Photo by ainsley tharp [ID: an image with bright saturated colors with a sunflower folded in half in the background there is a watermelon and a lemon covered in blue fluffy mold]
How do we define legacy and carry what was built, cultivated, nurtured, and grown through death and generations?
We take what we can carry in the ways we know how.
So, we are,
did, and do.
FRESH FESTIVAL began in 2010 in the care of Kathleen Hermesdorf, Albert Mathias, and Ernesto Sopprani. For 10 years Kathleen was the director, curator, teacher, performer, and producer of FRESH FESTIVAL. In 2020, Kathleen was diagnosed with brain cancer and died about 8 months later. Here is Kathleen’s archive with so many beautiful memories, and letters from the past.
We replicated what we thought FRESH was and allowed ourselves and the festival to shift and adapt.
Changes are inevitable
and we learned from what already existed.
[DOING]
Doing the damn thing taught us what needed to be done, and moving from there as a place of momentum.
How does form influence practice?
Embedded in the bodies that carry the legacy of KH FRESH are the forms/formlessness of experimental improv.
Legacy became less about replicating the choreography of what the festival was and more about an improv score with FRESH’s past while tumbling towards the possibilities of what is just around the corner (THE FUTURE).
So yeah,,,,
we’re experimenting,
improvising,
fucking it up,
failing,
listening, collaborating
and being in community
because that is our practice. It’s what we know, it’s how we move, and it is our way of carrying on the FRESH legacy.
~~~~~~ m a k i n g s p a c e f o r m o r e s p a c e ~~~~~~
Who is in the room? Who is the community?
(great fucking question.)
The choreography of what this festival is will inevitably change and transform based on who is in the room. And a part of the legacy of FRESH we are acknowledging is the whiteness of past leadership of the festival.
We are shifting, recentering, and adapting.
(making s p a c e)
In inheriting, it was a clear call and ask of this moment to reposition and address the overall whiteness of the festival. Having a majority BIPOC and queer production/curation team, the only access point for us to engage with the festival was to center BIPOC and queer artists by inviting folks like Maurya Kerr, Rama Hamesh Hall, En Ningún Lugar, mayfield brooks, Tommy DeFranz, and others to teach and perform in the festival.
How do we build bridges?
How do we cultivate a rich and diverse container that feels honest?
How does recentering leadership create space for BIPOC and queer artist participation and cultivation?
Something we come back to again and again and again is the economic realities and precarity of our audience and community. Financial accessibility is a core pillar, principle, and practice guiding the structure of the festival. All of our classes and events are no one turned away for lack of funds (NOTAFLOF), which many participants took advantage of in previous iterations. We offer audio description and ASL for our performances, and there have been other offerings for other dance styles besides experimental dance and improvisation, such as House and Butoh.
We are laying to rest and giving FRESH new life through this upcoming festival ROT.
Definition of ROT:
the process of decay.
There is so much movement in the decay, there is transformation in the compost, there is new life and new beginnings after ROT.
ROT is the name of this moment. Through ROT 2025 and a communal conversation, there will be a new name coming circa 2026 for What. is. Next. And honestly who the fuck knows?! Maybe we keep the name if backed by popular demand.
????What. is. Next.????
ROT/FRESH/ROT/FRESH/ROT/FRESH/ROT/FRESH/ROT/FRESH
We want to emphasize what has been at the heart of this festival these past few years and amplify what we loooove about it. It’s a microcosm of events across experimental dance, interdisciplinary art, and academic spaces.
It is a community that appears and dissolves.
It is a community that co-learns, co-creates, and trains together.
It is an incubator for collaboration; a shock to the system that re-invigorates and holds space to collectively build possibilities that become more possibilities—
practicepracticepracticepracticepracticepracticepractice
—[a site of experimentation, study, risk-taking, mishaps, ]
all while centering anti-racist, proto-feminist, (light?) anarchist politics as participants and organizers. It is quick, dirty, and creates an environment that allows us to generate better questions, moremoremore questions, and questions that don’t have answers.
Just a tiny few (moremoremore) of the largesse of questions to ourselves—How is this a community care practice and what are the limitations around this type of work?
How does legacy get passed down through the body / embodiment?
How do scarcity and abundance and sustainability collide?
and to you—
How are you interested in / what do you need to support being together?
Who are your / our communal dancestors?
What do you want to see?
Are we willing to not know? YES
We are willing to not know.
ROT/FRESH/ROT/FRESH/ROT/FRESH/ROT/FRESH/ROT/FRESH
Well I guess this is kind of an abrupt end to this chapter, to this article, to what was once FRESH, but also here we are writhing in the ROT, digging through the compost, improvising with ghosts, and giving thanks to those who came before us and those that will come after us.
Photo by Robbie Sweeny [ID: The image is bright and blurry. The entire image is vibrating like sequins shimmering. The image is of Clarissa and ainsley from the waist up. Clarissa and ainsley are covered in transparent plastic they are both looking down. The back ground is a bright floral print.]
This article has been co-written by Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley e. tharp, the two primary caretakers of ROT 2025.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of In Dance.
Clarissa Rivera Dyas (she/they) is a dance & movement artist, performer, and creator with roots in the SF Bay Area, Ohlone Land. She centers her artistic practice through the truthfulness of improvisation, investigating the intersection of their black + asian lineage and queerness, and the belief that movement is a spiritual practice as a conduit of change. She is a co-conspirator with RUPTURE. In 2024, they were awarded an ImPulsTanz danceWEB Scholarship and were named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” for their work as a freelance dancer and choreographer. You can see Clarissa’s work upcoming in ROT and the Black Choreographers Festival.
ainsley e. tharp’s work is experimental, feminine but not very ladylike, fixated on failure as protest, and informed by improvisation as play, impermanence as study, and mess making as necessity. She is a queer white interdisciplinary artist and witch working in between and with fringe subcultures rooted in the Bay Area. Her work is inspired by antiracism, proto feminism, and anarchist principles and practices. ainsley’s artistic background is in the field of experimental dance, visual art, video art, and projection design. She works towards creating and organizing low-income accessible art access spaces in the Bay Area.
