Grass, Gravel, & the Space Between Trees: Unfolding, Merging, Marking Time
September 13th / Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
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, ainsley e. tharp
With original text written and performed by Chinchin Hsu, Maya Mohsin, & Phoenicia Pettyjohn
Original Sound Score + Performance: Clark Buckner
Site Assistance: Elias Buckner, Daisy Meritt, Karla Quintero, Mason Singers, Elizabeth Szele, Nami
Tech Assistance: Cruz Morrison
Photography: Hillary Goidell
Videography: Jacob Marks Productions
Costume Styling: Jennifer Perfilio, in collaboration with the artists
Photo Credit: Hillary Goidlell
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.
A Special Thank you to: Our friends who supported the in-progress sharing of this work last spring, as well as to the artists of the As Is Series, which was a 6-week series of performances experiments in the pandemic, at the Music Concourse; and which in many aspects, inspired the design of Grass, Gravel, & the Space Between Trees. These artists include Emma Lanier, Samuel Melecio-Zambrano, Shareen DeRyan, Hillary Goidell, Kena Frank, Amy Jacobsen, Vanessa Chang, Bhumi Patel, Karla Quintero, Clark Buckner, Atefeh Mordeshi, Veronica, and Alive and Well Productions, Luana Plunkett, and Neal Morrison.
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