Wanda's Picks Radio Show, Wednesday, October 9, 2019

This is a black arts and culture site. We will be exploring the African Diaspora via the writing, performance, both musical and theatrical (film and stage), as well as the visual arts of Africans in the Diaspora and those influenced by these aesthetic forms of expression. I am interested in the political and social ramifications of art on society, specifically movements supported by these artists and their forebearers. It is my claim that the artists are the true revolutionaries, their work honest and filled with raw unedited passion. They are our true heroes. Ashay!

1. Adia Tamar Whitaker, Artistic Director of the 19-year old Brooklyn based dance theater ensemble Àse Dance Theatre Collective, has performed contemporary dance, vernacular movement, Afro-Haitian, and Haitian dance in the U.S. and abroad for seventeen years. Whitaker has traveled to Haiti, Cuba, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ghana, Jamaica, and Trinidad, to study and teach dance. Whitaker received an MFA in Dance from Hollins University, a BA in Dance from San Francisco State University, and completed the Professional Division U.S. Independent Studies Program at The Ailey School. She was also an Urban Bush Women Apprentice, a Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography @ FSU Creative Entry Point Choreographic Fellow, a Jerome Foundation grantee and Isadora Duncan Award recipient. Most recently, Whitaker received the highly competitive  NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Award in Choreography and completed her second year of her Dunham Technique Certification.

2. Jess Curtis/Gravity presents (in)Visible Oct. 10-13 at CounterPulse in SF.

Jess Curtis/Gravity presents the San Francisco leg of the rolling World Premiere of (in)Visible, a dance/performance dislocating vision from the center of your experience. Developed in collaboration with—and particularly focusing on access to culture for—blind and visually impaired audiences, (in)Visible is created and performed by an international cast of six blind, visually impaired and sighted body-based dancers/performers. Through dancing, singing, whispering and feeling, they make their way into your consciousness—bringing experimental dance/performance and sensory accessibility practices into a rich and moving interaction. 

VIDEO TRAILER:  http://www.tanzforumberlin.de/en/production/in-visible/

(in)Visible furthers Curtis’ research into the intersections of movement, culture, sensory difference and physical diversity in live performance. Curtis explains, “Specifically, (in)Visible addresses the disproportionate prevalence in our culture of sight as a tool of perception, and explores more diverse modes of perceiving.  The work embeds access accommodations —such as Audio Description—into the work itself and will include non-traditional seating arrangements, pre-show Touch Tours for every show and ASL interpretation for D/deaf audiences.

The set design by Michiel Keuper. The sound score is by Samuel Hertz.  The performers are Berlin-based dancers Sophia Neises and Xenia Taniko, Sherwood Chen (Marseilles) and San Francisco based dancers/performers Tiffany Taylor, Gabriel Christian and Rachael Dichter. Creative consultants include author and UC Berkeley professor of disability studies Georgina Kleege, writer and philosopher Alva Noë, and blind art critic, essayist, artist, photographer Gerald Pirner.

(in)Visible runs two weekends, Thursday to Sunday, October 3-6 and 10-13 at 8:00 pm at CounterPulse in San Francisco. Audio Description is available for every performance.  ASL interpretation is available one night per weekend.  Please check www.counterpulse.org for specifics.  Tickets are $10 to $30 and are available online at www.jesscurtisgravity.org/invisible or by calling 415-626-2060.

Sherwood Chen has worked as a performer with artists including Grisha Coleman, Yuko Kaseki, Amara Tabor-Smith, Anna Halprin, Min Tanaka, Xavier Le Roy, inkBoat / Ko Murobushi, Christine Bonansea and Sara Shelton Mann. He leads workshops for performers in studio and in natural and urban landscapes worldwide. For over twenty years he has served as a cultural worker in public, nonprofit and philanthropic sectors focusing on community arts programming, arts education, arts grantmaking, and as an artist advocate in the United States, with a focus on supporting tradition-based, Native Californian and immigrant artists.  www.sherwoodchen.com

Gabriel Christian is a multidisciplinary artist bred in New York City and baking in Oakland, California. Their work metabolizes the vernaculars within BlaQ diaspora –– futurity, afrovivalism, faggotry ––  through body-based live performance and poetics; moreover, they feel the bio to be an unfortunate by-product of capitalistic modes like chattel slavery. 

Jess Curtis is an award-winning choreographer and performer committed to an art-making practice informed by experimentation, innovation, critical discourse and social relevance. He has created and performed multidisciplinary works throughout the U.S and Europe with the radical SF performance groups Contraband and CORE and the experimental French Circus company Cahin-Caha. In 2000, he founded his trans-continental performance company, Jess Curtis/Gravity. Curtis is active as a researcher, writer, teacher, advocate and community organizer in the fields of contemporary dance and performance. He holds an MFA in Choreography and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California at Davis.

http://tobtr.com/s/11530597