Dream #0
When Sky visits Nature / performance-score-intervention on a public space, the Regional Redwood Park in Oakland, California
In this dream, the sky descends to visit the trees and the forest, turned into three bodies, that dance to the rhythm of music that comes from the imagination of who dreams. The audience experiences a visual level, where they can almost touch the blue bodies with clouds, and an auditory level, with the string quartet that helps to transport them to a different reality. Dancers: Natan Daskal, Kenya Moses, Jessica Brown Oviedo. Live music: Amaranth String quartet (Katie von Braun, Abigail Shiman, Erica Zappia and Helen Newby). Helpers: Maisa Arias, Abril and Ivonne Iriondo. Concept and Direction, Adrian. Time: 66 minutes. Place: Regional Redwood Park in Oakland, California. As part of the Art in Nature Festival, on September 20, 2015. Link to watch a videoclip HERE.
DREAM #1
You are inside a dream, one with black and white canvases getting colors from the music, building forms with the dance, a dream with aromas of childhood and with sounds from the future. The dreamer/painter is Adrian, cooking a soup to generate the aromas that the public needed to enter the mind of Adrian, who will also be painting the canvases, dictated by the sounds of music and dance steps of the bailaora. Muses of creation: Amaranth String Quartet and La Tania.
Red Poppy Art House, Saturday April 9, 2016, 7:17pm
DREAM # 1
DREAM #2
When Fire Visits Us, Visual Poem by Adrian Arias.
May 21st and 22nd 2016, Fort Mason Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
Fire is chosen in this new performance by Adrián Arias, which explores the poetic-conceptual and destructive burden that this element carries.
Influenced by his last years of experience in the laboratory of scores by Anna Halprin, Adrian has created a series of 12 scores-performances that tell us how fire can live within us to give us life.
Visual artist, poet and performer Adrián Arias, creates his new Visual-Poem-performance working in collaboration with dancer-performer from Anna Halprin’s Wednesday Scoring Lab, Amelia Uzastegui, and special guests in flamenco: internationally renowned and Isadora Duncan awardee La Tania and Clara Rodriguez, award winning dancer-acrobat Zoë Klein, and singers Dina Zarif and Anaís Azul.
With live music by STRINGQUAKE: Amelia Romano, Harp; Misha Khalikulov, cello; Josh Mellinger, cajón, tabla and percussion. The music includes a choral piece specially composed by Anais Azul, and an original arrangement of Stravinsky’s Firebird by Schuyler Karr.
Show dedicated to Anna Halprin, for her teachings and wisdom.
DREAM #3
Score that explores the identity and ethnicity through a dream with the ancestors. I am dreaming that I am in this theater and I am telling the public about my genetic profile, and the problems that will be living in this country with 54% indigenous blood.
Presented at
FLACC, Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers in December 2016.
And at PUSH Festival, on September 23 and 24, 2017 at ODC Theater.
Photos by Robbie Sweeny. Assistant by Mara P. Hernandez
DREAM #4
Dream #4: The Sacred Water, pays homage to rainwater as a sacred element, which provides life for the earth and those who live in it, and connects with our ancestors as a universal language.
We are living a time of political and social intolerance, and the water of the rain awakens us and gives us the energy we need to recognize that we must work for a change.
Performance at Dance Mission, and the esplanade of Bart Station at 24th Street and Mission Street in San Francisco. As part of D.I.R.T. Festival. March 24, 2017. Running time: 16 minutes.
DREAM #5
Dream #5: Blue Poem / performance-score at the North Beach Public Library in San Francisco, California
In this performance, the blue color is transported from my garden to the North Beach library, creating an oniric atmosphere full of umbrellas, books and many blue objects that I collect only for color. I start doing “blue” inhalations of eucalyptus and lavender, creating an aromatic space for the development of the dream-performance. I read “blue” poems, I describe the origin of the objects, I enter the deepest of the absurd, counting endless dreams.
Suddenly in the dream, the fears of reality mix, know that we live under a regime, that freedom is restricted, that it is dangerous to be an immigrant, it creates pain and confusion. I connect with the public with a blue thread that we all grasp. I invite the audience to read texts in different languages simultaneously, creating a chaos of overlapping languages. Then I give them umbrella to the whole audience, to protect us from the political moment we are living.
Concept and Direction, Adrian. Time: 29 minutes. April 2017
DREAM #6
Exploration in the Border and the territories that people cross and become “illegal” and in the internal borders of the body where we do not know how to explain our “bodily legality”. Dance Mission theatre, in collaboration with Kenya Moses and Mara P. Hernandez. As part of FLACC, Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers.
And also at Anna Halprin Mountain Studio, Nov-Dec. 2018.
DREAM #7
Adrian’s Dream # 7 had two stages. The first was developed in a performance in Somarts, and the second in the Red Poppy Art House, Nov-Dec 2018.
DREAM #8
Adrian is dreaming that there is a public that is with him and that public is dreaming of him. Adrian dreams that he is at a table, that he flicks a black flag with hollow stars, that he creates his own garden out of a suitcase, while a typewriter sounds every time a dead body is found on the border. Oscar, Valeria, Isabel, dead while trying to cross the frontera, appear in this dream, bringing memories of childhood, joy and pain. A group of Heralds appears to protect this dream, and help Adrian understand that Adrian dreams that he is dead.
Part of this performance was created in the rural residence of Arte BENAMIL, Spain, and part in Sea Ranch and Oakland, and part at the Anna Halprin Mountain Studio in Kentfield.
Dream # 8 was designed to be presented at FLACC, Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers, at the Berkeley Museum, California BAMPFA, on November 23, 2019.
Performers : Amy Cranch, Sue Heinemann, Darcie Luce, Marguerite Etemad, Carol Naber and Craig Amos.
Adrian wants to thank Anna Halprin, Brian Collentine, La Tania and the production assistance of Mara Hernandez.
DREAM #9
As part of SFIAF, May 2020, Fort Mason Center. In collaboration with Anais Azul. Cancelled due to pandemic.
DREAM #10
Coming soon….