DISMANTLING

dance, space and memory
danza, espacio y memoria
tanssi, tila ja muisti

 

Dismantling asks how dancers collaborate, investigate cities, and challenge institutionalized histories to expose enduring structures of discrimination. Through essays, poetry, photobook-inspired visual narratives, and reclaimed symbols developed through performance workshops, eleven contributors document artistic acts of resistance, rehearse possibilities for social transformation, and generate counter-narratives that refuse erasure in Tallahassee, Florida.

A group of people of different genders, ages, and ethnicities are dancing, with arms raised, around a room

From October 11-22, 2024, NAKA Dance Theater came together in residence at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) at Florida State University. Co-founders and directors José Ome Navarrete Mazatl and Debby Kajiyama worked in close exchange with collaborators Amelia Uzategui Bonilla, Cristina López Suárez, Krhistina Giles, Music Research Strategies (Marshall Trammell), Oka Ver, and Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz, developing a new performance to premiere in 2025. Each artist, based in different cities across the world, brought their own creative processes and inquiries, into an interchange of ideas, tactics, and imaginations. The residency unfolded as a fusion between performance creation and convivio.

This book emerges from that shared time and space.

During our time at MANCC, Marshall Trammell led an Insurgent Learning Workshop (more details about this process are in the book) where participants designed codes to assist people in fleeing, escaping, and becoming a fugitive. These created fugitive codes are found throughout the book.

For those attending the book release on November 8, 2026, we will have fugitive code stamps available to intervene on your own book.

A man with brown skin and dark hair wears red leather gloves as he holds a metal stamp that has just been pressed into a piece of particle board. Other people gather around.

The cohort taught a dance and poetry workshop at the Big Bend A.F.T.E.R. Re-entry Coalition (BBARC) where we collaboratively wrote a poem with participants. You can listen to a recording of it below.

Clean Slate
Big Bend A.F.T.E.R. Re-entry Coalition

Get a copy of Dismantling for yourself:

Available at NAKA’s 25th Anniversary Community Gathering & Celebration on Sunday, November 8, 2026 at SPACE 124 in Project Artaud at 499 Alabama Street, San Francisco (details to come)

Suggested donation of $25.

NAKA is committed to donating a minimum of $500 to the Tallahassee Bail Fund from book donations. We are grateful for co-founders of the Tallahassee Bail Fund for engaging with us in community during our MANCC residency.

Photos: Chris Cameron