With support from the California Arts Council, Flyaway Productions will:
1. Premiere IF I GIVE YOU MY SORROWS, a multi-layered project featuring ten site-specific performances/ stories from incarcerated/formerly incarcerated women; three-panel discussions; and an art exhibition by female incarcerated artists from CCWF, curated by incarcerated artists, and presented in partnership with MoAD and Empowerment Avenue.
2. Lead GIRLFLY, San Francisco’s only stipend-based youth program combining activism and dance innovation for girls/GNC youth ages 14-19.
3. Engage in development (one year of teaching/relationship building) with community leaders and the Tenderloin Museum for ODE TO JANE, a large-scale site work to premiere on the Asian Art Museum Building (2024). ODE TO JANE connects the resistance strategies of the 20th century to the addiction crisis, threats to women’s bodies, racial reckoning, and the complex intersection of these realities.
PERFORM: We make dances that are site-specific, off the ground, and justice-driven. We perform in unlikely places, activating the sides of buildings above bleak city streets. Discarded needles; unhoused bodies lining sidewalks. This is where we create. Our site-specific dances impact neighborhoods because they unfold at the very place where conflict lives. For us, a building is a witness. It holds the complexity of a neighborhood’s history in its “hands,” I-beams, or concrete walls. Our tools include coalition building, an intersectional feminist lens, and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity. From 2017-2023, Flyaway created The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time. We continue to create new work centering incarcerated artists and exploring prison systems change.
TEACH: We offer year-round classes to adults, teens, and youth. We offer GIRLFLY, a Youth Art & Activism Program, integrating dance-making and activism. Our training with youth offers some remedy for the ways women and girls/GNC youth remain underserved in public culture as a whole. We also offer teaching residencies that link social justice content, school curriculum, and movement innovation, where your young artists are our collaborators.
ADVOCATE: We provide a bridge between the arts, gender justice, racial justice, and everyday life. We are constantly developing new forms for community engagement and coalition building with activists and non-arts partners.
COLLABORATE: We have worked with Bay Area Dance Artists Bianca Cabrera, Quinn Dior, Clarissa Dyas, Laura Elaine Ellis, Sonsherée Giles, MaryStarr Hope, Megan Lowe, Jhia Jackson, Saharla Vetch and natalya shoaf. We also work in collaboration with designer Sean Riley, rigger Dave Freitag, and over a dozen women/nonbinary composers, including Pamela Z, Madlines, Jewlia Eisenberg, Carla Kihlstedt, Van Anh Vo, Melanie DeMore, and Theresa Wong.

