About the work
Alma Esperanza Cunningham creates work that explores form, memory, and sensation. Her work highlights the images and ideas that are most important to her. "I make abstract work that distills the human experience into an image or moment that appears and disappears. The work always celebrates femininity in all ways and all forms. I like to play with and juxtapose ideas of beauty and power. Creating opportunities for the viewer to reflect and reimagine new pathways of perception,"
Alma's BIO
Alma Esperanza Cunningham is a mother, choreographer, and public school teacher in San Francisco. While living in New York, Alma's work was presented at Movement Research, Joyce Soho, Dixon Place, and Dance Theater Workshop's Fresh Tracks (Lively Arts). In San Francisco, her work has been presented at the ODC Theater, Cowell Theater, Z Space, and Yerba Buena Gardens. She has been in residence at ODC, Margaret Jenkin's CHIME, CUNY Purchase dance initiative, and Safehouse AIRspace. She has been a guest choreographer at the University of San Francisco's Dance Department and received a Bay Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery Award (GOLDIE) in dance. Alma teaches solo composition workshops to adult dancers; she has also been teaching dance and dance making classes to children in the Tenderloin through the Tenderloin Achievement Group and Safehouse Arts. Alma is a feminist, queer bicultural second gen Latina artist trying to make work that speaks to the complexity and nuances of identity.
-only alma's work turned the proposition of "political" into movement exploration that altered a sense of space and time – and by calling attention to our subjectivity (to our experience of self within an environment) this shifted what we know to be "true" or "real" or "valid" – and i LOVE that approach…. Mari Tollon/Baywatch
"It was Cunningham's choreography that spoke volumes for me. As in the first solo, each chapter mixed recognizable dance vocabulary with unpredictable physical activity and pedestrian tasks. Deconstructing norms and assumptions of what movement can or should 'fit' together, Cunningham seamlessly crafted each phrase into a choreographic stream of consciousness."
Heather Desaulniers, Critical Dance
Current dancer-collaborators: Chloe Nagle, Raina Sacksteder, Kyle Filley, Sophia Grimani
Past collaborators: Lisa Kitchen, Cherami Connelly, Melanie Casey, Rosemary Hannon, Kate Filbert, Abigail Munn, Rebecca Pappas, Phoenicia Pettyjohn, Ronja Ver, Keryn Breiterman Loader, Karla Quintero, Daria Kaufman, Arletta Anderson, Caitlin Daly, Leigh Riley, and Aura Fischbeck