"Each city has its own fingerprint of style and story. However, here in the Mission, in San Francisco, I see a level of Cultura that inspires the world."
-Carlos Santana

FIRST ELEMENT:  BACKGROUND

Sean San Jose, Program Director at Intersection for the Arts and co-founder of Campo Santo, leads a team of musicians, dancers, visual artists and performers in an exploration of Street Art inspired by San Francisco's Mission District. With this project, we want to blur the space between gallery, theatre and the street - proposing new possibilities for the performance experience! The goal is to celebrate an innovative and ever-evolving form that challenges boundaries of ownership, space and social agency.  Inspired by work that sheds light on often dark and dangerous places, we also want to celebrate the way that art can provide new ways of seeing.

We have commissioned a series of works to interact with the street itself as a way of creating a place-based aesthetic.  First Element will be equal parts architecture, visual art, and story. The sculptural nature of Street Art - this impulse and imagery - will serve as scenography. First Element will be accompanied by a visual arts exhibition programmed by renowned curator, Kevin B. Chen, providing opportunity for cross-fertilization and exchange across disciplines and traditions.

FIRST ELEMENT:  THE BIG EVENT!

It’s Campo Santo’s First Element happy hour and mobile theater project.  We bring you a one-of-a-kind live music and theater experience – on wheels! ONE NIGHT ONLY.  An intimate street art survey around Intersection's neighborhood of downtown/mid-Market San Francisco, featuring original graffiti pieces, performances on the street and in a tour bus, plus full-blown after-party. It’s the dance party that will take Campo Santo’s Fellowship at the de Young Museum to the next level, through the roof and off the walls.

Directed by Sean San Jose and featuring:

• Felonious (Keith Pinto, Tommy Shepherd, Dan Wolf)
• Wonway Posibul (Juan Amador)
• Traci Tolmaire
• Campo Santo Street Team (Christine Jamlig, Ricky Saenz, Kelly Strickland)
• Visual artists Evan Bissell, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Ricardo Richey, Favianna Rodriguez
• Campo Santo designers Alejandro Acosta and Tanya Orellana
• Mix'd Ingdnts (all female dance crew from Oakland)
• Hot Pocket (latin funk band from San Francisco)
• and much more!

ABOUT CAMPO SANTO

“Campo Rules! Spend an evening with Campo Santo and you’ll see why this troupe is electrifying local theater. Campo Santo, resident theater company for San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, creates the kind of living, breathing theater that makes you want to stand up and shout.”
San Francisco Magazine, J.H. Tompkins

Founded in 1996, Campo Santo cultivates playwrights, fiction writers and poets to work in an intimate, interactive setting to create new theatrical experiences that reflect and reinvent our society. We are widely regarded for our participatory community-based development process and for the unique success we have had nurturing a very loyal, young and diverse constituency. Powerful writers and equally intense actors play a vital part in Campo Santo’s success, since 1996. One of our greatest successes has been our ability to create long term relationships with internationally known writers who are leaders in developing work that is broadening and diversifying the American voice – including Jimmy Santiago Baca, Philip Kan Gotanda, Jessica Hagedorn, Naomi Iizuka, Denis Johnson, and Octavio Solis, to name a few.

“It’s fair to say Campo Santo’s output has been nothing short of awesome.” -Robert Avila, San Francisco Bay Guardian