ www.JhiaJackson.com

Megan Lowe (she/they) is a Chinese and Irish American dance maker, performer, teacher, singer-songwriter, and Artistic Director of Megan Lowe Dances. She creates courageous multidisciplinary dance works, rooted in care, that transform spaces with dynamic place-making, playful partner-work, and daring aerial/vertical dance. She’s a two-time Izzie Award winner for Outstanding Achievement in Performance, with recent work presented at Legion of Honor, ODC, Fort Mason, de Young, and 500 Capp Street, as well as in United States of Asian America Festival, SF Aerial Arts Festival, SF Trolley Dances, CAAMFest, and on KQED Live. Megan has been performing and teaching with Flyaway since 2015. ~ Website: www.MeganLoweDances.com | Instagram: @MLoweDanceKitty

Saharla Vetsch (she/her) is a Somali American multidisciplinary artist rooted in the Bay Area. Saharla earned a degree in Performing Arts and Social Justice from the University of San Francisco. Her focus is on movement storytelling using elements of vertical dance, drag, and spectacle. Saharla’s teaching and performances encourage and celebrate the intersecting identities that make up who we are. She does this in the spaces of queer nightlife entertainment, multigenerational dance education, and through collaborative dance performances. She creates work that fosters community & connection using physical comedy, high-camp energy, and infectious joy. Saharla strives to be a beacon of self-expression, harnessing the liberating power of dance to ignite the same sense of freedom in others.

Caelan Barbour (Head Rigger – he/they) For the last two decades, Caelan has been helping artists fly. His experience ranges from international circus tours to underground performance art with a firm root in more conventional entertainment rigging as a journeyman with IATSE Local 16. In his free time, he is an avid motorcycle traveler and photographer.

Jack  Beuttler (Lighting Design – he/him) is a Seattle based designer and producer. His work has appeared with ODC, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, LEVYdance, and Dance Theatre SF, and he received a 2019 Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design for Flyaway’s The Wait Room. He’s the Director of Production for Pacific Northwest Ballet, a role he has previously served in for ODC, Ballet Sun Valley, Opera Parallele, and the Sun Valley Music Festival. ~ www.JackB.info

David Freitag (Rigging Design – he/him) is an aerial rigging designer who has spent the past 20 years designing mechanical rigging systems for site specific dance, circus productions, and permanent theatrical installations on walls and in theaters across the Bay Area and internationally.   Dave has rigged with Flyaway Productions since 2010, designed for Capacitor Dance Company, Circo de la Luna NYC, and toured internationally with Cirque Mechanics and Printz Dance Project.  Dave’s recent design projects include Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Love, A State of Grace (2022), and the 7Fingers Dear San Francisco (2021).  Dave is a journeyman member of IATSE Local 16, and always “stands under his work.”

Additional Credits