White Box at Liberty Station is San Diego’s freshest performance space and it has truly come alive with thirteen evenings of live arts that began April 5 and continues on until April 21.
Live Arts Fest was created and curated by San Diego Dance Theater artistic director Jean Isaacs and the newly formed White Box Collective, a group of local emerging choreographers including Blythe Barton, Anne Gehman, Kerry Greenwood, Maria Juan, Zaquia Mahler Salinas and Minaqua McPherson. So far, the first annual Live Arts Fest is living up to its promise offering all types of live art including dance, puppetry, theater, music, light installations and more.
Check out the Web site to see what event appeals to you. In the meantime here are a couple of events to consider this week:
Righteous Exploits by Margaret Noble and Justin Hudnall is the 100-year-long true story of a family rising out of and returning to poverty over the course of three generations. Dust Bowl-era activist heroine Helen Hosmer fought against the exploitation of agrarian workers in the face of persecution by McCarthy’s FBI, but her own family’s dissolution undermined the very ideals she championed. Told through a combination of live audio/visual multimedia and performance art, Margaret Noble pulls audiences through a time warp of cultural mishaps that reveal just how dirty the good fight can get when morality competes with survival, and civic duty undermines family.
LGBT community favorite Michael Mizerany and friends will premiere a brand new work, At Long Last…Love! as well as his award-winning solo Tin Soldier (“heart breaking and beautiful,” Kris Eitland, San Diego Story) and audience favorite Tethered. In addition the evening features performances by Stephanie Harvey, Andrew Holmes and Bradley R. Lundberg.
The Door is Open: An Intergenerational Dance Project by Kira Corser is a joy-filled 30-minute documentary that covers a year of working collaboratively with Jean Isaacs’ San Diego Dance Theater with a tango performance by Jim and Jo-Ellen Larue. For the last four years, Jo-Ellen and Jim have been studying Argentine Tango under the tutelage of Colette Hebert. Jim, now 80 years old, and his wife, Jo-Ellen, will perform a “Milonga,” a playful and fast-beat dance which preceded the better known Argentine Tango. They will dance Francisco Canaro’s Milonga Brava.
