Traveling Asians Make Great Art: SF Thomassons Performance Tours

Monday, January 11, 2010

From KSW To MySpace To You:

SF Thomassons Performance Tours

An original performance project / bus tour presented by Kearny Street Workshop and Kaya Press

Saturday January 23, 12noon – 2pm and 3 – 5pm

Tickets: $10 advance; $12 at the bus
Tour begins at 953 Mission St. @ 5th St (Mint Mall, lower level)

Have you ever noticed a third floor door opening into the air? Useless pipes or poles jutting out from the sidewalk or the sides of buildings? Join KSW and a group of performing artists for a bus tour to discover some of these overlooked Thomassons around SF. This unique tour will feature local artists including Allan Manalo, Philip Huang, Anthem Salgado, Kennedy Kabasares, Adderly Bigelow, Christina Miglino, Dennis Rodis, Rob Trinidad and others, doing a variety of on-site interpretive acts ranging from dance to comedy to aerial performance. Afterwards, you will see your everyday surroundings in a whole new way.

SF Thomassons is a collaboration between KSW, API Diaspora publisher Kaya Press and Bay Area artists Allan Manalo and Seng Chen, responding to conceptual artist Gempei’s historic book Hyperart: Thomasson. Kaya Press recently published the first English language translation of the book, which opened up an opportunity to revive interest in this historic intersection between art and urbanism. Check out the project’s dedicated website for more information and to see Thomassons that our community has discovered in the Bay Area and beyond!

Led by Asian American artists, SF Thomassons continues KSW’s ongoing practice of hands-on, audience participatory art-making and response to community change and displacement. Affected repeatedly by San Francisco’s boom-and-bust real estate cycles, KSW has always been directly involved in neighborhood activism and demographic change through: neighborhood mural projects of the seventies and eighties; our activism in the I-Hotel eviction struggle and rebuilding; innumerable site-specific performance collaborations; our 2001 artists mapping exhibition; and literary workshops on writing place.

RESERVE YOUR SEAT NOW!