ANNE BLUETHENTHAL AND DANCERS
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Mission Statement
Founded in 1984, ABD Productions has, over nearly four decades, collaborated with dozens of communities to develop more than 150 original multidisciplinary performance works. It’s principal program for the last eleven years is Skywatchers, a multi-ethnic, mixed-ability, community-based performing arts ensemble based in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Rooted in the belief that relationships are the first site of social change, we use a values-based relational, durational, conversational, and structural methodology focused on process over product to leverage arts for justice and equity. Through a durational process of relationship building and arts-based civic engagement, Skywatchers brings people together across identities, facilitates expression, and fosters creative problem solving. Anchored by these values rather than an aesthetic or narrative agenda, the artistic products can manifest as formal performance, arts-based organizing, or creative advocacy.
About This Cause
The Tenderloin is a dense neighborhood with a rich history of culture, resistance, and poverty. Residents are more racially diverse, older, and have higher rates of disability and lower educational attainment than the citywide average, and 25% of median income. Nearly half the city’s homeless persons live in the neighborhood. Many neighborhood residents and most Skywatchers community ensemble members have experienced intergenerational poverty, trauma, and disenfranchisement, high levels of substance abuse and mental illness, repeated encounters with the judicial system, and houselessness. Today most live in supportive housing. Most, too, report multiple traumatic encounters with the medical system. The radical challenges of COVID-19 disproportionately affected low-income communities of color nationwide. Our community in the Tenderloin was particularly hard hit by the crisis: TL residents with whom Skywatchers has a unique, sustained relationship were especially vulnerable to COVID-19 due to pre-existing health conditions, poverty, and high-density housing. Our current project, Towards Opulence, grows out of the deepening awareness COVID fostered of the role healthcare inequities play in civic life and communal well-being. It is also rooted in the recognition that when people’s basic needs are not met, we can’t afford the luxury of imagination. Because quality healthcare is a basic need which for many Tenderloin residents is still out of reach, we are engaging the arts as a tool to tackle inequitable access to healthcare. We are doing this in partnership with one of the most powerful medical institutions in the Bay Area: University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Creating collaborative work across significant axes of difference requires skillful, active listening and consistency of presence. From a single conversation in 2011 with a handful of residents struggling with serious health and social inequities, Skywatchers has grown into an ensemble that has directly involved hundreds of participants and engaged thousands more in artworks of creative resistance and community celebration. The majority of the ensemble members are BIPOC; close to a third identify as LGBTQ. Through the creative process participants linked their personal stories to those of their neighbors and to the larger social fabric, amplifying and weaving together histories too often hidden. Ensemble members have taken ownership of the work, integrating it into the DNA of the Tenderloin. Our work together has: ● Created a thriving community arts collaboration composed of low- and no-income Black and Brown residents who are cultivating collective agency and taking neighborhood leadership. ● Built a repertoire of works deeply rooted in the histories, talents, and urgent concerns of ensemble members, artists with anywhere from one to forty years of experience making art. ● Manifested horizontal leadership held jointly by young QTPOC artists and Skywatchers ensemble. ● Built ongoing partnerships with more than a dozen neighborhood-based organizations. Towards Opulence nurtures dialogue both across the divide between healthcare providers and low-income residents who are subject to race- and class-based bias and trauma, and city agencies—SFDPH, SFAC, UCSF Community Engagement, and SF Planning—who are positioned to create policy changes that support equity, build community resilience, foster trust, and recognize our interdependence. The creative engagement process will build trust between TL residents, patients and providers—both subject to dehumanizing conditions, shifting the discourse from blame to envisioning solutions. The artistic works produced through Towards Opulence will activate community spaces, and project partnerships will generate momentum towards a collective vision of health that supports a thriving community. We are already building the work and partnerships to make this project a reality. In 2021 we developed a series of poetic, film-based works that center the voices of Tenderloin residents who have experienced medical racism, trauma, and other barriers to care. The films will simultaneously be used as a teaching tool for UCSF staff and students, and the accompanying curriculum—created by these Tenderloin residents in partnership with clinicians and academics from within the UCSF system—will support the values of anti-racism and equity.