SAFEhouse Arts has launched a new format for live events at their venue located at 145 Eddy Street in San Francisco. The next group of RAW artists put their time under lockdown to good use. Rafi Barrow, Francesca Cipponeri, Hannah Young, Kat Lin, Sawako Gannon and Bruna Gill are ready to begin anew with live performances!

Larissa Archer will screen one of her award-winning dance films made during the pandemic. They all share a passion for dance and were chosen for their talents to get to the heart of what makes us human. They all bring a spark of creative energy to RAW, which in turn provides the venue for rehearsals, videotaping and performances, plus mentorship, marketing and production support!

It turns out that two of the RAW artists merge art and advocacy. Francesca Cipponeri has been involved in human trafficking-relief work since 2016. Her RAW performance is dedicated to a beautiful, spunky young woman who has survived the horrors of trafficking. Rafi Barrow exemplies the young artist who balks at being labeled disabled. Rafi is a queer, trans, multiply-disabled, white Jewish femme. They are ardent about making the arts accessible and facilitating solidarity between all of the chronically ill, neurodivergent, and mobility- and sensory-disabled communities they are a part of.

Rafi Barrow points out: “As dance has mainly been constructed as the purview of the nondisabled, white, thin, and cisgender dancer, our marginalized bodies are often originally misread as illegible due to their dissonance with the mainstream vernaculars of movement.  However, I argue that through this inability to have meaning made out of our bodies succinctly, our movement can demand a different level of engagement from the audience with possibility for transformation to a site of love, the “I-Thou” utterance.”