OccupyForum presents... Pearl Ubuñgen with percussionist Dave Mihaly in Sacred City Loss,

OccupyForum presents…
Sacred City: On Loss, Betrayal
and the Art of Gentrification
with Pearl Ubuñgen accompanied by Dave Mihaly percussion

Improvising with images, sonic sources, writings, dreams and daily heartbreak, choreographer/cultural activist Pearl Ubuñgen reflects on the conflicted role artists and arts organizations play as bewildered accomplices in the gentrification-based activity of cultural erasure. Inspired by the subtle presence and memory of her mentor, the late great Master Artist Ed Mock (1938 -1986). Ubuñgen performs an illustrated case-study weaving a sorrowful, soulful lament drawn from the terrain of today’s late phase, hyper-gentrified San Francisco.

Sacred City is an ongoing series of community-based projects in which Ubuñgen subverts disciplinary borders and offers activism, the arts and the dharma as interrelated practices. In September 2016, she curated a day-long retreat at the Shambhala Meditation Center of San Francisco, which brought together dharma practitioners, local performance artists, and advocates/organizers for tenants rights, the unhoused, and victims of police violence. The gathering featured the family of Luis Gongora-Pat who was murdered by SFPD on 7 April 2016 at Shotwell and 19th Streets in SF’s Mission District.

Pearl Ubuñgen is a fourth generation pilipina american who grew up in San Francisco’s Fillmoreand Richmond districts. Ubuñgen is known for her commitment to community engagement and groundbreaking innovations in the field of community-based work. During the 1990’s she worked with youth in the South of Market and Tenderloin neighborhood where her studio was located in the school building of St. Boniface Church. This year marks the 20-year anniversary of “Take Me to the Tenderloin, Now! (1997), created in collaboration with social documentary street photographer Ken Miller.

During the dot-com era, Ms. Ubuñgen was displaced from her rehearsal and living spaces in San Francisco and relocated to Boulder, Colorado. While in Boulder, Ubuñgen served briefly as Chair
of Performing Arts at Naropa University where she designed and implemented an innovative interdisciplinary BFA in Performance (2002-2006). During this time ubuñgen deepened and enriched her study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism with Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, lineage holder of Shambhala Buddhism. Ubuñgen now serves as the Northern California Regional Chopon (Master of Offerings) for Shambhala Buddhist rituals and is a Director of Shambhala Training and Meditation Instructor.

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