Daily Inspiration: Meet Annie Kahane

Today we’d like to introduce you to Annie Kahane.

Hi Annie, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up around a lot of music and books and theater. We didn’t have a tv so I played outside and read and wrote a lot. I wrote poems and stories, drew pictures, loved dancing, and then went to an arts high school as a theater student. I spent most of my twenties trying to be a professional dancer. At the same time, I was always writing and going to poetry slams. My creative work has not (so far) been lucrative, so I’ve also worked a bunch of day jobs to support myself. I’ve always had a hard time specializing, and in retrospect, I think I started making my own creative work to resolve the unrest I felt about where to direct my focus.

About ten years ago, a bunch of things in my life fell apart at the same time. As I emerged from that crisis, one of the loudest messages was that I wanted  my life to be about making art. I’d been working a full-time administrative job and was miserable. An opportunity appeared (as opportunities tend to when we get clear about what we want) to use a black box theater for free for a week, and that catalyzed what would become Alive & Well Productions. I put on a show with two friends, mostly as an experiment in form. That project combined the different disciplines I’d been playing with since childhood. This led to the work I make now, which is mostly performance projects that take up a full evening in a theater. In 2022 I earned an MFA in Choreography from UCLA and I currently teach there as a part-time faculty member.

The “how” in “How I got where I am now” is colored by my teachers and collaborators, and by the people I admire. Specifically, John Craven, who taught theater in the ArtQuest program at my high school, José Joaquin Garcia, who taught a class called Theater Experimento at Wavy Gravy’s summer camp, the youth poetry scenes in the Bay Area and Chicago, the Joe Goode Performance Group in San Francisco, Lucky Plush Productions in Chicago, friends I have traded writing with since I was a teenager. All of my collaborators have shared creative material that is braided into my work. Especially at the beginning, what I made was very heavily informed by the people in the room.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I sacrifice a lot financially to continue making elaborate art projects. I rarely break even, and there is so much rejection when asking for funding, or residency space, or opportunities to present work. It definitely feels like swimming up-current, although about 10 years in, I feel like that is starting to shift a little.

I wouldn’t say it’s been a smooth road, but there is an inner peace in living life the way I want to live it.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I work in a lot of different modalities, which can be tricky for people to wrap their heads around in a culture that is obsessed with personal branding. If I had to categorize myself, I would say that I make Dance Theater, but I also write essays and poems and lately have been working in public ritual, film and multimedia performance as well.

Among people who present contemporary dance/performance in proscenium theaters, I think what sets me apart is that I care so much about the audience’s experience. Some of the lineages in which I trained (modern/post-modern dance, contemporary performance, the kind of poetry that gets studied in the academy) prioritize certain aesthetic values over whether the audience is engaged or even over whether the audience has any idea what’s going on. What I mean is that sometimes these forms can be extremely – even smugly – abstract and illegible. I think I am unique because I do employ certain “fine art” aesthetics, but my work is really meant to be understood rather than obscured. I’m proudest when people who do not usually go to the theater tell me they were moved or engaged. I’m proudest when people laugh or cry.

In 2018 I made a piece with life-scale oil portraits (by Poppy Golland) of the performers that moved around the stage with their living subjects. I’m really proud of that idea and the way it looked. I just presented a one-woman show at the SF International Arts Festival that had very large-scale, magical-looking animations (by Ethan Alesch) on two walls. It was a tragedy and a comedy at the same time and I’m proud that the audience laughed and cried. I’m proud when my students express gratitude to me for the space I create as an instructor.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Woof. There are so many. I think most of the lessons I’ve learned have already been articulated by other people. I guess if I had to choose one, I would say it’s that everything changes. Whether the moment is ecstatic, peaceful, or excruciating, it will not last forever. And I think that knowing that helps to experience life with more surrender and less fight.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.aliveandwellproductions.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alive_and_well_productions/
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/saltandbubbles

Image Credits
Photos: Laura Cohen, Brooke Porter, Cat Ganson, Joshua Sandler Portraits: Poppy Golland Performers: Bianca Stephanie Mendoza, Linda Phung, Dominique Hargrove, Courtney King, Kyle Limin, Jhia Jackson, Alexandria Diaz De Fato, Annie Kahane