Live Arts in Resistance: Showcase #5

EastSide Cultural Center / March 17-18, 2017

Cacartels, Cacaffeine, Cucumbia / JUAN MANUEL ALDAPE

Soundscore and text by Juan Manuel Aldape

Cacartels, Cacaffeine, Cucumbia is a fragmented dance-theatre solo performance. In the first half, he experiments by breaking down Mexican social dance idioms and music. The second half is a fast-paced, lamenting monologue about the intimate aspects of the Mexico-US relationship.

This piece is dedicated to his cousin, Juanito who died the night before Juan Manuel’s return-flight to Mexico in July 2012.

Juan Manuel is formerly undocumented. He arrived in this country at age six. He's a choreographer whose inspiration is the migrant figure who risks everything in hope of a better future. He is a graduate student in performance studies at UC Berkeley. www.juanmaldape.com

Juan Manuel Aldape

iNDiGO SKiN (In Fear of Black Fruit) / BAHIYA MOVEMENT

Dancers: Afia & Nafi Thompson
Directors: Shawn Hawkins, Jonathan Coerly, Tracee Henson, SevanKelee Boult
Music: Strange Fruit by Nina Simone, Oya by Ibeya, Black Is by The Last Poets

Afia Thompson, photo by Luna Dance Staff (click to enlarge)

This piece depicts the Struggle, Healing, and Acceptance of Black and Brown people surviving while in a racist society. Although, it is up to all people to explore pathways towards unity on Earth. How do people of color guide each other towards finding the paths of self-determination? When does the struggle end, and what can be done to STOP the mass production of BLACK FRUIT? What would YOU do if YOU saw a Black Fruit?!!!!

Bahiya Movement’s mission is to create a safe, welcoming, body positive environment for everyone of all shapes, sizes, and gender preference. Bahiya Movement develops performing artists by offering performance and dance technique while having fun creating art.

Spoken Once / STEPHANIE BASTOS

Stephanie Bastos, photo by Cliff Roles (click to enlarge)

Choreography by Millicent Johnnie
Music by India Arie
Costume by Stephanie Bastos

Daughter of Bernadette Chaves Nunes and Aluizio Ribeiro Bastos, Stephanie started her performance career as a child with the Miami Ballet and later, with the Isadora Duncan Dance Ensemble in Miami, Florida as an “Isadorable”. Since receiving her BFA in Dance from New World School of the Arts, she has been performing and teaching Modern and Contemporary Dance throughout the United States, Germany and Brazil, after losing her leg in a car accident. Winner of the 2011 San Francisco "Izzies” Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance Ensemble with Ase West Dance Theater Collective, she has also worked with the Urban Bush Women, Axis Dance Company, Deep Waters Dance Theater, Aguas Da Bahia, Cunamacué and Ron Brown’s/ EVIDENCE. Her teaching credits include FSU/World Dance Festival, American College Dance Festival, ODC in San Francisco and various schools and arts organizations throughout the Bay Area in California, including Destiny Arts Center and Youth In Arts/ VSA.

Her life story has been featured on Dateline NBC, People Español Magazine, Good Morning America, and KQED “New Frontiers in Dance”. She is honored to have premiered her own work at CounterPULSE, SF Artist in Residence/ARCE for "Timeline," an autobiographical dance-theater solo in August 2016.

Stephanie Bastos

Poet/Emcee / JAIME CORTEZ

Jaime Cortez is an artist, writer and cultural worker based in Northern California. His multidisciplinary art practice encompasses mixed media, photo, sculpture, installation and especially drawing. He has exhibited his art in venues that include the Berkeley Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, Intersection for the Arts, Galería de la Raza, Southern Exposure, Martina Johnston Gallery, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Jaime's short stories have been published in over a dozen anthologies, and he has given readings in the Bay Area for twenty years. Jaime's art can be found at jaimecortez.org.

SHAVON MOORE

Music: Sam Cooke, George Gershwin

Proud graduate of Oakland School for the Arts class of 2016! Since freshman year attending OSA, she learned a wide range of genres such as rock, and classical, but her three favorite genres are Gospel, Jazz, & R&B. In the 10th grade, Shavon attended a summer learning workshop with Jazz vocalist, Faye Carol and musician Howard Wiley. Since OSA Shavon has performed at the Malcolm X JazzArts Festival, was featured at several Eastside Arts Alliance events, OSA Alumni Tavia Percia's play: Emmett Till, and Enumerated Negro featuring Howard Wiley. Shavon has recorded her own music and music videos. In her free time, she attends EastSide Arts Alliance’s Beats Flows program which is an intermediate level beat-making, engineering, and mixing course that teaches youth how to use studio equipment. Shavon has created a portfolio of her work spanning the past four years, some of which can be found on SoundCloud and Youtube. Currently she attends the California Jazz Conservatory pursuing a BA Degree in Music. Later she plans on becoming a elementary school music teacher. Music will always and forever be in the plan. No matter how old she becomes, she hopes to continue writing, singing and producing music.

Buscarte (excerpt) / NAKA DANCE THEATER

Sound programming and processing by Adria Otte
Additional music by Liliana Felipe

NAKA Dance Theater creates interdisciplinary performance works using movement, theater, art installation, multimedia, and site-specific environments. Our work has been influenced by ritual, cultural studies, and the political and environmental concerns of the world in which we live. Recent themes include: racial profiling and state brutality, genetic modification of native crops, the commodification of water, cultural colonization, and the human response to overwhelming disaster.

NAKA Dance Theater

Every 28 hours, The Sounds of Oakland / M’KALA PAYTON

M'Kala Payton is a Poet, singer, songwriter as well as an instructor of EastSide Arts Alliance’s Beats Flows Program using art as a means for liberation.

M'Kala Payton

We.Here.Now: the Verge / KEISHA TURNER

Music: Broke-n & The Grind, This Way (short edit), Session 75, Imamou Lele

Keisha Turner, photo by Deirdre Visser (click to enlarge)

Dancer and performance-maker, Keisha Turner, has Chicago and Brooklyn roots, and is based in Oakland, CA. Keisha is a creative change-maker with growing ties to the many resistance movements taking place in the Bay Area. In her artistic practice, she values the ability of African American/African diasporic traditions of dance and improvisation to intersect with contemporary performance art to tell stories that probe issues of politics, culture, and identity.

Keisha is also a certified yoga instructor, and is committed to offering body-positive, life-affirming classes that create space for participants to prioritize self-care and self-awareness as an entry point to engaging with their communities. Her creative enterprise, EarthChild, is a collection of love-offerings comprised of performance, yoga classes, and body care products designed to celebrate, heal, and uplift oppressed communities. www.iamearthchild.com We.Here.Now. is an intermittent performance/ritual project that asserts the inherent value of black life and black liberation. All ritualized performance that takes place via We.Here.Now. rely on the richness of Afro-Diasporan cultural practices to acknowledge, heal from, and begin to dismantle the varied manifestations of generational, racialized violence.

Keisha Turner

The Live Arts in Resistance series is supported by: The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; William & Flora Hewlett Foundation; The California Arts Council and the generous donations of individual supporters of EastSide Arts Alliance.

LAIR Showcase #5