Above: Photos of Julie Tolentino and The Hard Corps. Courtesy of Julie Tolentino, 2017 Community Engagement Resident Artist.

Community Engagement Residency

Since its beginning, The Bridge Project has had a focus on lineage. The Community Engagement Residency cultivates a different type of lineage: the lateral lines that sustain creative communities. CER provides an opportunity for select artists, especially those historically marginalized, to engage in a year-long project with their communities. Core values of the residency include equity, dialogue, process, artist autonomy, the intersection of art-making and activism, and building relationships among artists.

*Photo (L to R): jose e. abad by Robbie Sweeny; Stephanie Hewett by Amina El Kabbany; Andreina Maldonado by Cynthia Valeska*

2021 - 2022 Lead Artists

jose e. abad & Stephanie Hewett
to be like the river

Andreina Maldonado
Our Work / Our Dignity

Photo (L to R): Performance Primers logo created and photographed by Zoe Donnellycolt, designed by Claire Rabkin; Jarrel Phillips by Michole "Micholiano" Forks

2020 - 2021 Lead Artists

Performance Primers
Hannah Ayasse, Chibueze Crouch, Zoe Donnellycolt

Jarrel Phillips
Living Folklore

2019-2020 Community Engagement Residency: Lead Artists (clockwise, starting at top left): David Herrera, Yayoi Kambara, and the BIPOC Performing Artist Hive, led by randy reyes and Daria Garina. — 2019-2020 Community Engagement Residency:
*Lead Artists (clockwise, starting at top left): David Herrera, Yayoi Kambara, and the BIPOC Performing Artist Hive, led by randy reyes and Daria Garina.*

2019-2020 Lead Artists

David Herrera
LatinXtensions: Latinx Choreographic Mentorship Program

Yayoi Kambara
Aesthetic Shift: A Dance Lab for Equitable Practices

randy reyes and Daria Garina
BIQTPOC Performing Artist Hive

2018-2019 Lead Artist
Gerald Casel
Dancing Around Race

Members of the artist cohort for Gerald Casel’s Dancing Around Race were: Raissa Simpson, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sammay Dizon, Yayoi Kambara and David Herrera. Dancing Around Race included monthly gatherings of the cohort with invited guests and a series of three Public Gatherings that invited the community into the cohort’s process. Guests at public gatherings included Aruna D’Souza, Barbara Bryan, and Thomas DeFrantz.

“For this residency, I will be engaging with artists as co-interrogators to look closely at the role race plays in dance production and presentation. We will ask how our work as artists functions in society and how the communities we engage with are considered, internalized, and reflected through our work. Employing a 'systems thinking' approach, I hope to connect with sectors of the Bay Area dance ecology and beyond to engage in invigorated dialogue to better understand how all are interconnected.”

- Gerald Casel

*Above: Julie Tolentino by Hillary Goidell in Tolentino's bury.me.fiercely*

2017-2018 Lead Artist
Julie Tolentino
The Hard Corps & a.u.l.e.

Performance artist Julie Tolentino was the first lead artist in The Bridge Project’s Community Engagement Residency. Her year-long residency combined group studio practice, solo practice, and performance. Tolentino navigated among these three modes throughout the year, allowing each to inform the other. Invited artists of Tolentino’s artist cohort included Larry Arrington, Maurya Kerr, Xandra Ibarra, and Amara Tabor Smith.

Questions that Tolentino held throughout her residency included, in her words:

What is and who offers sanctuary?

What do I dare need?

How do we work within the wide abstract of words, worlds and of the ongoing stratification of race, sex, gender, and class?

Am I able to facilitate a space of the unknown – that includes the vulnerability of being part of the group?

How can I produce artist and audience agency through such methods as optimistic refusal, aesthetic geometry, awkward affect, and time-based discovery?

What matters to (each of) us?

What is my role with or for each artist? Do these interactions constitute community-building?

The Community Engagement Residency is made possible with support from the California Arts Council Artists in Communities Program Grant.