Porter
Porter uses the singular history of West Oakland rail workers to create a dance considering the widespread poetics of history, belonging, change and invention. Porter is an abstract story about the elusiveness of change and what is left behind after all that has rushed in slowly begins to disappear. 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 inclusivity. 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.