Selected from a pool of over 60 applicants from across California, these thirteen artists and companies represent many of the state’s most exciting new voices at the intersection of traditional arts, contemporary performance and California’s changing demographics.
Meet the Artists |
Weekend 1: |
Danica Sena Gakovich Danica Sena Gakovich is an experienced choreographer, performer, musician and teacher who has performed and researched folkloric music and dance traditions from Spain for over 20 years. Her works are exploratory and collaborative while maintaining deep musical/rhythmic awareness. Danica will be creating a work that explores the shared ancestry between traditional Serbian and Flamenco music. Koreni, which means “roots” in Serbian is an original work based on profound investigation of the shared ancestry between traditional Serbian and Flamenco music. San Francisco-based flamenco choreographer/performer Sena re-connects with her Serbian heritage together with an exceptional cast of world-reknown musicians Miroslav Tadic (guitar),, Alfredo Caceres (guitar) and Juan Carlos Moreno (singer). |
Charlotte Moraga Charlotte Moraga, a senior disciple of Pandit Chitresh Das, performs traditional Kathak dance around the world as principal dancer of Chitresh Das Dance Company (CDDC), and as a solo artist. Moraga is currently director of the Chhandam Youth Dance Company. She is a recipient of the first Shenson Performing Arts Fellowship, recognizing artistic merit and potential for future excellence and impact on the field of Kathak. With her newest work, Moraga will explore the triangle of audience, dancer and musicians by putting it into a triptych based on the Hindu paradigm of existence: creation, preservation and destruction. Destruction is often seen as a creative act in itself as it makes way for rejuvenation. The work will feature collaborative and virtuosic live music. |
Gema Sandoval, Artistic Director of Danza Floricanto/USA Gema Sandoval is the founder and artistic director of Danza Floricanto/USA. Gema is devoted to illuminating her Mexican-American heritage through dance. She and her company have recreated the movement, costume and song of 17 different regions of Mexico, and over half a dozen works on the Chicano experience which celebrate cultural identity for the Mexican American community and the immigrant experience for the rest of America. Sandoval will develop Reflections/Reflecciones, a dance work based on Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me Ultima, a piece that blends the vocabulary of traditional Mexican and Indigenous folk dance, African influenced and European based contemporary expressions. |
Adia Tamar Whitaker Adia Tamar Whitaker is one of the youngest professional choreographers and master teachers of Afro-Haitian folkloric dance in the United States. A former member of Blanche Brown’s Group Petit La Croix and Colette Eloi’s Reconnect, she has studied and performed Afro-Haitian dance in the U.S. and abroad for 13 years. Her artistic work focuses on neo-folklore of the African Diaspora, linking contemporary modern dance, original vernacular movement, and traditional dance theater. Recently Whitaker completed the first part of a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study grant in Ghana. Her new project combines dance, media and music inspired by “ampey,” a rhythmic game played by little girls in Ghana. |
Weekend 2: |
Sri Susilowati Pasadena, CA Sri Susilowati is a choreographer originally from Java, Indonesia. Her work is grounded in Indonesian art forms as well as training in post-modern dance composition. She creates contemporary works on the subjects of community, gender, and ethnicity through dance and multi-media. Eating Dance (working title) employs contemporary dance and spoken word, along with traditional classical Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese movement vocabularies to tell stories of food ritual for dancers. Using text, video projection, and dance movements, the piece will explore the contrast of how dancers in the United States and Indonesia value food. |
Opal Palmer Adisa Opal Palmer Adisa refers to herself as Ja-American and is deeply rooted in Jamaican and American cultures. As a writer of all genres, a college professor, photographer and performer, Adisa is concerned about African cultural preservation in the Diaspora, and particularly in the Caribbean region. Her works examine and explore healing from varied perspectives. The work that she will present, The Myalist, explores healing the self and the world through language, song and dance. Adisa sees the myalist as the contemporary griot –historian and storyteller– and it is through her stories, which are her medicine, that she is able to heal herself and those she encounters. |
| Colette Eloi, Artistic Director of El Wah Movement Oakland, CA Colette Eloi is an artist and student of the diverse dance styles of the African Diaspora along with Ballet and Modern. Her emphasis is on Haiti, the native land of her parents. As a dancer/choreographer Eloi has performed extensively, both nationally and internationally. She is artistic director of El Wah Movement, which presents Haitian dance, along with African Diaspora Dance. Her new work will use the folkloric dances of Haiti to address some of the country’s issues in association with the western world. Eloi will offer social commentary about the politics of poverty through both traditional and contemporized Hatian dance, as well as sound and projected visuals. |
Ana Maria Alvarez, Artistic Director of CONTRA-TIEMPO Ana Maria Alvarez, a Cuban American choreographer engages, creates opportunities for people to feel, relate and communicate with each other and with the subject material that she addresses in her work: immigration, race, gender and power. Her work challenges notions of how Salsa has been utilized to depoliticize Latinos, females and communities of color – and how it can be reclaimed and used as a tool to say something meaningful – and be heard! CONTRA-TIEMPO will be debuting the opening suite of the new urban-Latin dance theater work Pa’ comen(zar). Food is often used as a metaphor for dance, music, body parts, relationships, joy, ecstasy, hurt, and anger. CONTRA-TIEMPO will explore the interchange and conversation between dance and food, the fundamental voids in our cultural and societal relationship with our own history and our connection to ourselves and each other. |
Weekend 3: |
Wang Fei, Founder and Director of the North American Guqin Association Wang Fei is an internationally known guqin performer, educator, and scholar. She is considered one of the most experienced guqin artists of her generation. She is the founder and director of the North American Guqin Association and a council member of the China Guqin committee. Wang has experience internationally giving concert-level performances and presentations on the guqin and related arts to both Chinese and Western audiences. She has won several awards in the field of Chinese music and lectured at many universities. Wang and her collaborators will create a multidisciplinary project titled The Living Art of the Guqin: Beyond a Museum Piece. This project will feature traditional and contemporary instruments, digital projections and imagery and performance. The goal is to take the audience on a journey that will deliver this ancient art form into the new digital era of 21st century China. |
Devendra Sharma Devendra Sharma is a performer, writer, and director of Nautanki, Raaslila, Bhagat, and Rasiya, the traditional musical theatre genres of northern India. He was trained in the famous Swami-Khera Gharana by renowned folk guru Pundit Ram Dayal Sharma. He has given more than five hundred performances to date and directed many films illustrating Indian folk traditions. At present, he is an Assistant Professor of Communication at California State University, Fresno. Sharma’s artistic mission is to use the indigenous performing arts to bring critical attention to contemporary global issues and empower marginalized people. His current Nautanki piece examines the phenomenon of Indian men who come to America from India to study or work and have two romantic partners, one in India and another in America. |
Yannis Adoniou/KUNST STOFF, Catherine Clambaneva, and Leonidas Kassapides Yannis Adoniou, the artistic director of KUNST-STOFF, has become known for his unusual and highly visual theatrical dance works, which merge different art forms, often creating unexpected collisions and provocative beauty. His next artistic project will explore the origins and evolution of Rembetiko in a collaboration with singer Catherine Clambaneva, and shadow theater artist Leonidas Kassapides. Rembetiko music — similar to that of the tango, flamenco, the blues, and Fado — was born out of sorrow, pain, desire, and yearnings, specifically those of Turkish Greek refugees seeking to adjust to a new life in a new country, far from home. |
Dulce Capadocia, Artistic Director of Silayan Philippine-American Dance Company Dulce Capadocia is well-known as an award-winning Artistic Director and storyteller uniquely trained in both contemporary dance and Philippine folk traditions. Her choreography is a theatrical interpretation of her heritage as a Filipina growing up in Los Angeles’ inner city. Capadocia and her critically-acclaimed multi-ethnic Silayan Dance Company will premiere an exciting original dance drama. Taking inspiration from urban sources and her experience being raised in a home where dance and culture flourished, Capadocia’s newest creation examines the cultural phenomenon of the “Hip Hop Tinikling” and promises to be a dramatic, thought-provoking dance theatre expression of the Filipino-American experience. |
Prumsodun Ok Prumsodun Ok is an artist and cultural activist based in Long Beach, California where he teaches filmmaking to inner-city youth with the YMCA Youth Institute, is a videographer for the Cambodian Community History and Archiving Project, and teaches classical Cambodian dance at the Khmer Arts Academy, as well as serving as its curator and media designer. Ok draws upon beliefs of reincarnation and the ritualistic, meditative language of Cambodian classical dance to illustrate a relationship transcendent of form and image, gender and sexuality, to say clearly: “Let love live.” |