As CounterPulse celebrates 30 years of arts KQED highlights this Tenderloin arts organzation’s past, present, and future.
In 1991, three friends—Keith Hennessey, Michael “Med-O” Whitson, and Todd Eugene—co-founded an underground performance venue on Divisadero Street known as 848 Community Space. A hub for body-based art and activism, including dance, pagan sex rituals, and performance art, 848 was a place where queer and sex-positive San Francisco could gather, perform, and create among allies. Born during a time when AIDS was still a full-blown public health crisis—a portent of pandemics to come—848 provided a safe haven of radical access and acceptance to its artists and audiences alike.
“One of the powerful aspects of 848 was that people lived there,” recalls Rick Darnell, CounterPulse’s current Associate Director of Neighborhood Arts, who performed at 848 in the early years with his own dance company—the High Risk Group. “People waking, making art, sleeping, and loving there really blessed the space…truly epic, authentic, vision-grade stuff.”
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