Grantee Database

FLYAWAY PRODUCTIONS

Grant Year

2024-25

Grant Program

Creative Youth Development

Award Amount

$23,147.00

Project Description

With support from the California Arts Council, FLYAWAY PRODUCTIONS offers GIRLFLY– an artist-as-activist training program for girls/gender-nonconforming (gnc) youth who don’t have regular arts access. Participants learn aerial dance, site-specific dance, visual art and creative writing that center racial/gender justice, belonging, and self-esteem built through performance. Participants receive a $550 stipend. In 2022, we observed how much trauma students carry from the pandemic, climate change, racism, immigration challenges, poverty, and the intersection of issues. Our response moving forward is to prioritize joy, ease and how artists create joy, in tough contexts. We focus on building a healthy community within the program via community agreements, active peer support and processing challenges as a group as they arise.

Organization Summary

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.

Organization

Flyaway Productions

Address

1068 Bowdoin St.

San Francisco

94134

County

San Francisco

Region

Bay Area – San Francisco

Phone

(415) 672-4111

Congressional District

U.S. House of Representatives district 15

State Assembly District

District 17

State Senate District

District 11

Subscribe to the California ArtBeat weekly newsletter

Skip to content