“‘Pioneer’ — I have trouble with that word,” says Brontez Purnell, sitting in the sunny backyard of his West Oakland home and grasping for the best language with which to describe Ed Mock. It’s a task that the popular dancer, musician, author, and visual artist has meditated on for the past two years while directing his first documentary — about influential San Francisco dancer Ed Mock, who died from AIDS in 1986. Mock’s work was definitely daring: experimental, free, genre-bending performance at the forefront of the alternative West Coast dance scene in the 1970s. But with Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock, Purnell is more interested in identifying lineages than he is in applauding originality.

Read more at www.kqed.org