SALTA at the Starline Social Club
By SALTA Collective artists
SALTA is a feminist collective of dancers based in Oakland, California. For the past four years, we have curated a free monthly performance series in the East Bay that takes place in a different venue each month, collaborating with an ever-expanding network of spaces, communities, and performers. Admission to SALTA shows is always a non-monetary donation to the free bar and boutique, where everyone eats, drinks, and shops for free. This non-commercial context frees us to be inclusive, experimental, and eccentric in our curation.
We curate monthly events that offer an informal, inclusive space for people to show and interface with performance. The structure of our events is often loose, and the aesthetic is DIY. Our primary focus is supporting the artists we invite to perform and leaving room for audience to take in the work and participate in variable ways. Our curatorial style embraces the dirty, the punk, the sensuous and surprising, the unfinished and unravelling. We want to create a fertile ground for wild things to grow. Motivated by a scarcity of venues for artists to show experimental work and a growing weariness for traditional models for presenting dance, we offer a platform that we ourselves would want to participate in, a platform that is not concerned with hosting totally planned, precisely executed, and cooly managed dance performances. Sometimes it’s successful, and at other times, a total failure. Prior to working together as SALTA, none of us understood ourselves as curators, and we are not entirely comfortable with the role now. The process of curating SALTA events has become a creative practice as well as an organizing effort.
We let ourselves not know what SALTA is entirely. As a collective, we try things out as experiments, leaving space for the project to grow and morph. In addition to putting on our event series, we have collaboratively made and performed a dance with all seven of us. We have hosted and performed in queer burlesque nights. We have an ongoing reading group, where we discuss articles and interviews. We make zines. We value spending time together, talking about dance, politics, and friendship. We vibe and see what happens.
SALTA is not a dance company, nor do we wish to be. Our collective form-of-life cannot be held by or slotted into the structure of not-for-profit corporation. We don’t want dance lyfe to be as regulated, boring, and administered as corporations necessarily are. We live within a capitalist world and interface with it as everyone does, but we are ready for it to be over. We are ready for the unleashing of unicorns to shoot dance rainbows over everything and trample all the tentacles of the colonialist, capitalist hetero-patriarchy. We think that dance companies are part of the old world. In the world to come, no one would have to have a dance company or write grants or apply for residencies. Because there would be no separation between the world of the choreographic and the world of laborious drudgery.
We like dance. It nourishes us and gives us strength. We need this strength to grow into fierce unicorn warriors. Performance is in many ways an excuse to be together. We hope this coming together is the seed of a much larger process of coming together. Towards the ultimate dance floor.
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