BURNING WILD Presented by AVIVA Arts

This show:

• Involves the use of personal audio equipment. Please bring your cell phone and headphones.
• Is about the California wildfires and shares real-life stories about evacuation from fire. Content is suitable for ages 10 and up.
• Invites you to arrive up to 30 minutes before show time to experience some of the visual and sculptural aspects of the multidisciplinary show.

BURNING WILD is a devised interdisciplinary performance in response to the California wildfires of 2020. It began as a community gathering circle to support Northern Californians affected by the wildfires.

Recent 2020 fire survivors themselves, Debórah and Noor draw from their lived experience using personal stories of their relationship to home and placemaking from The Middle East to the Bay Area.

This experience uses text, song, movement, and documentary video to describe a collaged docu-myth about the land, displacement, trauma and renewal.

In a time when a prolonged megafire season is an annual occurrence, Burning Wild offers an opportunity for resilience, hope and community healing. This is done by returning agency back to the audience and blurring performance distinctions such as dance, theater, audio design and song with social justice and cultural advocacy.

Conceived, Directed, and Produced by Debórah Eliezer

Co-Artistic Collaborators: Noor Adabachi, Pamela Hollings, Yiyo Ornelas, Cynthia Ling Lee, Nicky Martinez and Vidhu Singh, PhD.

Guest Artists: Annabelle Berrios, Gabriel Cortez and Pepe Santamaria

Walbridge Fire Dramaturgy: Vidhu Singh, PhD

Script Dramaturgy: Pamela Hollings

Production Manager: Sánchez Sánchez

Sound Designer: Jules Indelicato

Graphic Designer: Stephanie Whigham

Video Editor: Nicky Martinez

Workshop Director/Choreographer: Cynthia Ling Lee

PLAN YOUR VISIT:

Burning Wild is both an indoor and outdoor experience. Please dress accordingly and wear comfortable walking shoes. If you have any mobility concerns, please let us know.

Plan to spend 90-120 minutes with us.

Please arrive at Dogpatch Hub at least 15 minutes early to check in and setup the audio experience on your phone. Dogpatch Hub has WiFi and restrooms available. The show will begin and end from here.

From the Hub, you will be guided on a very short walk to Progress Park, where the audio drama and live performances will continue. This is a small-group, participatory experience and you may be invited to engage with others.

Closing the experience, audience members will be led back to Dogpatch Hub for an optional tea salon.

Debórah Eliezer, (she/her) Writer, performer, Producer is a mixed identity white/MENA theater maker, social activist, community designer and California fire survivor living and working on the unceded territories of the Ramaytush Ohlone and Southern P’omo. She is the Artistic Director of Aviva Arts, an Associate Artist with Golden Thread, an artEquity arts facilitator alumna, and serves on the inaugural MENA Alliance of Theatre Makers steering committee (MENATMA). Passionate about the power of human transformation, her work focuses on disrupting assumptions about art, human values and society. She has devised and performed in numerous world premieres, working with playwrights Katie Pearl, Kate Tarker, Yussef el Guindi, Denmo Ibrahim, Torange Yeghiazarian, Fabrice Melquiot, Angela Santillo, Sheila Callaghan, Doug Dorst, Ben Yalom and Dan Chumley. With foolsFURY, Eliezer wrote and performed (dis)Place[d] which toured the FURY Factory, Ko Fest, Olivia Cruises and Limmud UK in 2019 and is featured in Michael Malek Najjar’s book, . She holds a BA Cum Laude from SFSU and a certificate in Sound, Voice Music Healing from CIIS. Eliezer is the Associate Director of Kids on Camera. As a professional voiceover, you may have heard her voice in over 25 Leapfrog Toys, Sims 2, 3 and 4 video games or numerous radio ads. She teaches throughout the Bay Area and maintains a private coaching practice.

Noor Adabachi, (he/him) Environmental & Community designer, is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts: CalArts where he studied set and costume design. Past designs for foolsFURY include (dis)Place[d], directed by Ben Yalom, The Unheard of World, directed by Michelle Haner, and Faulted, directed by Evren Odcikin. After working on theater and dance productions in Los Angeles in the early 80's he concentrated on custom furniture design and fabrication, creating work for Milton Katselas, Oprah Winfrey, Catherine Bell, Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil and many others. His work has been featured in architectural magazines and on E The Entertainment Channel. Since 2016 Adabachi has co-stewarded Venado Arts and Farm center, an educational center for arts and farming in Sonoma County, California. A recent fire survivor of the LNU Sonoma County fires in 2020, Adabachi is currently rebuilding Venado and working on sculptural elements for a new project about his experience in the California wildfires entitled Burning Wild.

Pamela Hollings (she/they) is a theater-maker, working as a director, dramaturg, educator, actor, deviser and writer, depending on the project. She is the Curation & Education Director at 3Girls Theatre, and an ensemble member of Aviva Arts (formerly foolsFURY). She was the Board Chair (2013-2021), as well as an ensemble member (2018-2022) of foolsFURY Theater and the former Artistic Managing Director of both The Yat/Bentley Centre for Performance, SF Bay Area and Soup Kitchen Theatre, Melbourne, Australia. She was the dramaturg for foolsFURY on (dis)Place[d] by Debórah Eliezer and Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man by Kate Tarker and has directed and been dramaturg on numerous plays in development at 3Girls Theatre and elsewhere. She has directed many plays, including the Australian premiere of Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang. She trained in Theatre Direction at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) whose distinguished alums include Cate Blanchett, Judy Davis, Baz Luhrmann and many more. She has studied Nature Awareness and Relational Education through Weaving Earth and has strong interests in group process, peacemaking, ritual and storytelling in all its forms.

Dr Vidhu Singh, (she/her) Dramaturg, Co-Writer, Performer, Vidhu Singh’s pioneering efforts as dramaturg, director and scholar have promoted the visibility of South Asian theater in the American theater. She holds a Masters degree in Dramatic Art from UC Santa Barbara and a doctorate from UH Manoa’s Asian Theatre program. Her research on India’s regional experimental 1990s theater movement has provided a vital contextual foundation to the life of Indian theater today.

Vidhu is a resident artist at Brava Theater; a core member of Theatre without Borders; a graduate of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors’ Lab; a founding member of World Wide Lab and the founder of RasaNova Theater.

Vidhu’s passion for dramaturgy emerged from the need for culturally conscious dramaturgy for new plays, including South Asian plays translated from regional languages. Vidhu’s fluency in a variety of cultural and aesthetic forms, her dramaturgy training, her scholarship, and her passion for theater have made her contribution to the American theater truly unique. Cal Shakes recognized this uniqueness by honoring Vidhu with the 2020 Luminary Award in dramaturgy. Recent highlights include Third Eye Moonwalk by Jon Bernson with Playwrights Foundation, BUILD From Here: the Future of Ensemble Theaters 2020 with foolsFURY Theater Company, House of Joy by Madhuri Shekar with Cal Shakes in 2019 and Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 2018, and Golden Thread Productions’ ReOrient 2017 Festival of Short Plays.

Guillermo “Yiyo” Ornelas (they/them) Performer, is a theater creator, teaching artist, and arts education advocate. As a first-generation Mexican-American, they understand the impact that an arts education can have, especially to members of vulnerable communities. Most recently, they performed at Brava Theater in Richard Montoya's, Translating Selena. They have worked with Campo Santo, Fuse, and foolsFury to help develop new work. Yiyo has served as the Vice-Chair for the Arts Education Alliance of the Bay Area (AEABA) to ensure that arts education be equitable and accessible to all members of the community. Guillermo holds a B.A from UC Berkeley, double majoring in Sociology and Theater & Performance Studies, having received the Mark Goodson award for ‘Distinguished Artistic Talent.’ Prior to transferring to UC Berkeley, they led a weekly theater workshop for runaway and homeless youth in Redlands, California. They’ve worked with local communities to encourage youth and their families to foster creative modes of expression, through the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, the Teatro Project, and JumpStart. They currently work as an outreach coordinator and teaching artist with San Francisco Youth Theater

Gabriel Cortez is a poet, educator, and organizer based in the Bay Area, California. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Breakbeat Poets Anthology Volume 4, and elsewhere. A VONA and Poetry Incubator fellow, he has received awards from the University of California, Palette Poetry, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Gabriel is the inaugural poet in residence at The Ecology Center and Shelterwood Collective, where he uses poetry and arts education to uplift local legacies of resistance rooted in environmental justice and food and land sovereignty. He is a member of the artist collective, Ghostlines, and co-founder of The Root Slam, an award-winning poetry venue dedicated to inclusivity, justice, and artistic growth, as well as Write Home, a project working to challenge public perceptions of houselessness and shift critical resources to houseless Bay Area youth through poetry and arts programming.
Gabriel serves as secretary on the board of directors of Performing Arts Workshop, a BIPOC-led Bay Area nonprofit organization established in 1965 dedicated to anti-racist practices, equalizing access to arts and arts education, and helping young people develop critical thinking, creative expression, Socio-Emotional Learning, and essential life skills. From 2014 to 2023, he served as Lead Poet Mentor and Director of Programs at Youth Speaks, one of the world’s leading presenters of spoken word performance, education, and youth development programs.
Gabriel is of Black, white, and Panamanian descent. His work explores power, identity, belonging, and gold teeth. For more, visit

Annabelle Berríos, she/her: Annabelle is a weaver, experimenter and storyteller. She has ancestral roots in Borikén, the Taíno name for Puerto Rico, where she was born and raised. She is a person of Taino, African and Spanish heritage who currently resides in the ancestral lands of the Ohlone, now known as Berkeley, California.

Annabelle has a law degree from Boston College Law School. She also has a Master of Arts in East West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she focused her studies in Terrapsychology and Holistic Education. She is the author of “Alternative Mapping: Tracking Solidarity with Sacred Land” in Terrapsychology: Further Inquiry into Self, Place and Planet, Craig Chalquist, Garret Barnwell (Ed.), (Routledge 2023) and “Traveling Landscapes” in Vento e Agua online magazine, 2022, among other publications.

Nicky Martinez (they/them) Performer, Video Editor, is a Latiné genderfluid theatre activist who was born and raised in San Francisco. They have a BA in Performing Arts and Social Justice from the University of San Francisco. They are a solo performing artist, poet, published playwright, and visual artist. In their art, they focus on social issues like having queer and trans identities, racial inequities, mental health, and femme rights. They currently work at Theatre Bay Area as a Program and Grants Coordinator and are involved with several ensemble companies like FoolsFURY, Ragged Wing, You Don't Know Me, and others.

Sánchez Sánchez (they them , elle elles) is a first generation Mexican American actor, director, and dramaturg from the Southside of Chicago. They are a history buff who attended NYU for Drama and Latino Studies--aspira unir el mundo del teatro con el público Latino. They focus on work by, for, and about Latinos in hopes of having their image reflected back at them. Sánchez invites audiences into the world of the productions they work on by helping them take a deeper look at the traditional family values upheld in Latin households, y ayudándolos entender que la única manera de avanzar hacia su futuro es sanar del pasado.

Host or Publisher Aviva Arts