Brendan Fernandes: I’M DOWN

Brendan Fernandes
Participatory actions in Santa Monica
#ImDown #18thStreetArts

Saturday, March 18 | 11 AM -1 PM
Tuesday, March 21 | 11 AM -1 PM
Friday, March 24 | 11 AM -1 PM

Please text “IMDOWN” to 555888 to RSVP, be informed of meeting locations, and receive text-based artworks to your phone.

Brendan Fernandes’s dance-based practice explores the intersections between dance and visual arts through language, architecture, and the body. I’M DOWN, a series of participatory public actions realized at and around 18th Street Arts Center, uses performance and language to illustrate narratives of absence and loss around displacement through migration, gentrification, and social violence. His work, anchored in his unique cultural background as a Kenyan-Indian Canadian based in the United States for over a decade, confronts the hybrid and transitional nature of identity as not static, but enacted. Key questions in his work are informed by his experience as a trained dancer in ballet and modern techniques, who had to leave the dance world due to injury.

Through this project Fernandes and dancers will develop a gestural vocabulary based on research into the movements of residents and commuters around the Pico Neighborhood that surrounds 18th Street Arts Center, and the community’s cultural histories. Performers will workshop this gestural vocabulary of the Pico Neighborhood with local participants in various locations around Santa Monica, accessible via the bike and pedestrian path adjacent to the Expo Line Metro corridor, on three scheduled occasions: Saturday, March 18; Tuesday, March 21; and Friday, March 24, all from 11am-1pm. Meeting locations in Santa Monica will be announced via text message, 24 hours prior to each action.

Featuring performers Peter Kalisch, Barry Brannum, Jade Schuster, Candice Fox, Michael Tomlin III, Julie Kleinerman, Natali Micciche, and Catherine ‘Scoti’ Scott.

Please text “IMDOWN” to 555888 to RSVP and subscribe to announcements.