Transnational Collaboration

with Byb Chanel Bibene and SAMMAY

A vehicle for expanding our consciousness across borders, NAKA has convened choreographers Byb Chanel Bibene and Sammay Dizon to discuss and create on the topic of forced disappearance in their respective cultures. NAKA, Byb and Sammay, along with video documentarian Stevie Sanchez will travel to Mexico, Congo-Brazzaville, Japan and the Philippines together to research issues of erasure in each country.

In February 2018, we traveled together to Mexico City to visit the permanent camp established in front of the Attorney General’s offices (PGR) by activists demanding justice in the case of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa.

On March 11, 2018, we hosted a workshop showing of some of the ideas we are contemplating. The program included:

350
By Byb Chanel Bibene

In the deep uproarious and callous waters of the Kongo river, three hundred fifty bodies vanished as a soulless smoke dissipates into the void of a harmful space. Waters, the life that turned into a grave of heroic women, men, and progenies; waters that offered a gift of tears to a country already torn by flying lethal missiles. 350 is the number of the disappeared at Le Beach de Brazzaville, the port, in 1998.

RECLAIM BAE
By SAMMAY

RECLAIM BAE (re-klaim ba-eh) is a multimedia dance theatre piece that pays tribute to the indigenous women of the Philippines at the forefront of revolution pastpresentfuture. we honor our soil-skinned grandmothers/mothers/daughters as the unseen warriors who continue to fight for our lands and nurture the tribe in the ongoing movement to reclaim what has been stolen.

Excerpt from BUSCARTE: Duet
By NAKA Dance Theater

BUSCARTE: Duet is a multidisciplinary duet performance that contemplates the forensic anthropology findings in the case of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College who were forcibly disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in 2014. The ongoing search for the students has led to the discovery of multiple mass graves that reveal the epidemic proportions of the hidden violence.

Development of BUSCARTE is funded in part by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s NEW Program, Dancers’ Group’s Lighting Artists in Dance (LAD) program, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council and the East Bay Community Foundation's Fund for Artists.