California Touring Project, by Cid Pearlman, Liam Clancy, Casebolt and Smith

Featuring collection of dances that navigate the slippery nature of meaning, and gleefully fracture expectations on gender, friendship and collaboration.

The California Touring Project returns to CounterPULSE after last year’s successful run of performances in San Francisco, Santa Cruz and San Diego. This year, choreographers Cid Pearlman (Santa Cruz) and Liam Clancy (San Diego) are joined by the Los Angeles duo casebolt and smith, to present a collection of dances that navigate the slippery nature of meaning, and gleefully fracture expectations on gender, friendship and collaboration.

With a movement vocabulary that shifts between a rough-and-tumble physicality, intricate partnering, and moments of delicate touch, Cid Pearlman’s choreography subtly disrupts traditional notions of desire, gender, and friendship. Best known for her choreography for San Francisco/Los Angeles dance company Nesting Dolls, and described by the LA Weekly as having a “brash wit and postpunk aesthetics,” Pearlman will present the San Francisco premiere of Fire Sale. Four performers, an eight by eight square of black & white linoleum, and two green chairs – in this simple, but compelling environment, Pearlman deftly juxtaposes violence, tenderness, beauty, ugliness, strength and fragility, to illuminate the complexity, and sometimes absurdity, of social relationships. Fire Sale is set to an original score by Camper Van Beethoven violinist Jonathan Segel, with whom Pearlman has been collaborating for fifteen years. Also on the program is Pearlman’s “catch-as-catch-can” (2006), a rowdy sextet of flying and falling set to a music score by Segel and Seattle musician Rafe Pearlman.

Liam Clancy returns to San Francisco with an excerpt from The Merry Chase, or, The Recursive Synthesis of an Illusion, created in collaboration with choreographers Joe Alter, Eric Geiger, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann, dramaturg D.J. Hopkins, and lighting designer Craig Wolf, who make up The Hybrid Authorship Project. Using a sawed-off dining table, an ottoman, two end tables and live-feed video, the work wrestles with issues of time and timing, dynamics and rhythm, meaning and cliché in a mini-universe of shifting perspectives and contexts. Created not by adhering to a single “vision,” but as a result of disparate interests, friction, and the exploration of multiple perspectives, this new dance theater work features a continuous engagement with the short story, "The Merry Chase," by controversial experimental fiction writer Gordon Lish. Lish’s text challenges the reader to decipher meaning and context from a barrage of cliché and invective. The Merry Chase, or, The Recursive Synthesis of an Illusion explores the idea of who we are in those in-between moments when time, context and our own identity are in question.

Los Angeles based duet dance/theater company casebolt and smith is committed to the collaborative process as a means of creating clever, socially charged and humorous dances that challenge traditional modes of dance making while exploring what is possible when combining gesture, virtuosity, partnering, text, storytelling, autobiography, and improvisation. Their work has been described by Artscape Media as “offering terrific dance-theater insight into the human condition.” At CounterPULSE casebolt and smith will present three works, including After Words, a danced conversation in which a man and a woman playfully draw attention to how meaning is made in relation to gender, sexuality and power while unfolding and questioning these constructions. Also on the program is In The Space Provided, a duet that is both hilarious and poignant as it investigates the realm of new friendships: the oddly coincidental randomness of first meetings and the ways in which we weigh and measure a potential friend when we are deciding if we want them in our lives.

Now in its second year, The California Touring Project was created as a way to build community and create touring opportunities in these times of diminished resources for dance. The response received from audiences and presenters to the project has been extraordinary. Upcoming performances include the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, May 10th, 2008.