Press

“RACE pits communitarian values and marginalized voices (in the form of the stirring stories and personalities of its cast) against the steroidal economic and governmental machinations that serve to sort out winners and losers under the rubrics of development and gentrification.”

“Intent on public dialogue, Kajiyama and Navarrete have sidestepped the traditional stage for the streets. In their push to perform along the complex environment of International Boulevard in East Oakland, the team hopes not only to reflect issues already familiar to the community, but to reinvigorate conversation in a place where exclusive models of contemporary performance run the risk of leaving residents cold.”

“Outside the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, a lively crowd milled as Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theatre’s Jose Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, powdered ghostly white, traipsed through a macabre “Milonga Sentimental.” Making great use of the theater’s lawn, awnings, and most memorably the chasm between two benches, the pair made tango and butoh look like the most natural mash-up in the world. They swiveled through ochos, they declaimed Jeanette Winterson poetry, they had Setsuko Nakamura play a tiny toy piano balanced on Kajiyama’s head. It was all eerily delightful.”

“The Revenge of Huitlacoche is a smartly conceived and emotionally affecting work of thought-provoking dance that showed Navarrete as a skilled and agile dancer/choreographer.”

“[Huitlacoche] managed to straddle the line between heavy-handedness, skillful scripting, and camp, almost perfectly well...Navarrete’s pieces were moving, political, and real.”

“…thoughtful, imaginative…exhilarating entertainment... Navarrete is a powerful…mover, yet he inflects every gesture with emotional accents that banish any hint of bleak abstraction... What succeeded…was the tension between political sermonizing and theatrical imperatives, neither one swamping the other.”

“Just as Astor Piazzola, whose music they often use, pushed tango’s resonance into other realms, Navarrete and Kajiyama dig into the tension between constraint and freedom. They stretch the duo form and dip into the cauldron of tango’s underbelly. What they have come up with is a series of pungent little essays—some of them light, some of them dark, all of them crisply designed and excellently performed.”

“Ambos coreógrafos establecen una atractiva e interesante dupla en el escenario, el nivel de comprensión y de comunicación que existe entre ambos es poco frecuente y la energía que despliegan ejerce un inusual atractivo. ...pieza de gran belleza...una verdadera joya de la compañía.”

“In the sharpest dancing of the whole program, Jose Navarrete & Debby Kajiyama danced two deliciously intense tangos. The first, a more traditional piece to the music of Juan D’arienzo, and the second an evolutionary cultural hybrid of tango and contemporary performance to the music of Kodo. The electricity between these dancers was palpably hot and sexual stereotypes wilted in their heat.”