Amy Seiwert's Imagery

 Video Created By Kevin Jenkins and Amy Seiwert

Amy Seiwert's Imagery discusses the creative process behind Sketch 4: Music Mirror and the impact of the creative process. Choreographed by Amy Seiwert and Adam Hougland, Music Mirror addresses how the same sound score can be interpreted by two different choreographers.  

Check out our previous post here to learn more about Sketch 4: Music Mirror.



Imagery Dancers   
Rachel Furst, Brandon Freeman, James Gilmer, Sarah Griffin, Ben Needham-Wood, Weston Krukow, Annali Rose and Katherine Wells.

NAKA Dance Theater, The Anastasio Project

Anastasio Project,  Premiers September 19th - 21st,  8pm at The EastSide Arts Alliance

  Our Current Resident Company, NAKA Dance Theater along with their longtime partner, EastSide Alliance in Oakland present the Anastasio Project. This multidisciplinary public performance investigates race relations, state brutality and border violence using the stories of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas as a point of departure. Hernandez-Rojas was a Mexican national who was detained at the US-Mexican border in May 2010 and then surrounded by over a dozen Customs and Border Patrol Agents, hog-tied and shot with a stun gun while pleading for help. Anastasio died shortly after.

 The Anastasio Project grows out of NAKA's longtime interest in investigating social and environmental issues, and addresses core questions about racial profiling, police brutality, State violence and power structures which are key issues that our community faces on a daily basis.

 The response from artists and cultural workers in the Oakland community has been overwhelmingly positive, inspiring NAKA Dance theater to continue to build these relevant issues with young emerging artists from the Bayview Hunters Point Community during their current residency at Zaccho Studio. Jose Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama of NAKA will partner with racial equity educator Tammy Johnson, Bayview dance artist Michael Turner, Jr. and Zaccho to host monthly Racial Equity forums and planning meetings with community members and artists to discuss the current state of the community in Bayview Hunter's Point and brainstorm projects of interest to residents. NAKA has known and collaborated with Joanna Haigood and Zaccho Dance Theatre for many years, and has asked Ms. Haigood to be a consultant for their upcoming project on how to address social issues through performance, stating that "she has a powerful discourse and history of making work about race relations." NAKA Dance Theater's Residency at Zaccho Studio will culminate in a presentation of what they discover through this process in February, 2015.

The Anastasio Project 

Friday, September 19, 20, & 21
8pm
EastSide Arts Alliance
2277 International Boulevard
Oakland
Tickets: Sliding scale, $10-40
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/722370

 No one turned away for lack of funds 

NAKA Bio

Navarrete x Kajiyama create interdisciplinary performance work using movement, theater, art installation, multimedia and site-specific environments. Their work has been influenced by ritual, cultural studies and the political and environmental concerns of the world in which we live. In the last eight years, the themes of their work have shifted to address their deepening concern with social and environmental issues. Recent themes include: genetic modification of native crops, the commodification of water, cultural colonization and the human response to overwhelming disaster.

Since 2001, NAKA has created work involving members of the Latino transgender community, the local Mexican-American and Japanese-American communities and San Francisco's community of Argentine Tango dancers. From 2005 - 2008, Navarrete x Kajiyama were Artists in Residence at ODC theater. In 2006, NAKA was named one of the 25 to Watch by Dance Magazine. In 2007, they collaborated with visual artists from EastSide Arts Alliance, an organization of artists and community organizers of color in East Oakland, to create the performance environment for The Revenge of Huitlacoche. That same year, Navarrete x Kajiyama were invited to present their work at the Hemispheric Institution on performance and Politics' Encuentro in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2008 and 2014, they were chosen to be the San Francisco representative for SCUBA Touring Network performances in Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Seattle. In 2010/11 NAKA Dance Theater were Irvine Fellows at the Lucas Artist Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center. Their work has been presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theatre, the Queer Arts Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church (NYC), the Yerba Buena Choreographers Festival, California State University East Bay, the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center Performance Series, the Oakland Museum of California and the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.

For more information, visit: www.nkdancetheater.com and www.facebook.com/navarretexkajiyama

Flyaway Productions

    Photo Credit: Rapt Productions

 The recent recipient of two Isadora Duncan Awards, Resident Company Flyaway Productions is proud to announce the world premiere of Multiple Mary and Invisible Jane, an aerial dance about the experience of older homeless women created by Choreographer Jo Kreiter in collaboration with award-winning composer Pamela Z and journalist Rose Aguilar. In this unusually arresting aerial dance set on an 80 foot wall in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, Multiple Mary and Invisible Jane offers a riveting portrait of the nature of housing security and how it eludes so many older women in San Francisco.

 The work aims not only to make visible "old ladies" who live on the street, but to nurture a connection between them and the available resources - including women's shelters and family based SROs - that the company's community partner, Episcopal Community Services, has to offer. The site of the performance is located at the edge of the Tenderloin and Civic Center neighborhoods, where the city's extremes of privilege and deprivation crash into each other. UC Hastings College of the Law, an institution that for decades has supported a project focusing on the needs of homeless people terminated from General Assistance Welfare, has generously donated it's wall at 333 Golden Gate Avenue to Flyaway's production. The premiere of Multiple Mary represents the second in a trilogy of large-scale pieces created by Flyaway for performance in the Central Market area of San Francisco. Like Niagara Falling, the first in the series, Multiple Mary focuses on urban poverty. While Niagara offered a national perspective on the problem, Multiple Mary provides a distinctly feminist lens. The piece has its roots in "Old, Female and Homeless", an article published in the Nation last year by collaborator Rose Aguilar. Aguilar reports that the population of older homeless women has grown dramatically in the last 20 years. "It used to be that homeless women over 50 were blessedly rare," she writes. "Today, it's the norm."

 With the help of Aguilar and the Episcopal Community Services, Kreiter has gathered oral histories from women living on the streets of San Francisco, which she uses as source material in Multiple Mary. In tandem with the show's 12 performances, Flyaway will host a series of "curbside chats" bringing passersby into a conversation about homelessness. Participants in this series include Aguilar, the director of the General Assistance Advocacy Project supported by UC Hastings, as well as the women whose stories are featured in Multiple Mary. The curbside chats will take place in the two weeks leading up to the performances, as well as at post-performance receptions on the street. "The arts have a unique capacity to raise awareness and build constituencies for social justice issues, and site-specific artworks are especially adept at meeting people where they are," says Kreiter. "At its core, Flyaway's work exposes the range and power of female physicality, and from there, reaches out to communities who are confronted in some way by injustice."

 Composer Pamela Z and Kreiter have worked together off and on for nearly 20 years. Z's use of the human voice as an instrument marries perfectly with Kreiter's interest in giving voice to those without. The sound score will integrate the voices and stories of San Francisco's elder homeless women. Multiple Mary runs for ten evenings, Friday to Saturday, September 12th - 13th, and Thursday to Saturday, September 18th - 20th. In addition, two noon performances will take place Wednesday and Thursday, September 17th - 18th.   All performances are Free.  Performers in Multiple Mary form a multi-generational ensemble including Becca Dean, Laura Elaine Ellis,
Mary Starr Hope, Erin Mei-­Ling Stewart, Alayna Stroud and Esther Wrobel.

 The world premiere of Multiple Mary and Invisible Jane is made possible by The National Endowment for the Arts, Grants for the Arts, The Lighting Arts and Dance Award promoted by the California Arts Council, Dancer's Group, The Zellerbach Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Flyaway's generous individual donors and Zaccho Studio's Residency Program.

 Jo Kreiter is a choreographer with a background in political science. Through dance she engages imagination, physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. Her lineage includes gymnastics, Chinese pole acrobatics and 14 years as a principle dancer in Zaccho Dance Theatre. Kreiter / Flyaway is the recipient of two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, a 2013 Center for Cultural Innovation Award, an Artist Investigator Award from Cal Shakespeare, a 2012 Gerbode Award, a 2012 CHIME Across Boarders grant with Elizabeth Streb, and grants from the Creative Work Fund and the MAP Fund. Her articles have been published in Contact Quarterly, In Dance, STREET ART San Francisco and Site Dance - the first book written in contemporary site-specific performance.

Jo Kreiter has been a Resident Company of Zaccho Studio since Flyaway Production's inception in 1995, and has been hosting year round workshops at Zaccho since 1996. "Zaccho has been my artistic home for a long time. It is a fabulous studio to make dances in, especially if they are off the ground," says Kreiter. "You walk in and you immediately feel like you have left the regular world and entered a place of elegance and creativity. The sense of space is magnificent there, as are the views of the city, the afternoon light, and the people who call the studio home. You won't go wrong if you study, train or invent your master piece at Zaccho!"

dawson dance

fabbrica materasso d'argento performance at Zaccho Studio

dawson dance sf is pleased to announce the launch of its new company website.  Please visit dawsondancesf.org for information on artist profiles, upcoming performances, and ways to support the company in its mission to bring new and exciting works to the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.  In particular, a New Kickstarter Campaign has been launched, and the company can be seen performing in San Francisco, Southern California, and New York this season.  Excited to be making San Francisco's Zaccho Studio its home base, dawson dance sf is looking forward to a season of passionate and innovative work.  Please check the company’s website and Zaccho's AIR Blog regularly for news regarding current and forthcoming projects.

Amy Seiwert Artist in Residence

July is a very special time here at Zaccho Studio! For the past four summers, we have had the immense pleasure of hosting AIR Amy Seiwert and her Imagery Dancers during the creation of their SKETCH series. The SKETCH series was launched in 2011 as a platform for experimentation and innovation in ballet based choreography. Each choreographer self identifies a risk and uses that as their departure point for creation. Opportunities for pure choreographic exploration and development are almost non-existent in the ballet world, and rarely do they come with the freedom or resources that choreographers need to truly experiment. The SKETCH series was created specifically as a resource for choreographers to abandon their comfort zone. Each year the series has a theme. For 2014, that theme will be the relationship between music and dance.  

SKETCH 4 | Music Mirror is an exploration of how two very different ballet choreographers interpret the same piece of original music by composer Kevin Keller. The commissioned music will be performed live by Amy Seiwert's Imagery (ASI), where Choreographers Seiwert and Adam Hougland will collaborate with Keller in the creation of new works, culminating in public performances at ODC Theater. 

The impact of SKETCH on both artists and audiences is significant. For the composer and choreographers, it is a chance to revel in possibility and creative ambition; for the dancers, it is an opportunity to participate directly in creation; for audiences, SKETCH provides access to the creative process. The works-in-process showings that take place at Zaccho Studio, as well as performances at ODC Theater (in San Francisco July 24-27 2014) with talk-backs and receptions happening at ODC on July 26th 2014, allow for a deep exchange between the audience and artists.

Amy Seiwert  serves as the Artistic Director and primary choreographer of Imagery. Her collaborations with artists of other disciplines and commitment to experimental work from a classical base make her a unique voice in the SF dance community. She is honored to be the Choreographer in Residence for Smuin Ballet as well as an Artist in Residence at the ODC Theater and Zaccho Studio.

Gregory Dawson Artist in Residence

Our most featured AIR of 2014 is Artistic Director Gregory Dawson and his company dawson dance sf! They have re-established an enormous presence in San Francisco with the presentation of their highly successful World Premier fabricca matterasso d'argento. A high-energy and hard-hitting ballet, fabricca is set to the music of Alton San Giovanni and inspired by Langston Hughes' poem Dreams. As said by Ray Mark Rinaldi of the Denver Post, "The piece is an intimate, sensual and surreal marathon that pushes the dancers to the limits".

 In his second production as AIR, Gregory Dawson embarked on the exciting and challenging territory of aerial dance with his Intrinsic Motion Project, staging his own highly ambitious, high-impact style of choreography off of the ground. Informed and inspired by his previous work as a dancer with Zaccho Dance Theatre, Gregory turned to Artistic Director Joanna Haigood for consulting on aerial techniques and safe practices. Zaccho's House Rigger, Sean Riley of Gravity Design, was also on board to rig the dancers' apparatus, allowing them to safely explore the realm of dancing in the rafters and zip across the floor with ropes.

Video Footage of this highly ambitious and successful new project can be seen here:

Gregory Dawson  retired from Lines Ballet in 2005 and began to teach and choreograph for Alonzo King's LINES Ballet BFA at Dominican University California and for LINES Ballet Training Program. Students from the LINES BFA Program were selected to represent the Southwest Region and perform his Solid Soil Beneath Our Feet at the National College Dance Festival in New York. Mr Dawson has also been on faculty for the San Francisco High School for the Arts for the last eight years. 

 In 2007 he formed dawsondancesf. In 2008 he choreographed Which Light in the Sky is Us for Company C which was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Award for Choreography. In 2009, he became Assistant Director of the CCCSA Dance Dept. In the spring of 2010, Mr. Dawson reset Venus for the 2010 season of David Taylor Dance (DTD), and in spring 2011 created a new ballet for DTD, Big Sky Endless Mountains. 

In the fall of 2011, Mr Dawson became Director of Dawson Wallace Dance Project in Denver, Colorado (formally David Taylor Dance). In 2011 Dawson was selected to receive a CHIME Grant to be mentored by Elizabeth Streb for one year, ending in December of 2012. In 2013, the Denver Post named Dawson the Best Choreographer in Denver. In September of 2013, dawsondancesf re-established it's presence in San Francisco with the World Premier of fabricca matterasso d'argento at Zaccho Studio, the company's new home.