The theme of this year’s Limited Edition is “Forward-Looking Lineages,” inspired in part by the SFMOMA show Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules. Contemporary performance is, among many things, a set of traditions, enriched and bedeviled by questions of ownership, of legacy, of the authentic and the appropriated. Open Space will explore these themes through the work produced and supported by a cohort of San Francisco organizations.​ As sites for well-resourced arts writing continue to be imperiled, and as vital independent arts spaces struggle to stay afloat in the face of rapid gentrification and decreased arts funding, Limited Edition seeks to address a crucial need for smart context around contemporary culture.

Gerald Casel and Keith Hennessy, Gerald + Keith​; photo: Robbie Sweeny.

Choreographers and former Merce Cunningham dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener draw on the concept of “Desire Lines,” unofficial routes in nature and landscape architecture which develop over time as the people traversing a space reject designated paths in favor of more desirable or convenient paths. DESIRE LINES: RETROFIT uses group improvisation to explore path-making, democratic choices, and utopian community, enabling the group of performers to navigate a world built from their collective desires, and exploring the connections between dance and visual art.

Photo: Alex John Beck

Join us for a performative exchange and discussion focused on humor in performance, tactility and the haptic with artists Cori Olinghouse, Tammy Rae Carland, Xandra Ibarra, and Anne Walsh, hosted by Claudia La Rocco, SFMOMA’s Head of Community Engagement, and Julie Potter, Director, ODC Theater.

Photo: Andrew Jordan

Wry, electric commentary on the dark corners, the everyday, and the oft-overlooked. Word for Word brings us five stories from Bay Area writer Lucia Berlin, posthumously famous for her searing look on American society. Set to an evocative jazz score, the incisive, witty stories feature complex women, balancing motherhood, relationships, and a working life. Directed by JoAnne Winter and Nancy Shelby. Supported by the Bernard Osher Foundation, Panta Rhea Foundation, and Florence Gould Foundation.

Lucia Berlin; photo: Buddy Berlin

ODC Theater presents an evening of film and performance by Cori Olinghouse, whose works employ shape-shifting and a queering of the clown form. In Ghost line, a 16mm film collaboration with filmmaker Shona Masarin, optical printing, hand painting, drawing, and frame-by-frame animation explode the film’s surface through tactile interventions. Grandma, a live performance set in an American landscape of Twinkies and Wonderbread, excavates the effects of television, the media, and dark familial pasts.

Photo: Andrew Jordan

bury.me.fiercely. derives from the inner workings of Tolentino’s recent residency working one-on-one with five local artists. This final iteration of the project offers signature methods: durational performance, movement, exploration of abstraction and minimalism with aims to seduce the project into its barest presentational form.

Presented with support from Hope Mohr Dance’s Bridge Project.

Photos: Aldo Hernandez / Psari Visual / Manuel Vason. All images courtesy of the artist.

Hope Mohr Dance / The Bridge Project and ODC Theater co-present Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities, a multidisciplinary series of lecture-performances. Generated through deconstructions of landmark modern choreographies, these dance-experiments are performed alongside contributions by scholars and writers who situate these iconic works and artists within the larger project of Modernism, exploring foundational tenants such as sovereignty, race, feminism, and nihilism. Yerushalmy will present her installments devoted to Vaslav Nijinsky, Alvin Ailey, and Merce Cunningham.

Photo: Paule Lobo

Historically, the North and West offered Black Americans social and economic opportunities that could not be found in the Southern states their predecessors sought to escape. Bailey asks, what does it mean for current socio-economic conditions to force Black Americans back to the South? The Lab’s 16th and Mission Project invites artists and the public to use the 16th Street and Mission BART plaza as a public art forum: a site for active social exchange through the medium of constructed situations.

Photo: Simone Bailey: Sway, Clench, Release (Requiem No. 415), 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Join Z Space for wine and conversation about the creative process. Bringing together artists and art lovers from multiple disciplines, we will dive into these questions: Where are our ideas coming from these days? What’s bubbling up to the surface? How do we go about deciding what we want our art to be about? How do we begin to brainstorm, outline, and create? The free evening event is hosted by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb and Rose Oser.

A three-channel video work and live performance, Hustlers & Empires draws on the stories of three iconic characters, inspired by Iceberg Slim’s Pimp (1967), Marguerite Duras’ The Lover (1984), and Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit (1968). Handelman re-contextualizes these characters through three legendary queer performers — Shannon Funchess, John Kelly, and Viva Ruiz.

Michelle Handelman, Hustlers & Empires, 2018, (Production still); photo: Mr. Means

The inaugural CounterPulse Festival is an incubator for radical makers, featuring events at The Stud, an all-night dance party with Surface Tension, and performances by Arletta Anderson & Adam Smith, Ruairí Donovan, keyon gaskin (presented by The Lab), Valérie Reding and Mica Sigourney. An artist lab brings together individuals from the Bay Area, US swing states, and Russia to research how interdisciplinary arts can be a model for cultural pluralism. ​

CounterPulse Family Feast and Fundraiser; photo: Robbie Sweeny

Coinciding with Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules, Performance All Ages presents BodyCartography Project for a weekend of drop-in, participatory movement pieces that connect to Rauschenberg’s performances. Join us on Member Access Day or Free Family Day for performances that excite the imagination.

BodyCartography Project, felt room, 2017; photo: courtesy of the artists​