Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener performing in 2017 as part of the Marfa Sounding: Anna Halprin festival with Marfa Live Arts. Photo: Amitava Sarkar. Over the last decade, I’ve gone from being a dance critic who covered Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener from afar to a friend, collaborator, and sometimes curator. The duo has performed [...]
The very elements that made Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 (henceforth referred to as We are Proud to Present…) amusing also made it troubling. The play, a play about the making of a [...]
“No Deportations on Stolen Land,” Albuquerque Indigenous Peoples Day, 2018. Photo: Nick Estes. “Go back to where you came from!” a white woman screamed at us at the Los Angeles International Airport. We laughed at the absurdity of the notion. The biting humor of the late Haudenosaunee and Cree comedian Charlie Hill quickly came to [...]
During the Inherited Bodies post-performance discussion at the Women’s Building. From left to right: Kanyon Sayers-Roods (Mutsun-Ohlone, California Native), who began the evening with a land acknowledgment in Yelamu; artists Sara Shelton Mann and Snowflake Towers; moderator Claudia La Rocco; artists Nadhi Thekkek and Jarrel Phillips; and Hope Mohr, the co-presenter of Inherited Bodies. My [...]
The Oakland Cannery lies on an industrial stretch of San Leandro Street alongside the rapid-transit BART tracks in East Oakland; amid a landscape of warehouses, auto repair shops, and RV camps, the building houses a complex of artists’ live/work spaces. The original settler and founder, a widely respected artist, educator, and community activist, is Arthur [...]
You’re dead but I’m writing you. We can’t know that letters don’t reach the dead. I don’t mean I’m sending this anywhere, that I know where to send letters for the dead. I mean writing — which is technically just lettering a blank page — I mean that if I mean to write to someone, [...]
We commissioned ten Bay Area artists — Sofía Córdova, Alex Escalante, Maxe Crandall, Dazaun Soleyn, Danishta Rivero, Julie Moon, Christy Funsch, Jenny Odell, Nicole Peisl, and Sophia Wang — to participate in a two-week residency with choreographers and former Cunningham dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, and then to make new works. These will premiere [...]
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk to the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the Wattis Institute on CCA’s San Francisco campus. To get there: I walked west toward the train on 40th St. in Oakland, through the hip-salon-bar-and-café corridor that used to be quiet save for Art’s Crab Shack, the Ella Baker [...]