Blue 24 (video installation)
Radius Gallery
September 26-November 3, 2024

For the ROYGBIV exhibition at Radius Gallery, Cid Pearlman reconfigures and repurposes documentary footage from 2018’s Bluets #1-40, a live movement event created with four performers from her dance company, 16 UCSC students, poet/dramaturge Denise Leto, scenic designer Kate Edmunds, and composer Jonathan Segel (violinist for Camper Van Beethoven). Inspired by Maggie Nelson’s book length poem Bluets, Pearlman and collaborators create a work that intertwines dance, poetics, and memoir in a way that is rigorous and deeply personal. Central to this project is Pearlman's ongoing interest in contained spaces, micro worlds, and the possibilities inherent in limitation. 

From dramaturge Denise Leto:
In conversation with Nelson’s poetry, Blue 2024 creates a movement palette: shades, tones and contrasts of blue become a tactile, felt presence. From tarps to lapis lazuli, “blue” is an almost reachable and always enticing force. Through recorded and live voice, projection and images, lines of text evoke the possibilities of language in relationship to actual and imagined aspects of “blue.” Here, the color is not merely theme and through-line so much as it is a palpable refraction and a lush consciousness to watch unfold, immerse, and emerge. 

“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak as though this were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, and affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious.” ~Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Choreography/Installation Design: Cid Pearlman
Dramaturge: Denise Leto
Original Music: Jonathan Segel
Scenic Design: Kate Edmunds
Video editing 2024: Zachary Hill
Video footage 2018: Mara Milam
Packing Crates: Robbie Schoen

Created with and performed by: Makenna Bantillo, Sonja Braden, Devin Chan, Juan Chavez, Julia Daniel, Cy Dollente, Rio Saul Garcia, Nicoletta Lanese, Lucia Flexer-Marshall, Sophia Kang, David King, Lyndia McGauhey, Michael Menzer, Thomas Ng, Taylor Northcutt, Alyssa Rose, Chloé Rosen, Megan Schneider-Calderón, Deneka Siu, Cynthia Strauss

Text from "Bluets” is used in this installation with permission from the author Maggie Nelson

Julia Daniel has been living and dancing in Santa Cruz for the last 10 years. They have worked alongside Cid Pearlman and David King for the majority of those years, traveling, collaborating and performing. Julia enjoys contact improvisation, release technique and working with dance friends and mentors to execute awesome lifts and emotive touch and connection. When Julia is not dancing they are running their vegan bakery and spending time with loved ones. 

Kate Edmunds has designed scenery for theater, dance, opera, and musicals for over 45 years. Venues include Broadway, Off-Broadway, nameless holes in the wall, and numerous regional theaters of varying sizes and budgets. A partial list includes Berkeley Rep (Associate Artist), ACT/SF (Resident Designer), Arena Stage, Manhattan Theatre Club, Seattle Rep, The Old Globe, the Goodman, CTG/LA, ART/Cambridge, Prototype Festival, Steppenwolf, the Kennedy Center and the old Helen Hayes. Her work has earned numerous awards. She was Production Designer on Philip Gotanda’s film Life Tastes Good, and worked as Assistant Art Director on The Muppets Take Manhattan, among other films. She has designed several museum installations, including Technology Benefiting Humanity at San Jose’s Tech Museum. Edmunds taught at UC Berkeley for 13 years. She is a Professor Emeritus of Design at UC Santa Cruz, where she taught for 19 years.

Lucia Flexer-Marshall is a Brooklyn-based contemporary dancer and filmmaker, holding a BA in Dance from UC Santa Cruz. Growing up in California, she trained at the Oakland Ballet School and Shawl Anderson Dance Center. Lucia has performed across the Bay Area and New York, with companies including Alessandra Corona Performing Works, Ziru Dance, Garrett & Moulton Productions, Dragons Dance, and Fullstop Dance. She is also the co-creator of the dance film project Soap Impressions with her creative partner Joaquin Bear. Their work has been screened at SF Dance Film Festival, Gibney, Estia Day Fest, and ODD Film Festival.

David King is a dancer, choreographer, durational installation artist and movement educator. Since 1992 he has been a principle dancer and choreographic collaborator with Cid Pearlman/Performance Projects (San Francisco/Los Angeles/Santa Cruz/Estonia). Their work has been presented by numerous venues including the Joyce SoHo (NYC), Theater Artaud (SF), and The Getty Center (LA). In addition to his work with CP/PP, he has performed with choreographers Eric Stern, Liam Clancy and Carmela Hermann, among others. In 1991 he earned a BA in Theater Arts/Dance from UC Santa Cruz and completed a four-year Feldenkrais practitioner training. In 2001 he received an MA in Dance from UCLA. King is co-founder of max10 Performance Laboratory, a monthly performance salon at the Electric Lodge in Venice, CA.

Denise Leto is a multidisciplinary poet, dance dramaturge, writer and creative editor. Currently, she is dramaturge in collaboration with the London based production “Brain Odysseys” involving dance, video, text and music with the arts organization Rosetta Life. The performance is created for stroke and brain injury survivors. She collaborated with choreographer and artistic director Cid Pearlman as poet dramaturge for the production, home (Body), a film/poetry/dance installation which premiered at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and was produced at The Cultural and Educational Centre Artium in Viimsi, Estonia. She co-created the ongoing site specific piece “The San Francisco Baylands Eco-Poetry Project.” She was recently featured on The Poetry Foundation online series. Her cross-genre projects include disability culture work with the international art collective, Olimpias. Her residencies include the Fellowship in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in Erice, Sicily. Denise was also the recipient of the Orlando Prize in Poetry. She wrote the book of poetry for the collaborative dance performance Your Body is Not a Shark choreographed by artistic director Cid Pearlman and featuring principal cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. Denise’s work has appeared most recently in Writing the Self-Elegy, from Southern Illinois University Press and Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Literature. She co-wrote the chapbook, Waveform, with the poet Amber DiPietra, which was published by Kenning Editions. Her recently completed poetry manuscript is entitled The Body is a Wild Summons.

Nicoletta Lanese (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based dancer and science journalist. They’ve recently danced with the NYC-based modern companies Cocco & Co, Digital Movement Dance, and Nikki and the Noise, and they’ve also performed work by choreographer Augie Sherman. Performance credits include the WestFest, 8 in Show, Fast Forward, and WAXworks festivals in NYC, as well as informal showings in the city where they’ve shared their own choreography. As a journalist, Lanese specializes in covering medical science and health care. Keep up with her dancing at nicomoves.com and her journalism at nicolettalanese.com.

Lyndia McGauhey (she/her/hers) is a Bay Area dance artist.  She has her BFA in Dance  from University of Colorado at Boulder (2011) and was the recipient of the Jamie Redmond Scholarship, Katherine J. Lamont Scholarship and several University Dance Awards. From 2011-2014, she choreographed for Telluride Theater, Young People's Theater and had choreography featured at several festivals. Since relocating to Santa Cruz, Lyndia has collaborated with Micha Scott, Molly Katzman and Katie Trigg. Lyndia has been dancing with CPP since 2016.

Michael Menzer began dancing at the age of 16 in San Diego, California. After spending two years learning classical ballet he attended University of California, Santa Cruz, where he worked with Gerald Casel, Cid Pearlman, and Cynthia Ling Lee exploring postmodern movement. He went on to receive his BA in Dance from University of California, Irvine, where he spent time working with esteemed faculty such as Lar Lubovitch, collaborating with other choreographers, and creating his own work. He now lives in New York where he is focused on exploring the next part of his career.

Thomas Ng, an interdisciplinary performing artist and scientist based in Los Angeles, began his dance practice while pursuing a doctorate in bioinformatics at UC Santa Cruz. Thomas has collaborated with local companies, colleges and artists in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, including Deborah Rosen and Dancers, Jamie Nichols, and Cid Pearlman Performance. Thomas has also contributed archival and technical support to nonprofit dance organizations such as Jacob’s Pillow, ARC Pasadena and Garth Fagan Dance. Currently, Thomas is focused on applying and developing data science and machine learning tools to analyze dance videos. His research aims to inform choreographic processes and uncover the history and lineages of dance.

Cid Pearlman is a choreographer working in the field of visual art and contemporary performance. For many years Pearlman presented her work primarily in theaters, including ODC Theater, Joyce SoHo, Kanuti Gildi SAAL (Estonia), the Getty Center, Stockholm City Hall, Theatre Artaud and the Museum of Contemporary Art/San Diego. Her recent projects are more likely to take place outside, or in galleries and public art spaces, as a way to directly address issues of access, community, audience experience. For over three decades Pearlman’s choreography has worked to subtly disrupt traditional notions of desire, gender and friendship. Inspired by the resilience, fragility, and resourcefulness of the human body, Pearlman makes dances about how we negotiate being together in a complex world. Among other honors she is the recipient of the 2021 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Award from the US Department of State, and has been twice awarded a Djerassi Resident Artist Fellowship. 

Alyssa Rose (they/them) is a disabled, non-binary and queer radical dreamer of liberation. They create paintings/collage, sculptures, dances, and healthy cultural ecosystems in dance communities. Currently, Alyssa serves as the program coordinator at DISCO RIOT in San Diego. Alyssa feels called to guide humans home to their bodies and empower marginalized people through embodiment. They use dance and visual art to explore the mystery of being alive and interconnected. Alyssa’s ongoing interests span research around Buddha Dharma, collective liberation, community care,  and how these areas of focus can be expressed through art and artistic process.

Chloe Rosen (they/them) is a genderqueer performance + choreographic artist currently living in Berkeley, CA. They graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz IN 2018, with a degree in psychology and dance. They've danced with Cid Pearlman, FACT/SF, Cookie Harrist, Wildance, Tim Rubel Human Shakes, Amy Foley, and have made their own works in the SF Bay Area/Santa Cruz since 2015. They've shown their own work through Shawl Anderson's Queering Dance Festival, SAFEhouse, Disco Riot's Queer Mvmnt Fest, Motion Pacific's Max10, and Incubator Project Residency. Chloe's work centers queer identity, community, curiosity, body autonomy, transformative justice, and process/play. ​They are the founder of Sapphire Yoga Collective, which is a collective of Queer/Trans yoga teachers who bring accessible classes to the LGBTQIA+ community of Santa Cruz. They are currently pursuing their Masters in Somatic Psychotherapy, with hopes of becoming a Dance/Movement therapist. 

Jonathan Segel is an accomplished musician and composer. He has composed music for film and dance and has toured throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Japan by himself or with a number of bands, most notably Camper Van Beethoven, Sparklehorse and Cracker, and with avant-garde musician Eugene Chadbourne. Jonathan plays several instruments, including the guitar, bass guitar, violin, viola, mandolin, keyboards and computer. He has also worked as a sound editor for film with Academy Award winning sound designer Dane A. Davis at Danetracks in Los Angeles, CA. Jonathan has been a principal composer for Cid Pearlman/Performance Projects, and her former company Nesting Dolls, since 1992. He has also composed music for Curt Haworth's Dance Company, and Maxine Moerman Dance Theater and the Deborah Slater Dance Theater, including the 2006 month-long run of “Hotel of Memories” at CounterPulse in San Francisco and 2007-2009 runs of “The Desire Line” on both east and west coasts.

Cynthia Strauss is a performance artist based in Santa Cruz, California since 1992.  She began dance studies at SFSU with Wilford Mark; Caribbean folklorique dance and Blanch Browne; Haitian and African.  A deep long dive into improvisational movement practice soon followed. Collaborations with painters, poets, musicians, in a multitude of environments;  are not limited to forests, streams, post offices, subway cars, and boulder tops.  Cynthia has been dancing with Cid Pearlman Performance since 2012.

Megan Schneider-Calderón is a Bay Area based dancer, choreographer, and educator that focuses on somatics and embodied memory. As a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, they earned a Bachelor of Arts in Dance and Psychology; becoming the first student to pursue a degree in dance at UCSC. Notable performances include dancing in "The Name of This Dance Changes Every Day," by Cid Pearlman, as well as working with the Watermelon Sisters, a queer art duo created by Ming Wong and Yu Cheng-Ta, at the prestigious Centre National de la Danse in Pantin, France.

Deneka Siu (they/them) is an emerging queer, Chinese-Filipinx American writer, movement artist and community organizer, who is Bay Area based, born, and raised. Their work is heavily influenced by their studies in Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz, as well as their time spent in class and in the production process with Cid Pearlman, Gerald Casel, and Rena Cochlin. Their attendance and participation in the international dance conference (Camping 2019), in Paris, France was also momentous in their exploration of dance post-college. Today, they honor their multidimensional passion by managing their own freelance writing career, working in student affairs at Northeastern University, and collaborating with their colleagues to expand the vision and offerings of the Queering Dance Festival.