LAIR Showcase Featuring Diana Lara, Audrey Johnson, and Kim Ip w/ABG

EastSide Arts Alliance and NAKA Present: LAIR Showcase  

Featuring Diana Lara, Audrey Johnson, Kim Ip - with support from Asian Babe Gang (ABG)

PERFORMANCES:

Friday, October 10 at 7 PM

Saturday, October 11 at 2 PM (ASL interpretation)

Sunday, October 12 at 2 PM (Audio description)

LOCATION:

Eastside Cultural Center

2277 International Blvd, Oakland, CA

TICKETS:

To celebrate EastSide’s 25th Anniversary tickets are free, but reservations are required through EventBrite.

LIVE ARTS IN RESISTANCE (LAIR) is a dynamic series of performance showcases, artist residencies, and community town halls that address racial inequity and white supremacy in popular culture. Collectively, we contribute to a new cultural consciousness of self-determination and indigenous knowledge as integral to our resistance to systemic oppression and imperialism. LAIR is a partnership between NAKA Dance Theater and EastSide Arts Alliance.

Description of Works

Kim Ip - with support from Asian Babe Gang (ABG) will share excerpts from Standard Impatiens, a solo about coming to terms with being culturally and emotionally socialised in a Western country and what it means to tend to a relationship with an immigrant mother. Standard Impatiens is a kind of flower that is able to grow in complete shade--this serves as a metaphor for survival and the desire to grow even in dark conditions.

Diana Lara will share from Yelkaram: Weaving the Ancestral Body, a dance and video-mapping performance that focuses on Honduran Lenca indigenous rituals about weaving traditions and nature protection reinterpreted by a group of artists (Isadora Paz, Gabriel Vallecillo and Diana Lara) with Honduran heritage. The artists traveled to Lenca indigenous communities and collaborated with Murilpaz, a Lenca women indigenous organization, to exchange somatic explorations and rituals in rivers, mountains, and weaving workshops. The performance is inspired by this experience and explores the connection between touch, movement and ancestry. The piece celebrates the strength of the Lenca women to recover and safeguard their traditions and natural resources in the face of extractivism.

Audrey Johnson will experiment with a new iteration of movement pathways and myth-making from her performance moniker Artemisia. Inspired by the bog, the meeting of waters, stands of nettles, mucky spots in brush, the still air of a forest in the afternoon animated with a percussive sound of suddenly moving leaves, the sounding of cicadas before a thunderstorm, an exhale of accepting where you are....the work experiments with tension, fear, shadow, acceptance, and desire. Through unfolding a "new" myth of Artemisia, (a figure deeply informed by African diasporic trickster figures and plant medicines of the Artemisia genus), the artist is curious about troubling and subverting myth-making as a function of nationalist american identity and propaganda. This research comes out of a curiosity about the embodiment of fear and desire, through a practice of being willing to encounter ourselves.

ACCESSIBILITY:

• The Eastside Cultural Center is wheelchair accessible.
• ASL Interpretation offered on Saturday, October 11 only
• Live Audio Description and Haptic Access Tours by Gravity Access Services for visually-impaired audience members on Sunday, October 12 only.
• For audience members who are blind or low vision, listening devices are issued, which transmit a trained describer’s description of what is happening on stage during pauses in dialogue.
• To reserve a headset for audio description, please select RSVP w/ Audio Description Headset. Or call the EastSide Arts Alliance Box Office, MWF, 11-5pm at 510-533-6629.

BIOS:

Kim Ip/KRIMM is a New Zealand born, Queer femme, Chinese American choreographer and movement artist based in the Bay Area. Currently, Kim’s dance practice is inspired by forming long term collaborative relationships with elders. She is proud to be 1/6 of Asian Babe Gang and is honoured to be sharing work for LAIR. Asian Babe Gang (ABG) has been gathering since 2018 in living rooms, parks and dance floors to explore the intersections of queerness, Asian diaspora, political education and friendship. Check it out: www.krimmip.com + ABG's Instagram: @asianbabegang

Diana Lara (she/her) is a Honduran Somatic educator, choreographer, performer with MS. in Kinesiology with emphasis in movement science based in San Francisco U.S. She has presented her work in venues in the San Francisco Bay Area including NohSpace, Dance Mission Theater, Counterpulse, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, Moment’s Notice, TheOffCenter, The Garage, and the Safe House Arts. She has facilitated contact improvisation and dance workshops based on Body-Mind Centering principles in Berkeley, the Performatica Festival at the University of the Americas in Puebla Mexico, the Department of Arts at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. IG,FB: @diana.lara.somatics

Audrey Johnson is a dance artist working in choreography, performance, teaching, and herbalism. Based in Oakland, CA|Ohlone land, originally from Michigan|Anishinaabe land, Audrey's work is grounded in a lineage of queer Black feminist praxis, and experiments with improvisation in refusal of colonized time and space. Her work has been presented around the San Francisco Bay Area and Detroit. She earned a BFA in Dance with Honors from Wayne State University, and was a co-founder of Collective Sweat Detroit. Audreyjohnson.space

Host or Publisher Eastside Arts Alliance