The Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing Preview Series is an opportunity to engage with choreographers and performers alike, offering a window into the process towards a new production.

Nina Haft & Company’s Precarious Pod tackles the theme of animals and extinction. Haft deeply explores instinct, adaptation, and finding balance within our world. We can learn so much by tuning into the animal world and its own kind of choreography, navigating change and survival.

Performances tonight at the Joe Goode Annex (Saturday, November 16, 2019) are at 7pm and 9pm. Sunday shows (Sun, November 17) are at 4pm and 6pm. You can also catch a second weekend of Precarious Pod, November 22-24.

Dancer Rogelio Lopez

Remember that we are animals

Reconnect with nature

Emergency

Interspecies

Sensate

These are 5 words and phrases that choreographer Nina Haft uses to describe Precarious Pod. Through both set choreography and  improvisational scores, the seven dancers invite us into the exploration and the journey. Today three of the dancers talk about love of the project, some of the artistic challenges, and the dream of the audience. Come prepared tonight to move and navigate the space alongside the artists.

From dancer Jennifer Twilley Jerum:

I love that Nina guides us with such clarity, curiosity and intelligence while trusting each dancer to find their own embodiment and expression of the animal within.

What challenges me is also what I cherish about the work: improvisation in performance. I’m always pushing myself to find new ways of solving movement problems, which is both magical and ripe with insecurity and self doubt.

From dancer Rogelio Lopez:

What do I love about the project? The process itself, the opportunity to keep revisiting the movement and the exploration of constantly finding new pathways. 

What challenges me in the work? To try and keep moving from an instinct/sensing ability in order to make new choices, versus falling into patterns of codified movement deeply instilled in my body. 

From dancer Jesse Wiener:

I love the state of being that I enter within Precarious Pod. It is a chance, an opportunity for me to play with the barriers that separate my internal world from the external world. A chance to feel them both fully and exploratively. It is a new practice for me to improvise beyond my intuition, which I feel like this piece calls for. It is still me and my body but at times it feels as if I get to try on a different body. A bird body within my humanness. 

I am challenged by the ways the piece and Nina asks of the dancers to expand. There is no section where I fully turn off my brain to surrender to the movement, but a level of attention and listening forces me to expand outward in all directions. 

I am curious about what kind of world the audience members will enter. One of the beauties of art and especially performing art is the differences in experience that each witness has. Nina has created a guided experience of the physical environment, and I have been thinking about the ways that brings in the audience to experience an immersive and sensory performance. I am excited to experience the many elements coming together and how the audience will feel a part of the environment or separate, more othered. 

 

Check out this immersive 60 minute event this weekend in San Francisco. www.joegoode.org

Dancers Jennifer Twilley Jerum and Jesse Wiener

Precarious Pod

Choreography: Nina Haft with the dancers

Video Design: Ian Winters

Scenic Design: Lauren Elder

Lighting Design: Rogelio Lopez

Sound Design: Gretchen Jude

Dancers: Rose Huey, Jennifer Twilley Jerum, Rogelio Lopez, Mallory Markham, Andrew Merrell, Rebecca Morris and Jesse Wiener

At the Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco November 15-24, 2019