Time of Change will be a dance-theater experience with pop-up moments of original music, monologues and movement all around the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
The show will weave and examine the utopian ideals and failures of the hippie era – as they relate to our current revolution. The project will uplift real peoples’ histories, examine the whiteness of the hippie movement, and explore what intersectional liberation means. JGPG is presenting this project with SF Heritage (in the Doolan-Larson Residence at Haight x Ashbury), to celebrate their 50th Anniversary (and JGPG’s 35th). Time of Change is emerging as a collaborative process, with neighborhood meetings, co-creation, and community agency. The team of Artistic co-directors includes: Joe Goode/Joe Goode Performance Group, Melecio Estrella and OYSTERKNIFE (Chibueze Crouch + Gabriele Christian). Time of Change is guided by dramaturg Lashon Daley.
Joe Goode Performance Group
Our most recent site-specific performance—co-presented by SF Heritage—was an intimate and immersive journey through the various rooms, characters, and narratives of the historic Haas-Lilienthal victorian in Pacific Heights. Joe revisits immersive work in partnership with SF Heritage in the Haight to examine the whiteness of the hippie movement. JGPG’s signature artistic approach to song, humor, text, and movement will weave and uplift a collection of queer personal and cultural stories.
“I learned about the hippie movement in high school (late 60s, Virginia) from an article in Life Magazine, I think. Amidst young people with long flowing hair and a girl with a bandana on her head stuffing a flower down the barrel of a policeman’s rifle—one photograph completely rocked me: a casually gender-bending person wearing a kimono and a parasol in the middle of the afternoon. It made me think that San Francisco was a utopia in bloom, a place of bold liberation.
Now, 40 years later that utopia has fallen in + out of shadow, and we are now squarely ensconced in a new cultural revolution that is equally urgent, one that demands that racism in America be acknowledged and repaired.
Time of Change looks at where the counterculture dream started and how it has turned out, asking: Who was the dream for? Was it just for middle class white kids like myself? What is the story of Black homeowners in the Haight, who have mostly been pushed out of the neighborhood and narrative? Were they free to don their bell bottoms and join in? What does it mean to dream of liberation?
To explore these questions, I knew I needed to center more voices in the artistic process.” —Joe Goode
Melecio Estrella is the associate artistic director of famed aerial company BANDALOOP, and a member of JGPG since 2004. He will bring in his aerial expertise to activate the Doolan-Larson building’s exterior architecture, alongside explorations of personal family histories, spirituality, and psychedelia. watch Bandaloop || bandaloop.org/who-we-are
“What an honor, to share a directorial process with Joe, Chibueze and Gabe!
I was born in San Francisco.
My mother comes from a sprawling Filipino Catholic family of 16 children, whose family house wason Clayton Street. She both went to grammar school and got married at St. Agnes Church on Masonic Avenue at Page Street. An inquiry of this neighborhood and its stories is literally a family affair.
I have learned through the many years working with JGPG that history lives in the present, in our bodies, in our stories. I can already feel a strong potency and resonance moving toward Time of Change.” —Melecio Estrella
Chibueze Crouch and Gabriele Christian (OYSTER KNIFE) are a queer Black choreographic duo who create work rooted in traditions from the African Diaspora. They will choreograph one of the primary sites of our show, exploring the Black narrative of liberation in the larger context of this show’s historical timeframe. Excerpt of mouth/full || about Gabriele / about Chibueze
“OYSTERKNIFE—derived from a famous Zora Neale Hurston essay—was born out of a longtime creative friendship and a desire to subvert our theatrical upbringings that oftentimes ignored our complicated Black + Queer (or BlaQ) experience. We’ve found interdisciplinary approaches nourish a fuller version of our work, allowing us to interrogate common attitudes around sociohistorical institutions: the transatlantic slave trade, the Christian Church, and now the American counterculture movement.
Time of Change gives us a chance to ground into the overlooked stories of peers, icons, and elders, of folks who have direct experience with this lost Black neighborhood and this lionized countercultural era. We hope this work will be an act of gratitude to this city that has held us and a loving tribute to those named and nameless who came before.” —Chibueze Crouch and Gabriele Christian
Time of Change is presented in partnership with San Francisco Heritage, with producing support by BANDALOOP.
Time of Change is made possible with support from The Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund that also is supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; San Francisco Grants for the Arts; Kenneth Rainin Foundation; Bernard Osher Foundation; Frances Hellman and Warren Breslau; and the generosity of many more individuals.
Joe Goode Performance Group is further supported by Bill Graham Foundation, Caerus Foundation, Fleishhacker Foundation, Sam Mazza Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.