In 2015, after six years of dancing professionally in the United States and Canada, Felicia McBride Guerra decided to give her lifelong dream of dancing in Europe a shot. She scored nine auditions with companies from Nuremberg to Basel.
During the second audition with Danish Dance Theater in Copenhagen, McBride Guerra broke her foot. That injury put an abrupt stop to her tour and led her back to Texas where she grew up. After some time in Austin she resettled in San Antonio to establish MESH, an arts organization that brings artists of different disciplines together for pop-up performance events.
Since 2018, MESH has presented six events involving musicians, poets, dancers and DJs, with familiar names including jazz pianist Aaron Prado and former San Antonio poet laureate Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson. The seventh MESH installment takes place Sunday at 6 p.m. at MBS Fitness yoga studio and art gallery.
Creative overlaps
The one-night-only event will feature three paired artists and a trio. McBride Guerra will dance with her husband Brandon Guerra, a jazz drummer who performs regularly with Doc Watkins at JazzTX, and Nick Mery, a filmmaker and musician who released an album with Guerra in 2022.
Choreographer Ivette Logan will dance alongside Kiona Reese, a vocalist from Tennessee, dancer Sarah Starkweather will perform with Justin Boyd, a sound artist who teaches new media and sculpture at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Sanderson will perform with multi-genre dancer Albert Lamar Corbett.
Boyd met Guerra and McBride Guerra at a Garrett T. Capps and NASA Country show, the band Boyd performs with on modular synthesizer. Boyd’s spouse had taken dance lessons with McBride Guerra, and Guerra performed on a solo record Boyd produced in 2021, so the three were already familiar with each others’ work.
McBride Guerra chooses most of the artist pairings for MESH, though some artists will suggest collaborators to work with. For the Sunday event, McBride Guerra paired Boyd and Starkweather, whom Boyd was not previously familiar with.
“It gets me very excited to try it to see what I can do” with the chance pairing, Boyd said. He said what he finds interesting is finding “areas of overlap in both of our creative pursuits, then seeing if we could bring those two things … together for a six-to-eight-minute piece.”
Outside the algorithm
Sanderson performed previously for MESH in November 2022 alongside dancer and choreographer Tanesha Payne. She said the events are immersive experiences for the audiences, as artists set up and perform throughout the MBS space.
On Sunday, Sanderson said, “we’re going to center ourselves in different spaces in the room and then activate, and you’re just kind of along for the ride as an audience. But I think it gets spiritual. And I think it gets cerebral too because it’s giving you a lot to process in that moment.”
Sanderson credited McBride Guerra for expanding the diversity of arts offerings in San Antonio, which she said is “known for certain styles of dance, and certain presentations of culture. But this is really getting into a great interdisciplinary space.”
And, she said, the immersion and immediacy of the pop-up events means that “if you miss it, you miss it. You’ve got to be there to experience it in person. … The buzz of electricity that happens when something artistic is being birthed, it’s really, really a cool thing to be a part of.”
Mery echoed Sanderson’s perspective on needing to be there to experience the true nature of spontaneous collaboration, rather than checking it out later on social media.
“That’s really appealing in this world … where everything is created for the algorithm,” Mery said. “This is living outside the algorithm.”
Admission to MESH is $15 at the door.
