Event

Callings & Sonoran Strange

In this double fill featuring the U.S. half of The Bi Cultural Road Show, San Francisco's Carpetbag Brigade shares the stage with Tucson, Arizona's VerboBala.

"Callings", an acrobatic stilt piece that examines the superstitious nature of meaning-making in a delicate overlap of circus, modern dance and theater.

Where do we look when our eyes are closed?

What words do we hear when no one is speaking?

Can we parch out thirst with this salt-coated cocktail of whispers, warnings and invocations conjured by the watery wrists of ceaselessly undulating waves?

If the ocean were ill, how would she weep?

If clouds were cryptographs, could we understand the symptoms?

If a sailor survived a siren's song, could we catch the words falling from the saline tongue?
Utilizing rich spoken word imagery,VerboBala presents Sonoran Strange, a multimedia performance that extracts the varied history of Arizona's border portal through digitalized spoken word and visual storytelling.

"The Sonoran Strange" from VerboBala extracts the stories of Arizona's border portal, the Sonoran Desert. With ambient video imagery and articulate spoken word, VerboBala dessicates the rich and complicated weave of the political and economic forces that shaped the ecological crisis and border mentality of contemporary Arizona. Wordsmith Logan Phillips and Video Wizard Adam Cooper-Teran intuitively document the historical transformation of the landscape of the southwest.

What if the Catalina Mountains outside Tucson dreamed of one day jumping the border of horizon, to follow their dreams of becoming thunderheads? What if the Apaches had won? What if the saguaros were sent to boarding school in Pennsylvania? What if the snowbirds don't come home to roost, if the tumbleweeds decide to settle down? What if sand shoots from the sprinklers? What if the water runs out?

The two performances may be interwoven with a meandering street intermezzo....