Date and Time:
June 12th, 5PM
June 19th, 5PM
Location
Commonweal, 451 Mesa Road
Bolinas, CA 94924, United States
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Date and Time:
July 10th, 6.30PM
July 11th, 5PM
July 17th, 6.30PM
July 18th, 5PM
Location
Skyline Community Church, 12540 Skyline Boulevard
Oakland, CA 94619, United States
ABOUT THE EVENT
An outdoor Selkie folklore inspired circus-theater production to reclaim what has been lost. Come to the forest. Come to the sea. Come home.
When Your Skin Calls You Home is a Selkie folklore inspired circus-theater production based on Sealskin, Soulskin by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Through performance art and ritual, grounded in Curandersimo, we will confront what has been taken, nurture what has been neglected, and remember what has been forgotten.
This outdoor environmental theater production weaves aerials, live cello, vocals, movement, and mask into wild places, as we traverse trails and labyrinths.
Bring your heart, weary of isolation. Bring your warm layers, your face mask, your walking shoes, and a pillow for sitting outdoors. Bring your longing for your truest self. Come to the forest. Come to the Sea. Come home.
Written by Melusina Gomez. Created and performed by Melusina Gomez, Mia Pixley, Shannon Gray, Shmee, Shoshana Green, Polina Smith, Claire Calderón, Nikbo
Tickets by donation, no one turned away for lack of funds.
Photos from 'When your Skin Calls you Home'
(By Mer Al Dao)
PERFORMERS
Photo by Thatcher Hayward
MIA PIXLEY
Mia Pixley, Ph.D. is a psychologist and artist who uses her cello, voice, and music performance to study aspects of self, other, and the natural world. Mia’s music gravitates toward the beauty that lives in sorrow and its potential to move us closer to our humanity and each other.
Mia has a professional studies diploma in cello performance from San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Ph.D. from CUNY Graduate Center, City College. Mia has recorded cello on GRAMMY award winning albums (Fantastic Negrito, “Please Don’t Be Dead”). She also tours annually on the Windham Hill Winter Solstice Tour, spearheaded by multi-instrumentalist, composer Barbara Higbie. Mia also performed in the Lucille Lortel Award winning off Broadway musical, “Futurity”.
Mia is set to release her first full length album, “Margaret in the Wild”, a project unabashedly inviting all of us to move toward nature - within and without.
Photo by Thatcher Hayward
MELUSINA GOMEZ
Melusina Gomez is a multifaceted artist, teacher, Curandera and the founder of Metzmecatl: Moon Rope Theatre, a Bay Area physical theater company. Melusina’s creative work engages the intuitive and dreaming mind, cultivating ritual and enchantment while addressing the wounds, longings, and unvoiced expressions of the soul in post-colonial, modern culture. She holds a MA in Experimental Performance from The Experimental Performance Institute at New College. Melusina’s mission is to bring pathos, humor, abstraction, beauty, tension, and the enchantment of make-believe to the stage, in the hopes of helping to add a little more magic, and a little more healing, to our world. www.metzmecatl.com
SHANNON GRAY
Shannon Gray can be found passing the time doing what many would consider rolling, climbing, releasing, gliding and creating. She enjoys things which consist of water, mud, trapeze bars, sand, and beautiful sounds. Merging the worlds of circus and dance, Shannon Gray has spent the last fifteen years developing her love of movement and curating her unique and expressive style. She draws specifically from somatic studies, dance, yoga, the practice of Authentic Movement and her MA in east-west psychology. Specializing in dance trapeze, she emphasizes a rich connection between the ground, apparatus, and air, dancing in ways which unfold a story more then tricks. Her movement quality revolves around release-based movement, contrast, and the emotion/physical connection. Born in Montreal, she has traveled extensively- collaborating, performing and teaching. No matter the venue and event- dancing in harness off a high rise building, improvising with live musicians in a secret, underground loft, or suspended over the ocean on a 100 ft. zipline- Shannon brings a rare kind of honesty and emotional intensity to all of her work. She currently lives north of San Francisco where she is commencing her new work, The Sentience Project- a film reflecting the examination and embodiment of injury, dreams, sentience, and the natural world. www.shannongray.ca
Photo by Thatcher Hayward
SHOSHANA GREEN
Shoshana is an experimental artist using movement and image to study "process" and "relationships" within and between the quotidian, esoteric and a lived interiority. She works with the body as a sculptural representation, a mysterious territory of sensations and a channel for giving form to non-verbal narratives. Shoshana is also a teacher, curator and presenter for Butoh Programming in San Francisco. She draws from her studies with renown Butoh teachers, Vangeline, Diego Piñon, Katsura Kan, Semimaru-San (Sankai Juku), Natsu Nakajima, Akira Kasai, Tadashi Endo and Yumiko Yoshioka, Atsushi Takenouchi. Shoshana has performed in KATSURA Kan's Oracle and Enigma at CounterPULSE in San Francisco and in Vangeline Theater's (NYC) production of FIFTH OF BUTOH at Triskelion Arts in New York. Shoshana also produced & performed in Vangeline's FIFTH OF BUTOH in San Francisco at NOHspace and eX..it performance festival at the International Art Research Residency, Schloss Bröllin in Berlin, Germany, performing work by Natsu Nakajima. Shoshana is a somatic psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco and at UCSF.
Websites: Butohsf.com, shoshanagreentherapy.com
SHMEE
S. Shmee, MA is an intermedia artist, storyteller and educator whose work is driven by a commitment to the creative process and the potential it holds for enrichment. In partnership with kind collaborators at non-profit and community arts centers, Shmee offers art-based interventions at public events and alongside therapeutic and rite of passage practices. These programs use mindfulness, embodiment, and creative play for self-inquiry, story weaving and community building. Shmee’s original works have been seen at the Bioneers conference, the conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams, SF Fringe Festival, Cucalores Film Festival, and Figment Arts, among others. In addition to facilitating original and enchanting programs, Shmee supports higher education through curriculum development as adjunct professor, teaching artist, and administrator. With a BA in Film Studies and MA in Depth Psychology, Shmee’s passion for storytelling spans from personal narrative to cultural mythology and fosters a commitment to the myriad of tales of our time. https://theartofshmee.weebly.com/
Photo bt Tumay Aslay
POLINA SMITH
Polina Smith is the Artistic Director of Crescent Moon Theater Productions creating original, thought provoking new work that spans across the disciplines of theater, dance, music and circus. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Inquiry from the California Institute of Integral Studies and worked for ten years with the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women. Polina is also the art event producer for Bioneers and Seismic Sisters, and can often be seen clowning around town as her character Dr. Schmit, who currently holds 83 phds.
NIKBO
Nikbo (they/she) is a community-supported artist and organizer who makes Third Culture Pop. Their latest EP, From the Garden, weaves pop hooks with global influences to create genre-fluid songs about belonging. They are devoted to helping shape a more just and regenerative world, while infusing joy into all processes—from our making, to our relating, to our movements. Supporters and fans can find links to their work and join the community they’re building at nikbomusic.com
Nikbo, whose given name is Nicole Bonsol, was born in Morocco to Filipino parents and raised in Canada, Malawi, and Kazakhstan before immigrating to the United States as a college student. They’ve been singing and writing for 20 years, beginning their career as a soprano in Stanford University’s Talisman a cappella group and touring around the world. As Talisman’s Musical Director, they had the privilege of singing with Bobby McFerrin and recording vocals for Christopher Tin’s Grammy-winning composition of “Baba Yetu."
In 2011, Nikbo was a VONA fellow and studied poetry with Ruth Forman. In 2017, their compositions won multiple competitions in 2017 with the West Coast Songwriters Berkeley chapter. They performed as a featured artist in 2018 at APAture (Kearny Street Workshop's Asian and Pacific American annual arts festival), and in 2019 at San Francisco’s annual Pistahan Festival. Their first music video, produced in collaboration with the award-winning, Brooklyn-based digital artist Kameron Neal, won an Independent Music Award in 2020.
CLAIRE CALDERÓN
Claire Calderón is an Oakland-based writer, literary curator, and musician. She writes and performs bilingual, cross-cultural songs for the feminist indie folk-pop band, Coraza, whose first single, "Like Blood" was released earlier this year. Claire holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and is the manager of The Ruby, a gathering space for women and non-binary artists and writers in San Francisco.
LOCATIONS
Commonweal, Bolinas
Commonweal started with a vision. In 1975, Michael Lerner was walking at the edge of the small coastal town of Bolinas just north of San Francisco. He looked out across grasslands and woods at an old RCA radio transmitter facility on a bluff overlooking the ocean. He imagined that this site could be a center for work in healing people and healing the earth.
Today, Commonweal works in three core fields—health and healing, art and education, and environment and justice. Within those fields, Commonweal incubates and supports a dozen different programs including programs in cancer, health professional education, environmental health, adult learning, yoga, healing nutrition, permaculture gardening, and juvenile justice.
Learn more at: www.commonweal.org
Skyline Church of Oakland
‘Progressive, spiritual, open and affirming’
Located in the majestic Oakland hill’s, Skyline’s vision is to be a strong voice for Progressive Christianity in Alameda County to build a beloved community and to lead in championing social justice and environmental justice for all.
We are a green congregation – we reduce waste, use native water wise planting, educate ourselves on environmental issues, put on an annual Earth Day service, reduce exposure to toxic chemicals, and advocate for local and global earth and climate issues.
We are an Open and Affirming (ONA) congregation. This is a UCC designation which means that we affirm the full inclusion of all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions into SKYLINE’s life and ministry.
We are a sanctuary church.
Learn more at: https://skylineucc.org/
