The Flow Show

 

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Next Production

The Fifth Annual Flow Show / San Francisco

When: April 5 – 7, 2013
Where: Dance Mission Theater
3316 24th Street at Mission
San Francisco, CA

Tickets: $20 via Brown Paper Tickets

About the Show

The Flow Show’s mission is to present the Flow Arts in a dance-theater setting. Most opportunities for Flow artists to do what they do for an audience lie in the context of circus, where the acts are focused on the “Ta-Da!” moments, in go-go-type acts accompanying bands or DJs, or in entertainment at parties. The performances in these contexts end up being trick-based, and essentially after-thoughts to the main event. The dance-theater setting gives the performers an opportunity to stretch what they do in new, artistically expressive directions for an audience that is there specifically to see them Flow. The show aims to model how Flow Arts performances can be shaped, and how the Flow Arts can be featured in the context of dance.

Highlights from the 2012 production

History of the show

The Flow Show started as a lark for founder Khan Wong. He had witnessed too many performances where the spinner or juggler’s act was background dressing or a side-act to a “main” event. These performances included fire shows where even though the performer was front and center, it was moreso the fire that the audience saw. He wondered what a stage show would be like, where the focus was on the spinner, their skill, their choreography, their expression, and where the performances were presented as a form of dance-theater.

Thus a call was put out “Hey everybody let’s put on a show…”  Many in the San Francisco spinning community stepped up to participate. That first year, the show happened to fall the weekend before Firedrums, when a lot of the brightest lights in the international spinning world were already arriving in town for the annual camp-out/firejam/marathon geek out session. It was a rare alignment, and a crowd estimated to be three times the legal capacity of the venue showed up and most were turned away. The response by those who made it into the show was rapturous, and it was clear at the end of that first night that something bigger than a one-off show was born.