For the past seven years, NAKA Dance Theater has been engaged in a process of close artistic collaboration with the women of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), a San Francisco Bay Area grassroots Latine organization that promotes individual healing and community power. Together they have created and presented Y Basta Ya! a first-person, multi-disciplinary performance work for street corners, community centers and theater stages. The work is an intimate and personal exploration of issues of race, gender violence, and invisibility, and individual and collective power.
Now Jose Ome Mazatl and Debby Kajiyama focus the camera back on themselves to reflect on their own experiences of creating the piece. They zoom in on key artifacts, costumes and photos; zoom out in time; reflect on border-crossings and the loss of languages to create a dream-like, multimedia-infused Performance of the Performance.
“Our intention is to cultivate a space where community members take ownership of the poetic representation of their own stories,” explains Kajiyama.
Each performance will begin with a workshop led by the women in the original community performance to set the stage for what you will witness. They pull the camera back to a wide shot, telling stories that didn’t make it onto the stage, reflecting on their individual and collective transformation, and dreaming about the future.
“Art that grows from this process has the power to be healing and transformative, cultivating personal and community liberation,” adds Mazatl.
Oct 26, 27, 28 at 7 PM
Oct 28 at 3 PM
Oct 29 at 2 PM
Y Basta Ya! (Enough!) is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation Open Spaces Grant, the City of Oakland Neighborhood Voices Grant, MAPFund, East Bay Fund for Artists, California Arts Council, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Rainin Fellowship, Dance/USA and many generous individual donors. Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists is made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. General Operating support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Y Basta Ya! is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by La Peña Cultural Center, Rosy Simas Danse and NPN. More information: www.npnweb.org.