EastSide Arts Alliance and NAKA Present: LAIR Showcase
Featuring Melissa Lewis / Asian Babe Gang (ABG) * gizeh muñiz * Clarissa Rivera Dyas * NAKA Dance Theater
LIVE ARTS IN RESISTANCE (LAIR) is a dynamic series of performance showcases, artist residencies, and community town halls that address racial inequity and white supremacy in popular culture. Collectively, we contribute to a new cultural consciousness of self-determination and indigenous knowledge as integral to our resistance to systemic oppression and imperialism. LAIR is a partnership between NAKA Dance Theater and EastSide Arts Alliance.
PERFORMANCES:
Fri, April 17 @ 7 PM
Sat April 18 @ 2 PM (ASL interpretation)
Sun, April 19 @ 2 PM Audio Description and Haptic Tour (at 1pm)
TICKETS: https://tinyurl.com/LAIRShowcase2026
General Admission $25
Students and Seniors $10
No one turned away for lack of funds
LOCATION:
EastSide Cultural Center
2277 International Blvd
Oakland, CA
ACCESSIBILITY:
• EastSide Cultural Center is ADA accessible.
• ASL Interpretation offered on Saturday, April 18 only.
• Live Audio Description and Haptic Access Tours by Gravity Access Services for visually-impaired audience members on Sunday, April 19 only.
• For audience members who are blind or low-vision, listening devices are issued, which transmit a trained describer’s description of what is happening on stage during pauses in dialogue.
• To reserve a headset for audio description, please select RSVP w/ Audio Description Headset. Or call the EastSide Arts Alliance Box Office, MWF, 11-5pm at 510-533-6629.
Photo of gizeh muñiz by Kevin Martinez
ABOUT:
gizeh muñiz
Molino for Levitation (a work-in-progress)
Molino for Levitation is a self-contained poem of motion—a fissure carved into the architecture of conventional reality to sustain a state of poetic crisis. It is conceived as a temporary archive: an embodied catalog of decisions, presences, and small rebellions captured within the fissure of performance.
The work embraces abstraction as a political and poetic act. To dance with the unfamiliar is to refuse the mandate of instant comprehension.
My methodology for creating new work starts with a rigorous movement research practice that establishes the language for the piece. What you will see in this performance is the raw exploration of this language.
The premiere of this piece will be at ODC’s State of Play Festival in August 2026. For more info visit gizzeh.com
gizeh is a movement, teaching and performing artist currently co-existing in Ohlone territory. They are dedicated to the study of being a breathing body through movement and stillness. Through their work, they create spaces that allow them to play and divest from concepts of linearity in a creative process, with the intention of practicing freedom. gizeh’s choreographic and teaching work has been shared in the United States, Mexico and Europe in festivals such as P.O.R.C.H in Germany, Improspeckje in Croatia, GUSH in San Francisco and 4x4 in Tijuana, to mention some. gizeh has been an artist in residence at Atland Residency, CounterPulse, PUSH, BANDALOOP, and Bridge Live Arts, and was the 2023-25 Radiate fellow of RAWdance. gizeh is the curator and producer of Gatherings - a free movement workshop series in the Bay Area. gizeh carries within their body their work with Kathleen Hermesdorf, Sara Shelton Mann, and a decade of study with Dance, Music and Theater teachers throughout Mexico.
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Melissa Lewis Wong with support from Asian Babe Gang
Working title: the water’s wide
Rowing across the river of time, this theatrical solo moves through tension, grief, and yearning – with vocalization, ancestral storytelling, and visual elements. Melissa Lewis Wong revisits their 2024 work 花和霧 flowers and fog and explores how it echoes and wrecks into the present – with support from ABG collective members and several directorial contributors. Something between drag, dance theater and an installation, this new work-in-progress asks: what echoes into the present? what happens after the end? what was unsaid, and what still wants to be birthed?
Performed and choreographed by: Melissa Lewis Wong
Thank you: Lawrence Tome (dramaturgy, sound); Kat Cole, with Amaya + Max (dramaturgy, performance support); Cristina Chavez (wardrobe and prop support); Loryn Barbeau (voice lessons); Eric Garcia (show mapping inspiration); Joy ChenYu Lewis
Melissa Lewis Wong (they/she/他) is a Bay-Area-based queer, non-binary Chinese American performer, artist and administrator. Deuce Lee is their drag persona, occasionally haunting Clutch the Pearls. Melissa has been working + performing in Yelamu (SF) since 2010 with various Bay Area organizations + artists, recently including DETOUR, Hope Mohr, Circo Zero, Fog Beast, Megan Lowe Dances, Rebecca Fitton, & KRIMMS DANCE PARTY. Melissa is a founding member of ABG, a collective of queer diasporic Asian-American friends. Melissa’s creative practice also spans analog photography, drawing, organizing, meditation and martial arts. @lemelissa / melissalewis.art
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Clarissa Rivera Dyas is a Black, Filipinx, Bay Area, Ohlone land, based movement artist, choreographer, and arts producer. Her artistic practice flows from the truthfulness of improvisation, is rooted in her communities, and centered around movement as a spiritual practice and a conduit of change. They have been a company member of Zaccho Dance Theatre, Robert Moses’ Kin, and Flyaway Productions and have performed with Keith Hennessy, Lenora Lee Dance, Megan Lowe Dances, OYSTERKNIFE, GRAVITY, Sarah Crowell, and many others. Clarissa is a co-conspirator with black, queer artists in RUPTURE (2021) who premiered DIASPORADICA at Fort Mason Center August 2025. She is currently in collaboration with Sara Shelton Mann (2020) and Embodiment Project (2023). They have presented work in REYES Dance, Dance Thrill Fest (2021), Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency (2022), Queering Dance Festival’s FROLIC! (2023), KH FRESH Festival (2024), Dance Up Close East Bay (2025), PUSHfest (2025) and in the Black Choreographers Festival in 2020/2025 and was awarded Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2024. They are a member of Queering Dance Festival’s Steering Committee and is a Co-Director of ROT Festival.
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NAKA Dance Theater will show a work-in-progress of Last Seen, a duet pursuing the impossible task of finding our footing in a landscape of blurred vistas and convoluted bureaucracy. A kidnapping and detention sends us searching, calling, traversing multiple languages, states, borders. A failed forensic performance. Last Seen is the first exploration in the development of a new work, “If you take a path that staggers, will it throw the bloodhounds off your trail?” that considers fugitivity as a technique for survival.
Founded in 2001 by José Ome Mazatl and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA Dance Theater creates experimental performance works using dance, storytelling, multimedia installations and site-specific environments. They are honored to continue celebrating their 25th Anniversary year by presenting work in LAIR. NAKA cultivates partnerships with communities, engages people’s histories and folklore and expresses experiences through accessible performances that challenge the viewer to think critically about social justice issues. Recent collaborations include Ja weya ob’aj wij, ex weya nchemaj (My Story, My Weaving), a devised installation-performance work created with Indigenous Maya Mam Women weavers living in Oakland, and Dismantling Tactic X: Fugitivity, a creative response to xenophobia and the threat of mass deportations. In addition to their performance work, NAKA co-produces Live Arts in Resistance (LAIR) in partnership with EastSide Arts Alliance. LAIR is a dynamic series of performance showcases, artist residencies, and community town halls that address racial inequity and white supremacy in popular culture. @nakadancetheater
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LAIR is sponsored and co-produced by EastSide Arts Alliance and NAKA with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Fleishhacker Foundation, EastSide's individual donors, the California Arts Council & the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.