NAKA's 25th Anniversary
Community Gathering, Performance & Celebration
5-6 PM: Book Launch: Dismantling: Dance, Space and Memory in Tallahassee
Reception with Profe Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz
7-8 PM: Performance of Mastín (Haptic Tour and Audio Description)
A new installation performance by Debby and José Ome
Commissioned by the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), Dismantling: Dance, Space and Memory in Tallahassee 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.
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.
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. Copies of the book will be available. Suggested donation of $25 per book.
Free admission — donations welcome.
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Mastín
Installation performance by Debby Kajiyama and José Ome Mazatl
Mastín explores Ome’s inherited fear of dogs alongside the colonial violence of “aperramiento,” when Spanish conquistadors used mastiffs against Indigenous peoples. Through an immersive visual and sound installation, a large-scale mastiff puppet and video of José’s pit bull, Canelo, bring historical violence into tension with the tenderness of human-animal bonds. The work becomes a test of how historical trauma might be confronted and reconciled.
Suggested donation $25. No one turned away.