EastSide Arts Alliance and NAKA Dance Theater present:

Power + Imagination

LIVE ARTS IN RESISTANCE (LAIR)

Back and FORTH

Featuring:
Transdisciplinary artist
brontë velez

It is a cypher. It is how our bodies, words, music and art manifest our experiences inside and outside of oppressive systems. It is how we transcend, heal, and continue to vision forward our reality/existence on earth.

Join us for a series of experimental performances and conversations with Oakland-based Black artists riffing on subjects such as: making art in a pandemic, Oakland life and dreaming forward in the age of Aquarius. Instigated by Amara Tabor-Smith, these embodied conversations will flirt with magic, failure, rage, and freedom -- all while surrendering to the unexpected creative spirit of the moment.

brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, designer, trickster, educator and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking & prophetic community traditions, environmental justice, and death doulaship.

they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice and hospicing systems of oppression through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective, educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth, and quotidian black queer lifemaking ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life.

Diego Ortiz / Creative Designs @juanfelipedetodoslossantos