Contraband, Oracle
Theater Artaud
Contraband is an eight-member, San Francisco-based, interdisciplinary performance collective that boasts of its “rowdy dancing.” It annexed a social context and power for its work several years ago with a series of performances in the Gartland Pit, the politically charged site of an unsolved crime in San Francisco’s Mission district in which arson destroyed a hotel for low-income residents and 12 occupants died in the blaze. I, for one, carried the memory of Contraband’s provocative performance there into the Theater Artaud for the company’s recent premiere of Oracle, presented by American