Sanctuary Spaces – CounterPulse Festival 2025

Join MovingGround on Sunday September 14th 3:30-6:30pm for CounterPulse Fest! We will be hosting Sanctuary Spaces: a workshop and dialogue.

The Sanctuary Spaces team will co-facilitate this workshop, utilizing arts-based, interactive, experiments, investigating our relationship with Sanctuary and creating safe spaces for humans. The following dialogue circle will be centered on questions the Sanctuary Spaces project centers, and the shared research uncovered within the afternoon workshop.

Workshop description: The Sanctuary Spaces team will co-facilitate this workshop, as we investigate our relationship with Sanctuary and creating safe spaces for humans, altogether. Participants will move through several locations and interactive, site-responsive experiments, including: an opening group score for warm-up and community building, followed by dialogue, movement, visual art and design based improvisations, and an interactive poetry + visual art experience focused on cultivating sanctuary through found language and “felt-sense”, [utilizing source text from Amanda Williamson’s Back to the Dance Itself]. Participants will play a vital role in the experiments and experiences created, as active researchers with the facilitators.

Dialogue description: This dialogue will include a guided community report back from the workshop participants, to share out the live, participatory research that was engaged during the workshop. We will also center some of our project questions and research, like : How has your life (or lives of your community members) been endangered due to current governmental or social policies and rhetoric? What spaces in your communities provide safety for you now? What would an ideal sanctuary space look like for you, given your identities and values? The nature of the dialogue may shift, based on the live and participatory interactions in the moment, in the space that we will all be creating.

Collaborating Artists: Krista DeNio, Maxine Flasher-Duzgunes, Jayden Torrey, Lisa Calderon, Deb’e Taylor, Bhumi Patel

MovingGround produces collaborative, interdisciplinary performance experiences using site-specific and audience-interactive models. We build community, facilitate dialogue across differences and create common ground.

Krista DeNio (she/her) is an interdisciplinary choreographer, director, performer, writer and educator. She facilitates creative projects based in the principles and practices of ensemble-based theater. Her work is based in embodied experience, social justice, civic engagement and human-to-human interaction. She is the Artistic Director of MovingGround

Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş (she/her) is a Turkish-American poet, dance artist, and educator engaging with the disciplines of choreography and visual art as tools for grasping poetic language. She is passionate about disability justice in a world where she’s seen firsthand how the most intelligent, kind, and vulnerable people are neglected and denied care. She is the founder of Marin’s Youth Poet Laureate Program, Area Coordinator of Marin Poets in the Schools, and a 2025 DrawBridge Community Artist.

Jayden Torrey (He/They) is an emerging multifaceted artist hailing from the vibrant heart of Los Angeles. With a career that spans over seven years in the arts, he seamlessly weaves together his passions for painting, music, and acting to create a rich tapestry of creative expression. Jayden’s work often delves into themes of mental health, veteran support, and LGBTQIA+, reflecting a deep engagement with the world around him. With his warm spirit and genuine kindness, Jayden continues to inspire those around him, championing creativity and connection in every endeavor he pursues. He believes that art, in all its forms, has the power to heal, unite, and transform lives.

Lisa Aurora Calderon is a community organizer, artist and activist.  Lisa has inspired artists of all ages and over many genres to ignite in a collective passion for freedom of expression and the right to enjoy the privileges of adulthood and fun and what is queer and optimistic.  That said, Lisa is also a brutalist in her forming of networks and utilizing resources and relationships to build what comes from her and the artists she works with.   When we are being taken seriously and take others seriously we can endeavor to bring great ideas to life.  We explore our evolved selves and we create in others a sense of wonder. 

Deb’e Taylor is a dancer, actor, taiko drummer and teacher who both creates her own work and performs with Dance Brigade, Moving Ground, and Maikaze Daiko, among others. She has performed and taught internationally with David Rousseve/Reality, Dance Berlin and more. Deb’e co-taught and collaborated in creating work with Anna Deavere Smith at Stanford University. She toured as a dancer/actor with the National Theater of the Deaf and was on the faculty of their Professional Summer School. She performed and co-directed with Fairmount Theater of the Deaf, winning awards at the Brno Deaf Theater Festival in Czechoslovakia, and worked with Tyst Teater in Sweden. Deb’e is a dancer in the documentary film Call of Life about mass extinction of species. Deb’e teaches Improvisation/Composition and Contemporary Dance at Alonzo King LINES Ballet School. She teaches and creates Taiko/Dance pieces for Social Justice themed performances for Dance Mission’s Youth/Grrrl Brigade programs. She offers public workshops in Contemporary Dance and Improvisation/Composition. Deb’e is also a certified Gyrokinesis teacher and ASL/English interpreter.

Movement artist and writer Bhumi B Patel directs pateldanceworks and is a queer, desi, home-seeker, and science fiction choreographer (she/they). In its purest form, she creates performance works as a love letter to her ancestors. While Patel has trained in Western forms, she seeks to create movement outside of white models of dance at the intersection of embodied research and generating new futures, using improvisational practice for voice and body as a pursuit for liberation. Patel seeks liberation through dancing, choreographing, curating, teaching, and scholarship and attends to her desires to create nourishing community spaces.