DEC 8-10: TELL

Circo Zero and Dance Mission Theater present
Tell

New dates!!! Dec 8-10, 2023:  Fri-Sun @ 8pm at Dance Mission Theater

Tickets:  Buy now
$0-$30 sliding scale – Please choose a ticket price based on your financial capacity.

Co-directed by Sarah Crowell and Keith Hennessy in collaboration with Larry Arrington, Samara Atkins, Amber Julian, Sheila Russell, Ainsley Tharp, and Shaunna Vella.

Dancing towards racial healing, Tell holds space for the vulnerability, beauty, and necessity of multi-racial collaboration. The work is potent, always evolving, and will invite you to interact. Come be in process with us. Snacks will be served.

Tell is more of an offering than a “show,” it’s a community experience in a life-long journey of racial healing. Creating a space where ancestors are welcomed and multi-generational healing will be explored, Tell is an experimental process-based approach to both racial healing and dance performance.

“To want to heal is to believe that something else is possible, it is a sort of precarious leap of faith, it is also a reckoning. And this is the act, the gesture, the movement that really feels like it is at the heart of Tell: the desire for collective healing.”  – Indybay, Kyla Searle

The Story: In 2020, after crossing paths for 30 years in the Bay Area dance community, Sarah and Keith performed together in the short powerful film The Space Between Us directed by Gabriel Diamond. Responding with words and dance to racially-charged questions of trust and safety, the film documents an intimate moment of negotiating power, race, gender, age, queerness, risk, love, and friendship. The film has been seen at over 15 festivals worldwide and has served in anti-racist DEI trainings and world building conferences.

Inspired by the film Keith and Sarah decided to gather two teams of dancers, one Black and one white, to explore potentials for racial healing through dancing and community process. The making of Tell has involved working separately in racially-caucused groups and then coming together as a multi-racial ensemble to build relationships through shared dancing, rituals, meals, conversation, and rural retreats. When we began we didn’t know if the two groups would remain separated or come together to create a single work, with the decision in the hands of the Black dancers. We recognized the possibility of both failure and conflict. Holding space for the nuanced intricacies of our identities to understand racial harm and pursue racial healing, we have stepped into cross-racial collaboration through honesty, consent, and care.

Supporters: Tell is supported by grants from The San Francisco Arts Commission, The California Arts Council, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, The Creative Work Fund, The National Endowment for the Arts, The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. Destiny Arts Center generously provided free rehearsal space for the development of Tell.