Porter
Porter uses the history of West Oakland rail workers to create a dance considering the widespread poetics of history, belonging, change and invention. Using physical themes of locomotion, coming, going, union, and isolation, Porter examines the aftermath of abundance, embodies the green that bursts upward out of rubble, and imitates cycles of prosperity and destitution. Particularly inspired by the now uninhabitable 16th Street Train Station in West Oakland, Blind Tiger imagines the stories inside those walls as physical fables. This lonely relic in West Oakland was completed in 1912 to accommodate the city’s surging population in the wake of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and now has green growing out of every crack in the cement. We await its future opulence.