Dance and sound unite San Diego arts community in 'all the big and little things'

Dancer and choreographer Giovanna Francisco says she is most aware of outside pressures based on how they feel in her body.

"I was noticing how taking on the weight of things — with things in my family or things just in the world and the chaos of everything all the time — and how it would make me feel heavy, and it would translate into my movement. I started to think about how this is something that we all experience," Francisco said.

Francisco is the creative director of "all the big and little things," a performance of music and movement informed by the ways we carry our burdens.

"I was wanting to explore how we can better tune into those moments where we might be aware of it, and other times where we might not be, and learn to accept both and embrace both versus trying to change anything," she said. "And there's a lot of play in this work, to also bring some levity to something that might feel complex and heavy."

Doug McMinimy

Francisco studied dance at UC San Diego and has recently worked with San Diego Dance Theater and other arts spaces in the region. She's motivated in her dancemaking to continue connecting with others. She's also interested in the meditative nature of movement, and allowing herself to create in a way that steps away from the artistic grind — the pressure to create.

"I think an approach I had for this project is I really wanted to make things that didn't feel so precious. I think in dancemaking sometimes I get really caught up into having everything I make be the best thing it's ever been. And that's not real, and it's arbitrary," she said. "So I've been trying to approach the movement-making part of this as more honoring who we are, just taking little things that are more just pedestrian movement qualities and being able to replicate that in a confined container — since performance is pretty calculated — but try to not be so calculated."

Francisco worked with other movement and sound artists to design a production that sits somewhere between choreographed and improvised.

Musician Zane Shrem-Besnoy was brought on as music director and was prompted by Francisco to study how sound and music are perceived.

"Giovanna came to me with this idea of perception, right? Like the way we perceive our own emotional state and our own bodies ,and how you perceive sound — or the sounds even within your own body — versus how we are perceived, and the tension between those things," Shrem-Besnoy said. "That was really exciting to me, because I think art is so much about how we perceive things and how we use our attention creatively."

In the performance, these sounds manifest as clarinets, slide whistles, harp, poetry — even balls bouncing on hand drums. A choir of differently tuned guitars and harp will join the movement artists on "stage," and singers will add their vocal art.

Julia Dixon Evans

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KPBS

As a sound artist, the space and divergence between music and sound is something Shrem-Besnoy spends a lot of time thinking about.

"Music is intent. Sound happens. Music is what we call it when we organize sound," he said. "I don't think necessarily what I'm doing for this show is always music, which I like, because for me music has a lot of meaning and I find it to be distracting. I've worked so many dance shows, and there's been so many times where the music just pulls me out of the movement and the interplay — what's happening on stage — because we have such a cultural relationship with music. And we also have a cultural relationship with sound, but we don't think about it the same way."

He said the project with Francisco involved leaning into that boundary.

"Can we notice our relationship to sound? Can we notice when it turns into music, or when we feel like it's music, and kind of like blurring that line?" Shrem-Besnoy said.

Francisco said the concept parallels the space between movement and dance.

"I think people's approach to dance is that it's something that you practice and something that's very separate from everyday movements, but I don't know exactly where the boundary is between movement and dance — when does it become something that's set and choreography? Because choreography can also be the particular way you brush your teeth and those little movements that everyone does all the time," she said.

Julia Dixon Evans

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KPBS

In addition to Shrem-Besnoy and the musicians, Francisco also collaborated with a group of other movement artists. They journaled on a series of prompts together, and Francisco pulled the lived experiences and connections of the artists together into movements.

"Collaboration has really brought this project to life because the base material we're working with can be so personal — and it's been very cool to see how our own unique experiences have brought us together through different art mediums, and to try to play into that a little bit," Francisco said.

For Francisco, this sort of cross-disciplinary, collaborative work is a strength of the region's cultural landscape.

"In San Diego in particular, the art scene to me has felt representative of how dynamic the community is — living in a cross-border region that's pretty metropolitan. I think the artists in this community, I know quite a handful of people that do so many things and don't necessarily identify with one medium. And I think that says a lot about what kind of place San Diego is, where there's not this criteria to define yourself as any one particular thing," she said.

Performances take place this weekend at San Diego City College's City Gallery.