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San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Resilience, resistance and two tour de force solos open ODC Theater's State of Play festival
Like so many arts organizations, the Mission District's ODC Theater has reason to feel dispirited by the current autocratic regime. In May, the groundbreaking venue lost $15,000 in funding for its annual State of Play Festival when the Trump administration rescinded National Endowment for the Arts grants already appropriated by Congress. Keep in mind that this significant budget item is just a small fraction of the approximately $1 million in total funding the ODC/Dance troupe and its many campus programs have lost as other funders shifted priorities. On Thursday, July 31, after a low-energy start, 2025's State of Play found its drive. Between a sparsely attended first performance and the evening's middle offering, the lobby filled with many of the city's most compelling dancers and their adventurous fans, eager to see what the night's three shows of experimental work would bring. Their persistence was rewarded by Oakland dancer Gizeh Muñiz's solo, 'Fishblod' — the kind of bizarrely riveting, unclassifiable movement art that makes such avant-garde festivals necessary and life-giving. Presenting eight artists in total for 2025, State of Play curators Zaquia Mahler Salinas and Maurya Kerr have categorized Muñiz as a 'Curious Creator,' presenting a work just 30-minutes long. (State of Play 'Risk Takers' offer hourlong works, while the 'Experimenters' give work-in-progress studio showings.) 'Fishblod,' which repeats Sunday, may be short in duration, but it is large in impact, a master class in tension. As you enter the theater, the dancer's limp body, clad in jeans and a hoodie, hangs from a rig with a scrim of glowing orange behind, human wreckage in almost imperceptible suspended motion. Kevin Lo's sound editing washes the air with a distorted soundscape of pounding waves, and Muñiz reaches for another rope and pulls tighter, tighter — when will she have to let go? Muñiz studied dance in Mexico before working with legendary San Francisco dancer Kathleen Hermesdorf, and rigorous, committed authenticity defines her every millimeter of movement. On the ground, she rolls and flops, but in ways that make you rethink the origami of the body. She feels her way through time with such intentionality that tiny motions — the wigglings of toes, a slow slide of her fingers on the floor — both command your attention and lead you subconsciously into the next section of her motion experiments, so that the progression of the solo feels fated. Subtle and then shocking lighting design by Erin Riley and Mary Clare Blake-Booth leads to a finale of mesmerizing rebounding limbs. Muñiz's artist statement says that her work is 'rooted in somatics, preverbal memories and evoking a sense of remembrance.' I cannot tell you what 'Fishblod' is about, exactly, but I can say that like Muñiz's duet 'Auiga' — performed at CounterPulse in 2024 and one of the year's best Bay Area dance performances — it feels primordial in a weirdly comforting way. The rocky start to the night came with drag artist Black Benatar's 'Black Benatar vs. the Cistem,' a 'Law and Order'-style trial of the health care system that involved a ruffly ovary costume attached to a puppet cyst. The deeply personal piece excoriated the pervasive racism faced by Black women in pain, but the show needs a lot of work finding its rhythm. (Also, dramaturgically it's missing a crucial character development bridge to its defiantly joyful ending.) The final show of opening night was a tour de force. Former Urban Bush Women member Wanjiru Kamuyu brought her 2022 solo 'An Immigrant's Story,' fiercely reenacting the jeering faced by a teenage Kenyan transplant to conservative small-town America, then widening the scope to include a panoply of immigrant experiences, even that of a Russian exiled to Sweden. Kamuyu's writing is tightly crafted, her acting is spectacular, and her dancing is radiant. 'An Immigrant's Story' repeats at 6 p.m. Friday, followed by a condensed version of Bay Area dancer Molly Rose-Williams' 'Crush,' a hilarious solo I saw (and loved) in a previous iteration. Other artists on the festival lineup include Leila Awadallah, a Palestinian dancer who divides her time between Minneapolis and Beirut, and the antic New York duo Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein. The resistance continues. In the lobby on Thursday, ODC Theater creative director Chloë L. Zimberg was frank but undaunted about the countercultural work the organization is undertaking in the wake of funding cuts. The theater's calling, she said, is to cultivate community members who will 'take a risk on seeing the unknown,' an endeavor the organization began two years ago with the ODC Theater Art Club, which pairs performances with mixers and discussions. 'We didn't know the funding cuts would happen so fast, and in such large dollar amounts,' Zimberg said. 'But we knew it was time to ask individuals to step up.'
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Florida Supreme Court halts state Bar's role in appointments to ABA policymaking panel
As part of an ongoing conservative backlash against the American Bar Association, Florida's highest court has asked The Florida Bar to stop "making appointments to the ABA House of Delegates," its policymaking body. In a June 12 letter to Bar executive director Joshua Doyle, Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos G. Muñiz said "many of the ABA's policies take positions on contested political and policy disputes over which reasonablepeople can and do disagree." Muñiz, who was an official in President Donald Trump's first administration, added that the "Bar strives to avoid entangling itself, even indirectly, in contentious policy debates" and its "practice of making appointments to the ABA's House of Delegates is inconsistent with that goal." The Florida Bar operates as an arm of the Florida Supreme Court to regulate the state's more than 114,000 lawyers. The agency "will revise our policies and procedures as directed," a spokesperson said. A request for comment is pending with the ABA. Muñiz's letter came two weeks after the Trump administration's decision to get rid of the ABA's longstanding special access to review federal judicial candidates. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi called the ABA an "activist organization" that is no longer "a fair arbiter of nominees' qualifications" and "favor(s) nominees put forth by Democratic administrations." The ABA was founded in 1878 with a "commitment to set the legal and ethical foundation for the American nation." For decades, it has reviewed candidates for federal judgeships, positions that are lifetime appointments. "The ABA's steadfast refusal to fix the bias in its ratings process, despite criticism from Congress, the Administration, and the academy, is disquieting," Bondi said. Muñiz was Bondi's chief of staff when she was Florida's elected attorney general. Moreover, the court in March released an administrative order to review whether those who want to practice law in Florida should continue to be required to have a diploma from an ABA-accredited law school. The justices, who decide who gets to be a practicing attorney in the state, are "interested in considering the merits of ... continued reliance on the ABA and whether changes to the (state's attorney admission) rules are warranted." The order creates a workgroup chaired by one of its former members, Ricky L. Polston, now with the Shutts & Bowen law firm. ABA complaints: Lawyers' group fuels Republicans' ire over its negative reviews of Trump judicial picks The ABA's lower ratings for several of the Trump administration's judicial nominees have fed into opposition from the political right, explained Charles Zelden, a history and political science professor at Nova Southeastern University. In Zelden's view, Trump wanted "ideological cohesion" and the ABA wanted the best judges, causing the conflict. In Trump's first term, the president often ignored the ABA when choosing judges. And the association is known to set the standard for "cohesion, predictability and a legal system that operated in a coherent and legal manner," Zelden said. The Supreme Court's letter, he added, demonstrates how much it has turned to the right under Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed five of the seven current justices, including Muñiz. The letter made clear that it represents all the justices but one: Jorge Labarga. Labarga was appointed by then-Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican who became an independent before becoming a Democrat. He was first appointed as a trial court judge by the state's last Democratic governor, the late Lawton Chiles. And he's often the sole dissenter on substantive opinions. Muñiz's letter to the Bar is "a very Trumpian, MAGA way of viewing the events," Zelden said, referring to conservative antipathy toward the ABA. This reporting content is supported by a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA Today Network-Florida First Amendment reporter Stephany Matat is based in Tallahassee, Fla. She can be reached at SMatat@ On X: @stephanymatat. This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Florida Bar told to stop naming delegates to ABA policymaking panel
