Welcome to the future site of Forgiveness Project online! This will be a broad, inclusive platform for extended community dialogue, interdisciplinary artistic sharing, networking, and connecting around the idea of forgiveness. 

We invite you to share your work with us!

MISSION

Forgiveness Project is a collaborative and interdisciplinary inquiry into the idea of forgiveness built through community engagement and multi-artist collaboration. Forgiveness Project utilizes interactive and participatory performance strategies to instigate communities around the world to identify and interrogate the intersecting personal, political, and economic contours of forgiveness. Forgiveness Project further reaches a global audience through its website, which serves as an artistic and social platform for discussion, rendering, interpretation, and reaction to the complexity of this deeply human challenge. 

“…Forgiveness Project opens a window into the deeply felt experience of human pain and suffering and the roles that each of us play, simultaneously as ‘victims,’ ‘aggressors,’ and ‘bystanders’...viscerally and eloquently raising the question of what forgiveness means, might look like, and might take, personally and socially.”
— Shoshana Simons, Chair of Expressive Arts Therapy Program, CIIS

Forgiveness Project at Trolley Dances 2012

Currency of Forgiveness is part of a larger work by ABD Productions entitled Forgiveness Project. The currency we are offering our audience-participants symbolizes our commitment to unilateral giving and the cultivation of interdependence over financial exchange and the culture of commodity.

BACKGROUND and HISTORY

What does it mean to forgive? Is it imperative or choice? Collective or individual? What is—or seems—unforgiveable? There are moments when forgiveness comes relatively easily, and others when it seems not only improbable, but inconceivable; times when those needing forgiveness are closest to us, and other times when it’s public figures whose insult to our beliefs seems both egregious and irredeemable. In this moment, the news is dense with statistics about the divide between red and blue, the 99 and the one, those who believe global climate change demands immediate collective action and those who see it as an impediment to economic growth. While we battle over our particular issues of social justice, not so far away atrocities are being perpetrated in numbers too large to imagine. It is against this backdrop of discord and urgency that ABD brings forth Forgiveness Project.

Through story and experiential, laboratory-like workshops Forgiveness Project engages a broad community of dancers, artists and the public. From Yaroslavl, Russia to the steps of the San Francisco Mint, ABD Artistic Director Anne Bluethenthal has collected a diversity of stories, at each step cultivating a growing vocabulary of movement and language that speaks to the challenges of forgiveness. 

So far, ABD has instigated the following:

· International Festival of Movement and Dance on the Volga, Yaroslavl, Russia, August 2012

·  SF Trolley Dances, San Francisco, October 2012

· International Expressive Arts Therapy Association Conference, Berkeley, CA, March 2013

· California Institute of Integral Studies, School of Undergraduate Studies, San Francisco, May 2013

· Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, San Francisco, September 2013

· Wave Rising Series, Brooklyn, NY, October 2013

To expand even further, ABD is launching a website to serve as an artistic and social platform for discussion, rendering, interpretation, and reaction to the complexity of this deeply human challenge. As with the stories told in hands-on workshops, the contributions made to the site will become part of the finished piece.

 Website under construction. More coming soon!