Review: CounterPulse's Groundwork Festival (Cohort A)

CounterPulse and the Curse of the Urban Echo Chamber by Teo Lin-Bianco

At CounterPulse, a nonprofit art center in downtown San Francisco, four dancers on the mainstage in fiery pants begin shaking, bouncing, and knotting themselves into a thick rope. The piece is visceral, disorienting, and, like much of the Groundwork Festival, unapologetically experimental. I felt it in my chest: the tension, the abrasion, the queer volatility the work claimed to explore. But when I turned to the friend I’d brought, someone completely new to contemporary dance, his face was a polite confusion. “So… what was that about?” he asked.

That gap between feeling and understanding is the paradox of experimental performance. For insiders (artists, academics, queers, progressives) spaces like CounterPulse are sanctuaries, where ritual and abstraction speak volumes. But for outsiders, those same gestures often collapse into noise, the meanings locked inside a dialect they don’t speak. In this way, CounterPulse risks embodying not only the radical energy of community, but also the curse of the urban echo chamber.

The Groundwork Festival positions itself as a crucible for new work: “raw but ready for an adventurous audience.” It is, by design, a space for risk. The evening I attended featured two pieces: Edging Sessions by Derek Dimartini and The Axe: a long line of broken white people by Alley Wilde. Both are unapologetically political, both push against convention, and both wrestle with urgent questions about repression, desire, ancestry, and colonialism.

Dimartini’s Edging Sessions is entirely improvised, with dancers tangling and untangling themselves with a heavy rope. Their bodies shook, bounced, bound, and resisted each other over abrasive soundscapes. The piece’s stated aim is to channel “the raw volatility of queer experience” and disrupt linear notions of time. What emerged for me was a visceral sense of tension: queerness as knots, as waves, as friction. The effect is unsettling. The unpredictable movements, in tandem with abrasive soundscapes, create a complex, nail-biting energy. 

Watching the piece, I felt physical tension in my own body, a quick glance at others nearby and it’s clear that this discomfort is shared amongst my fellow audience members.

Wilde’s The Axe took the form of ritual. Beginning with nudity and a bell, the performance moved through extended costuming, ritual drumming, a spoken-word genealogy of whiteness and colonialism, and culminated with the performer cutting down a wooden pole before covering themself in flour. The ritual, which appears to have roots in Pagan Nordic traditions, is a form of self-discovery, a way of confronting one’s ancestry to better understand one’s place in the world.  If Edging Sessions is about binding and release, The Axe is about destruction and reckoning, dismantling structures in both symbolic and literal form.

For me, both pieces “worked” not because I walked away with new information, but because I experienced familiar ideas differently. Repression and colonialism are hardly novel topics in CounterPulse’s orbit, but experimental art doesn’t aim to teach like a textbook. It works through sensation: the tightness of rope, the clang of a hatchet, the awkwardness of prolonged silence. It demands that we feel what we already know.

But here lies the tension. For my friend who had never seen a concert dance performance, the night felt alien. Without the vocabulary of experimental performance, he struggled to find footing. The ideas might have been important, but they were buried beneath a layer of abstraction he couldn’t crack. What moved me, left him bewildered.

This raises a central question: who is this art for?

Experimental art spaces like CounterPulse tend to gather a particular kind of public: college-educated, queer, gender-nonconforming, and politically progressive. But the real function of such audiences goes beyond shared identity markers; they represent a community deeply invested in sustaining alternative cultural infrastructures for performance and beyond. At the same time, CounterPulse not only facilitates experimental performance but also supports community-engaged work with residents of the Tenderloin, positioning itself as a bridge between avant-garde artmaking and local social realities. Their presence validates the kind of art that refuses commercial logic, and their participation helps maintain a fragile but essential network of resistance to mainstream cultural production. In some ways, this is its strength. It offers sanctuary, nourishment, and solidarity for communities that need it. The works themselves, dense with ritual and subversion, can be deeply affirming when staged in front of people who understand and share the values being articulated.

But the flip side is insularity. If everyone in the room already agrees that colonialism is violent, that repression is destructive, that whiteness requires reckoning, what does the performance do beyond reinforcement? The night becomes less about persuasion or education and more about collective affirmation. Ritual for insiders, static for outsiders.

This isn’t to say such work has no value. CounterPulse is a space where artists can test boundaries—form, content, and identity—knowing that the audience meets them with curiosity rather than judgment. That mutual trust between performer and viewer is what allows radical or experimental work to thrive. Radical art incubators like CounterPulse are critical, and marginalized communities deserve to make art without the burden of translating themselves for the mainstream. Yet the echo chamber problem lingers: how do these works reach beyond the faithful? How can experimental performance be both sanctuary and invitation?

Accessibility here doesn’t mean watering down the work. It could mean building bridges: at the end of the performance Wilde encourages audience members to reach out, offering resources, sources, and conversations that extend the work beyond the stage. The piece, then, functions almost like a live, ritualized TED talk, an emotionally demanding performance paired with opportunities for intellectual follow-up.

This matters. It suggests that experimental art can be both visceral and informative, both ritual and resource. While the bulk of the performance may feel inaccessible to someone untrained in the codes of contemporary dance, Wilde’s invitation to continued dialogue opens the door wider. If more experimental artists integrated such gestures into the performance itself through framing, program notes, or post-show engagement, the “outsider” might find a foothold without diminishing the sanctity of the space.

The challenge is balance. If the works are too accessible, they risk losing the experimental edge that makes them radical. If they remain opaque, they risk irrelevance outside the enclave. CounterPulse, with its reputation for experimentation and its commitment to emerging artists, sits squarely inside this paradox.

Walking out of CounterPulse that night, I felt both grateful and uneasy. Grateful to have a space where experimental, radical work thrives in a hostile funding climate. Uneasy because I wondered whether the power of that work can ever extend beyond the circle of those already converted.

I thought back to my friend’s question: “So…what was that about?”. As we talked, I found myself guiding the conversation toward ways of reading experimental performance, how to sit with ambiguity, how to feel instead of decipher. It was a conversation I’ve had before, one that comes from a certain training in art discourse. But it also felt uneasy, as if I were performing a kind of cultural translation I didn’t fully believe in. There’s a tension in that act: the desire to share tools for understanding, while recognizing that those very tools are shaped by privilege, education, and access. In that sense, even in spaces that aspire to openness, interpretation itself can become a boundary, one more layer of mediation between who gets to feel the work and who is expected to explain it.

Experimental art can change how we feel about what we think we know. It can make repression tactile, colonialism ritualistic, identity volatile. But until those feelings can be shared with people who don’t already speak the language, the curse of the echo chamber will persist. CounterPulse is one of many art spaces that is both sanctuary and stage; the challenge ahead is finding ways for these institutions to be both at once.

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Teo Lin-Bianco is a queer dance artist and writer based in San Francisco. They studied dance and performance at UC Berkeley, where their choreographic and academic work began to intertwine. Currently, they serve as co-director of Tether Dance Project, a company committed to interdisciplinary collaboration and embodied storytelling. With a background in circus, gymnastics, and modern dance, Teo brings an intuitive and critical eye to their writing. They are particularly interested in how movement can act as emotional language, cultural archive, and collective memory.