Meet Us Quickly with Your Mercy

In 2012, I stood inside a federal prison for the first time. To get to the visiting room, I had to enter a space where one steel gate closed, and the other did not open. So for a long moment, I was captured. This forced enclosure between two locked gates is experienced by everyone visiting a loved one in prison. In this space I felt my own genetic memory of capture. It’s an ancestral memory, shared by many Jews, and one that’s been rattled by the current rise of White nationalism.

Tonight’s performance started with a question. Acknowledging the complicated, problematic, and honorable history of solidarity between Black and Jewish movements for social change, How can Black and Jewish voices amplify the call for racial justice via an end to mass incarceration? While I don’t believe that contemporary anti-Jewish bigotry in the U.S. is equivalent to the structural racism felt by Black Americans, I want to encourage acts of resistance based on our shared history.

In 2018, I put out a call for a Black changemaker who wanted to work in cross cultural collaboration with me. Rahsaan Thomas answered that call. For four years, across hundreds of letters, monitored phone calls and prison visits, we have been engaging in artist as activist efforts, toward prison abolition. Meet Us Quickly with Your Mercy is the result of our work together.

– Jo Kreiter

The Performance Unfolds in Three Sections

1. Pushed and Shoved
2. Trogn (Carrying)
3. Chasing Freedom

Biographies

Flyaway Productions makes dances in unlikely places, activating the sides of buildings above bleak city streets. Discarded needles; unhoused bodies lining sidewalks; urine and feces on the curb. This is where we create. Our dances impact 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. Flyaway’s tools include coalition building, an intersectional feminist lens and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity. We’ve spent 25 years building coalitions with women marginalized by race, class, gender and workplace inequities. Noted partners include Essie Justice Group, UC Hastings, Tenderloin Museum, Code Tenderloin, Au Co Vietnamese Cultural Center and Tradeswomen, Inc. Directed by Izzie award-winning choreographer Jo Kreiter, Flyaway is supported by Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellowships, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Work Fund, Wattis and Rainin Foundations, the California Arts Council, San Francisco Grants for the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Council. From 2017-2023, Flyaway is creating The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time. The trilogy is part of a national wave of ongoing political action to expose the devastating effects of prison in the United States. The trilogy is rooted in collaboration with community organizations and people directly impacted by incarceration.

Rahsaan “New York” Thomas (Lead Writer/Collaborator) co-produces and co-hosts the Ear Hustle podcast, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won a Dupont award in 2020. He directed and produced the short film Friendly Signs with the support of the Marshall project and Sundance documentary film program. More than anything, he loves to write and does so for many publications, including the Marshall project, Current, SQ news, and most recently, the Boston Globe. As a social justice advocate, Rahsaan worked with Initiate Justice to restore voting rights to people on parole in California and created the Prison Renaissance program, Empowerment Avenue, which pairs incarcerated writers with volunteers to overcome barriers hampering getting published from behind bars. Additionally he counsels youth, practices restorative justice, and chairs a satellite chapter of the society of professional journalists—all from a cell at San Quentin prison.

Jo Kreiter (Artistic Director) is a San Francisco based choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. Through dance, she engages physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within.  Jo’s work is part of an intersectional feminist discourse on the body and the transformation of women’s images in the public domain. At its core, her work explores the female body’s tumultuous expressions of strength and fragility. Physically, the work experiments with height, speed, and gravity. Her work has been supported by Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellowships, and a recent individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission. Jo’s work springs from the traditions of aerial and site-specific performance that are deeply rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s part of a lineage learned from aerial dance innovator Joanna Haigood, with whom she danced 1989-2002, and with whom she continues to teach for; as well as Terry Sendgraff, and Master Lui Yee of the San Francisco Circus Center. To this lineage Jo brings new ways to ride space, using a defiance of gravity to subvert limitations, and claim public space as a proving ground for women. 

Bianca Cabrera received early training at the Chicago Academy for the Arts and later studied at the Alvin Ailey School, the Martha Graham Center and Point Park College, before receiving her BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts. Her two decade performing career includes work with Lingo Dance/KT Niehoff, Amii LeGendre, Ricki Mason/Lou Henry Hoover, Kim Epifano, LevyDance, The Fossettes, and Sonya Smith. Bianca is currently in company with Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions, Bandaloop, and Cielo Vertical Arts. Cabrera directs Blind Tiger Society in Oakland, CA and is on faculty at Contra Costa School for the Performing Arts. 

Clarissa Dyas is a movement artist and performer based in the SF Bay Area. She centers her artistic practice around intersecting identities, the truthfulness of improvisation, and the belief that movement is a spiritual practice to liberated justice. Clarissa graduated from SFSU in 2017 with a B.A. in Dance and a B.S. in Health Education. They have been a company member of Robert Moses’ Kin and ka·nei·see | collective and have performed in works by Talli Jackon, Raissa Simpson and many others. Clarissa is most recently in collaboration with Flyaway Productions, Sara Shelton Mann, Zaccho Dance Theatre and Lenora Lee Dance.

Laura Elaine Ellis maintains a non-stop career of performing, choreographing and producing in the Bay Area.  Over her 30 years of performing, she has worked on projects and collaborated with notables Deborah Vaughan, Robert Henry Johnson, Joan Lazarus, Anne Bluethenthal, Robert Moses, Nora Chipaumire, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Kim Epifano, Christy Funsch, Eric Kupers, and most recently, Jo Kreiter.  Ellis has been awarded an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Outstanding Individual Performance and numerous funding awards for her own choreographic and producing projects.  She is co-founder and executive director of the African & African American Performing Arts Coalition, co-presenters of the Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now.  Ellis is a dance educator serving on faculty for the Theater and Dance departments at the Athenian School and CSU East Bay.  She also serves as a board member for CounterPULSE Theater, Robert Moses’ Kin, and Oaktown Jazz Workshops.

Madeline Lawder is a dancer and aerialist living in Oakland, California. She received her B.A. in Performing Arts and Social Justice through the University of San Francisco in 2018 and has since taught and performed locally in the Bay.  

Megan Lowe is a dancer, choreographer, performer, singer-songwriter, dance filmmaker, teacher, and administrator, with Chinese and Irish ancestry woven into the fabric of her being. She creates dances with an affinity for site-specificity and dynamic partnering, that demonstrates the “intensely-physical, curiously-playful, delightfully-weighty rigor of physicality” (Life as a Modern Dancer). Megan Lowe Dances’ 2019 production of Action Potential was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award, and Megan has been included in nominations for numerous Izzies over the years while working with esteemed SF Bay Area dance companies. In addition to dancing with Flyaway since 2015, she has performed with Lenora Lee Dance, Dance Brigade, Scott Wells & Dancers, Lizz Roman & Dancers, Epiphany Productions, and more. She teaches for Joe Goode Performance Group, Bandaloop, Flyaway, for contact improvisation gatherings, and for her alma mater Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, where she currently works as the Office Manager. Art is her heart!

Sandia Sexton is a professional trapeze artist and aerial dancer who finds joy in choreographing solo and collaborative aerial performances that walk the line between stunt work and fine artistry. She has performed with Vau de Vire Society, Zaccho Dance Theatre, Flyaway Productions, Earth Circus, Velocity Circus, Extra Action Marching Band, Treat Social Club, as well as festivals and supper clubs locally and internationally. In 2018 she was Tony Bennett’s stunt double, dancing down the side of San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel and was the 2016 recipient of Dancer’s Group CA$H Grant for her aerial theatre production of “Refuge. A Ballad of the Renting Class.”

Helen Wicks is a performer, choreographer and educator based in the Bay Area. Her initial training was in elite gymnastics where she was a member of the USA National Team. Helen has undergone extensive classical training and is currently influenced by her time with Deborah Hay and Quincy Jones. She performs with Zaccho Dance Theatre, Flyaway Productions and her company, Helen Wicks Works. Helen received a BA in Dance and Psychology from Bard College where she performed with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Merce Cunningham Company. She is a recipient of the Ana Itelman prize for choreography.

Meet Us Quickly is Dedicated to the Memory of Jewlia Eisenberg, beloved friend, and co-conspirator.

Partnerships, Funders, and Supporters

Meet Us Quickly With Your Mercy is created in coalition with Prison Renaissance, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, and CounterPulse, and supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Ear Hussle/Radiotopia, Fleishhacker Foundation, Rainin Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation, Creative Work Fund, MAP Fund, Bill Graham Foundation, Wattis Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, and New Music USA.