Grass, Gravel, & the Space Between Trees: Unfolding, Merging, Marking Time
September 13th / Music Concourse San Francisco
DATE: Saturday, September 13th
SHOWTIMES: 3:00pm, 4:30pm, & 6:00pm
WHERE: Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF
Meet at the Rideout Fountain, in the center of the Concourse.here
WHAT TO EXPECT: Grass, Gravel, & the Space Between Trees unfolds over three adjacent areas of the Concourse. We invite audience to take agency over where and how they want to view the work. Please plan to enjoy the work the way you would otherwise enjoy the park; utilizing the already available park benches and/or grassy meadows, as your access to viewing, and/or stroll, pause, move around in whatever form is accessible to you, in order to accommodate your needs, and your viewing pleasure.
Run Time Approximately 1 hour
RSVP: This is a FREE event, presented in collaboration with SF Recreation and Parks. Please RSVP, so we can be sure to say hello to you.
Grass, Gravel, & the Space Between Trees: Unfolding, Merging, Marking Time is a free, public, site-responsive movement installation, or “dancescape,” integrated into the urban landscape of the Music Concourse, and presented by Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works, in partnership with San Francisco Recreation & Parks.
2025 marks the fifth anniversary of the COVID pandemic, when we found ourselves compelled to create and perform outdoors and informally, over many months, in Golden Gate Park’s Music Concourse, as a ritual; a non-digital archive; and a social experiment in intimate distance, solidarity care, and the sharing of public space.
We return to the Music Concourse five years later with Grass, Gravel, & the Space Between Trees, to explore the possibilities, at this juncture, of cumulative, ongoing, and sustainable art practices, with a different set of boundaries and desires around collective intimacy, grief, embodied ecologies of place, the public gaze, and the intersection (both disruptive and harmonious) of art and urban landscapes.
Concept and Direction: Jennifer Perfilio
Performance + Co-Creation: Shareen DeRyan, Irene Hsi, Chinchin Hsu, Maya Mohsin, Phoenicia Pettyjohn, and ainsley e. tharp. Original text written and performed by Chinchin Hsu, Maya Mohsin, & Phoenicia Pettyjohn
Original Sound Score + Performance: Clark Buckner
Photo Credit: Hillary Goidlell
Video Credit: Jules Buckner
Thank you to:
San Francisco Recreation & Parks, Dancers’ Group, and our individual donors, all of whom make this project possible, through their support of our work.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
JPMW acknowledges that this creative process and performance occurs on Yelamu, the unceded, stolen, ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We honor the Ramaytush Ohlone for their long-lasting commitment to mother earth, and recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. This process has afforded us the opportunity to see, listen to, and be in movement with the surrounding urban nature of Golden Gate Park. We acknowledge and reflect on the land that was here before, and the original peoples who stewarded it with grace and care. JPMW makes an annual donation to the Yunakin Land tax, and encourages all non-Indigenous people living in this region to do the same. We acknowledge that no amount of money will undo the damage caused by colonization and land theft, but that this is one step in the process of repair. ramaytush.org