GOD KNOWS WHERE Will Premiere Next Month at SAFEhouse Arts

Live shows have returned to the SAFEhouse Arts venue at 145 Eddy Street in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Following the grand reopening July 31, 2021, with RAW resident artists, SAFEhouse will host touring artists Biba Bell, Jmy James Kidd and Paige Martin, for one night only, Sunday, August 8, 2021 at 5:00pm. The evening's opening performer, Raven Malouf-Renning, is a SAFEhouse lead artist and is co-producing the event. There is limited general seating so advance ticket purchase highly encouraged. Ticketholders should visit the website for safety protocol updates.

Modern Garage Movement (MGM) takes its name from its conception in a one-car garage in San Francisco in 2005. MGM took a break from 2011 to 2021. Founding artist, Biba Bell, has not slowed down though. Bell bounced between home in the Bay Area; Tisch at NYU and teaching at Wayne State in Detroit; accumulating a lot of credits in the dance scene. Of her dancing, the New York Times writes: "It's invigorating to watch someone who borders on wild." A Detroit Metro Times writer explains, "...when we talk about a dancer like Bell, we aren't talking about a run-of-the-mill performer who'll be showcased at a local theater - there's a lot more to Bell than that. Bell, who is an adjunct professor at Wayne State, has a doctorate from New York University in performance studies. So, whenever the writer, dancer, and choreographer is creating a new project, you can expect it to incorporate elements you wouldn't typically expect in a dance show. Bell studies her subject matter first, and then creates something of a performance installation around her findings." Read full article at metrotimes/detroit.

Biba Bell returns to San Francisco for the West Coast leg of a national tour and returns to her nomadic ways with the resurrection of MGM. After a ten-year hiatus, relocations across the U.S. and delays due to the pandemic, this performance collective shows their grit and determination to take it on the road again with the premiere of God Knows Where (2021). The three lead dance artists, Biba Bell, Jmy James Kidd and Paige Martin, collaborated with musician-composers Gelsey Bell and Tara Jane O'Neil. Together, they create live performance events that mobilize audiences and sites with context and choreography. Their dances are made for touring. MGM takes a single dance and performs it within and across dozens of spaces like llama barns, farms, galleries, parks, alleys, bars, beaches, yoga studios, wineries, museums, theaters, farmers' markets, living rooms, backyards and, of course, garages. The work communes with the sonic, sensorial and visual materials embedded in the sacred sites all around us. Every performance is an offering and a time for gathering.

Bell describes it best in an interview with detroitcultural.com: "I've performed in theaters around the world and I love the technology and how much you can do, the refinement of that space, the control and forced perspective, but I also love being in the midst of the mess, of the messiness, and experiencing that through a dancing, improvising, participating body. This is how I think performance is a highly rigorous way to explore often discussed things like resilience, sustainability, community. These are practices for survival." More at bibabell.com.

As an Assistant Professor at Wayne State, Bell was involved in a project with Nick Cave reported on by Tisch NYU news tisch.nyu "Figure This: Detroit was the culmination of Nick Cave's five month long exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum which involved many events, performances, and partnerships with local institutions. Biba Bell, an alumus of the PhD program, choreographed one of the dance labs co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit where she collaborated with Nick's soundsuits, composer Frank Pahl, and a group of dancers. She was also involved in Head Detroit, which partnered with the Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance at WSU, in which forty of her students performed in his soundsuit."

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