Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Oakland Oakland, CA
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Oakland Winter Live
Oakland Winter Live brings a cutting edge showcase a few of the Bay Areas best contemporary music, dance, theatre, and video artists together for a series of short performance works, including internationally acclaimed theatre artist from Johannesburg, Tony Miyambo performing Kafkas Red Peter with an eye towards the black experience in America. Dont miss the cinematic environment of a monumental screen in the art deco theatre at the OACC. KIDS ARE FREE UNDER 17
Six pieces integrating music, dance, theatre with video will be presented December,8 &9th 2017. These works are created by some particularly accomplished Artists and performers in the Bay Area now. Wild Projects productions presents two nights two unique programs that will transform the newly reinvigorated Oakland Asian Cultural Center, in Oaklands Chinatown. This intersection of contemporary music, dance, theatre, with video strikes Oaklands evolving downtown like a moonlit epiphany, flickering on the elegant deco stage at OACC. The beauty of the stage is its wood floor and its 300 unfixed seats that will be arranged for these immersive performances. Oakland as a site for quality performance in Chinatown is coming into its own. These artists tackle social justice, sexuality, coming of age without parents, fragile nature and deep listening in refreshing and challenging ways. Oakland Winter Live marks a new sophisticated moment in Oaklands downtown cultural milieu.
The choice of these artists was based on their quality of work and their ability to integrate interdisciplinary approaches in live performance works. I wanted to have a variety of ensembles approaching this work from varied points of view. I wanted to attract a diverse audience, a broader demographic, to create an event where veteran performers were integrating with younger ones. I also wanted to use the space of the what seems to sometimes be called an auditorium and transform the space into a theatre. The following artists will present:
Dhaya is part of the new generation of comedians who are unafraid to take on the thorny issues of the day with verve, nuanced timing, and hilarity. She will bring a fiery touch to these elegant, and provocative performance works. Dhaya Lakshminarayanan is the 2016 winner of the Liz Carpenter Political Humor Award (previously awarded to Samantha Bee, Wanda Sykes and satirist/humorist Mark Russell) presented by the National Womens Political Caucus. KQED named her one of the twenty Women to Watch a series celebrating women artists, creatives and makers in the San Francisco Bay Area who are pushing boundaries in 2016. TheSF Weekly named her one of the 16 Bay Area performers to watch in 2016. She was named one of The Bay Areas 11 Best Standup Comedians by SFist. The San Francisco Bay Guardian named herBest Comedian 2013 in theBest of the Bay Readers Poll. Comedy Central Asia crowned her the Grand Prize Winner of The Ultimate Comedy Challenge filmed in Singapore.
Nakadance NAKA has been focusing on forensic anthropology findings in the case of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College who went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in 2014. The ongoing search for the students has led to the discovery of other mass graves that reveal the epidemic proportions of the hidden violence. Development and performance ofBUSCARTEwill take place in the galleries and multi-use space at East Side Arts Alliance, our long-term partner of 10 years. We will use lungs as the central visual, architectural and sonic element of the work. We will create sculptural or architectural tunnels that branch and narrow; inflate and deflate. Our movement investigations are influenced by ideas of constantly pushing forward, rest-lessness, the drive to keep searching, and the peace and the exhaustion that comes from that.
Kim Anno, Kristina Dutton, Sophia Shen, and Ingibjorg Frioriksdottir This group is working on Natural Arrangement a dramatic video and music mosaic of ephemeral and fragile nature imagery, arranged from dawn to dusk and micro to macro. Musicians will play violin, Pipa, electric keyboard, and other percussive instruments to underscore the drama of the natural world and the global threat to its climate. We are working with excerpts of Rachel Carsons Silent spring as a script. Kim Anno, Director, Producer. Anno is a painter, photographer, and filmmaker/video artist whose work has been exhibited by museums nationally and internationally.
Kristina Dutton, Violinist/composer: Her projects include: Horizontal Cobalt, 2017-2018, An evening celebrating the work of famed Bay Area artist Sonya Rapaport, including a musical reimagining of her works Horizontal Cobalt and The Anasazi Series. Curator and Co-founder; Call and Response Series 2014-2016 is an experiment in arts and lectures, combining performance and presentation. Project director, co-founder and composer: In the Cloud Forest 2017-2018 Classical representations of nature in western artistic cultures have reinforced separation of the human observer from his/her environment. Composer/Engineer,/Musician In the Hour of Butterflies, 2017 An interactive sculpture installation, created by the collaborative team of artist Ricardo Rivera, artist Kim Anno, and composer Kristina Dutton. Violinist/Composer, The Broken Trap-Ensemble, 2014-2016, Violinist/Composer, Drought 1200, a dance performance directed by Kim Anno, in collaboration with Naka Dance Theater Company. Music by Kristina Dutton, Crystal Pascucci, and Kanoko Nishi-Smith.
Sophia Shen and Ingibjorg Frioriksdottir: Apartment D is a bay area based electro-improv duo that explores sound and space by combining live electronic processing and experimental performance of voice and pipa during improvisation. Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir (https://soundcloud.com/ingibj-rg-fri-riksd-ttir) brings a background of both experimental electronic music and vocal training from Iceland. Sophia Shen (http://www.shensiyang.com/) combines her traditional Chinese pipa playing techniques with her new approaches to the instrument. The unique soundscape and the emotional depth that the duo creates are a result of an exchange and convergence from two very contrasting musical backgrounds and cultures. Both Shen and Frioriksdottir reside in Oakland, California.
Charles Woodman is collaborating with Bay Area music improviser, Lisa Mezzacappa, with Jason Levis, on Drums and Tim Perkis, on Electronics, in viDEO sAVant. viDEO sAVant is a noncontiguous series of happenings where video artists and musicians engage in a structured improvisation amidst a live audience. This interaction between artists, as a collaboration of light and sound, has the effect of changing the mood and perception of the space, calling into question the role of space itself, and the power performance has to undermine the authority of architecture. Lisa Mezzacappais a San Francisco Bay Area composer, bassist and producer. Called one of the most imaginative figures on the Bay Area creative jazz scene by theSan Jose Mercury Newsand a Bay Area treasure by KQED national public radio, she has been an active part of Californias vibrant experimental music community for more than 15 years. Mezzacappas activities as a composer and bandleader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance and installation art. Her work has been supported by the MAP Fund, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Zellerbach and Wattis Foundations, among others.www.lisamezzacappa.com
Journeys Beyond the Cosmodrome Jeanne C. Finley with Kri Schlafer and the SF Threshold Choir
Journeys Beyond the Cosmodromehas been created in collaboration withLydia Matthews, Lyazzat Khanim, Tamara Porras, and teensfrom Kazakhstans Akkol Orphanage. Sixteen teenagers from the orphanage participated in a workshop in which they imagined their journeys upon graduating from the orphanage. Using scientific and fictional images of space travel, traditional Kazakh literature and global popular culture to fuel their imagination,the group wrote about their dreams, articulated challenges, and identified aspects of Kazakh culture they will take with them into their new universe.They playfully performed their imagined future selves, collaboratively staging photographic and video self-portraits with objects found on the orphanage grounds.Kri Schlafer has composed music from the teens stories that are sung in this live presentation of the project by Kri and the San Francisco Threshold choir, an all-womens acappella group that sings for those at the thresholds of life. http://www.finleymuse.com/
skratchklang is a new collaboration between Thea Farhadian and Heike Liss. Visual Artist Heike Liss and musician/composer Thea Farhadian will join forces for an audio-visual improvisation. Thea brings twisted echoes, jagged rhythms, and microtonal landscapes that she skillfully performs with electronic violin."Liss pairs footage of passing landscapes with those found in a historical archive or onlinenewsfeed, live feeds of sky and street, improvising synchronistically to Farhadians sound and music. The resulting work together is haunting, abstract, and satiating. Its cultural evidence of an uncertain time.
. Thea Farhadian is a performer/composer based in San Francisco Bay Area and Berlin. Her projects include solo violin and interactive electronics, acoustic improvisation, solo laptop, radio art, and video. Her solo pieces for violin and electronics combine a classical music background with extended technique and digital processing using the program Max/MSP.Her work has been seen internationally at venues which include the Issue Project Room, and Alternative Museum New York City, Galerie Mario Mazolli, Sowieso, and Quiet Cue in Berlin, the Room Series, and Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, the Center for Experimental Art and the Aram Kachaturyan Museum in Yerevan, Armenia, International Women's Electroacoustic Listening Room Project at Bimhaus in Amsterdam.
Tony Miyambo, performing Kafkas Red Peter adapted to the condition of black men in America. Originally he made this work adapted to the conditions of Apartheid in South Africa where the play focused on the complexities of identity in post-apartheid. The new adaptation presents an opportunity for the audience to reflect on their own layered identities as co-created by society. Anno is commissioning the piece and directing his performance for Oakland. Miyambo lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Tony Miyambo holds a drama degree from Wits University in Johannesburg.He has an extensive Theatre background and sometimes dabbles in Television work. He has worked on many iconic plays such as Samuel Beckett, Kafka, his own work based on his father, and many others. Based on Ian Johnston's translation of Franz Kafka's A Report To An Academy, Red Peter's Way Out is a one-hander stage production performed by Tony Bonani Miyambo and directed by Phala Ookeditse Phala. The play focuses on the complexities of identity in post -- apartheid South Africa. The adaptation presents an opportunity for the audience to reflect on their own layered identities as co-created by society. Asked to make a report about his past life as an ape, Red Peter instead decides to make a report about his current life. In his report Red Peter's contests that his historical identity cannot be held against him or define him as a being. He largely questions the notion of prejudging one's identity based on their physical outward appearance. Red Peter's journey was ignited by finding a way out of a cage he was confined to after his capture. Has this 'way out' un-caged his identity?
Location
Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Oakland (View)
388 9th Street near Webster
Oakland, CA 94607
United States
