Aperture Dances Into Life's Unknowns

Mark Andrew Wilson

Aperture

​Aperture -- it's that setting on your SLR camera you pretend to understand. Actually, it's pretty simple. An aperture is a hole or a gap, and it's a fitting title for the world premiere performance by the Samantha Giron Dance Project that opens tonight (Friday) at Kunst-Stoff Arts. This Aperture explores the cause and effect of breaking away from tradition -- a literal presentation of the gap between what one knows and what one will discover.

The dance troupe describes it as "a contemporary meets street dance, electronics meets strings, father/daughter collaboration." The artist, Samantha Giron, was inspired by her father's unexpected trajectory. Keith Giron, an Apache and Hispanic American, was a first-generation high school graduate and left his low-income family to attend an Ivy League college, effectively paving a very different path for himself and his family than they would have otherwise known. Giron asks a common question through a unique focal point of the Hispanic American perspective (cue the Clash): Should I stay or should I go?

Samantha Giron is influenced by the underground electronic community and often collaborates with art makers around the world resulting in performances at Burning Man or 1015 Folsom and more common dance destinations such as CounterPULSE or ODC. Her company utilizes a sequential articulation of body parts, creating little pieces like words in a sentence that string together into an oral history as potent as a short story and memorable as an epic tale.

Through the company's signature style and an original score of collaged sound bits (including 1950s and '60s music along with string and electronic elements), Aperture is sure to summon the pleasure and pain of our own life decisions.

Aperture starts at 8:30 p.m. tonight (Friday) and continues Fridays and Saturdays through Jan. 21 at Kunst-Stoff Arts, 1 Grove (at Market), S.F. Admission is $18.