NAKA Dance Theater
(CA)
2024
Founded in 2001, NAKA Dance Theater creates interdisciplinary performance works that explore ritual, cultural studies, and contemporary socio-political and environmental issues. Through dance, storytelling, multimedia installations, and site-specific environments, NAKA builds deep partnerships with communities, engages people’s histories and folklore, and expresses experiences through accessible performances that challenge the viewer to think critically about social justice issues. NAKA brings together and creates rapport among diverse populations, encouraging dialogue and civic participation. Rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area’s culturally diverse communities, NAKA has also established a strong relationship w/Casa Tecmilco (Morelos, Mexico), whose mission is to support a network of small, hyper-local resistance movements across Mexico on land rights, migration and forced disappearance. NAKA has been presented by Dancers’ Group’s ONSITE, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC, Queer Arts Festival, Yerba Buena Choreographers Festival, Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center Performance Series, the Oakland Museum of California and San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.
Dismantling Tactic X
Visiting Artists | October 11 – 22, 2024
Collaborators in Residence: Krhistina Giles, Cristina López Suárez, Marshall Trammell, Amelia Uzategui Bonilla, Oka Ver [Collaborators], Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz [Writer]
NAKA Dance Theater further developed their latest work, Dismantling Tactic X at MANCC in October. In preparation, NAKA’s co-founders and artistic leadership, José Ome Navarrete Mazatl and Debby Kajiyama, came to MANCC for a site visit from April 9 – 15, 2024, to begin forming connections among the campus-wide and civic communities of Tallahassee to continue their interdisciplinary performance practice and work within social justice. Founded in 2001, NAKA utilizes dance, storytelling, multimedia installations, and site-specific environments to not only encourage dialogue but challenge viewers to think more critically about social justice issues.
While at MANCC in October, NAKA Dance Theater teamed up with the Big Bend AFTER Re-Entry Coalition to offer two creative workshops. This kind of community engagement and activism is fundamental to the way NAKA Dance Theater creates work while keeping community voices a part of the conversation. The first workshop began with a community lunch, followed by movement, shared ideas, and rhythm exploration, ending with a final group dance created by individual gestures of the whole group in attendance. Many of the attendees shared their excitement and expressed a sense of freedom and fun that accompanied their participation in this creative embodied practice. The second workshop offered inside this community was a poetry workshop, led by Tongo Eisen-Martin, NAKA collaborator and poet laureate of San Francisco.
Marshall Tramell, a musician and collaborator in residence with NAKA, presented a counter-hegemonic, participatory research Insurgent Learning Workshop for re-imagining the Underground Railroad quilt code patterns in today’s political landscape. The workshop involved using heated scrap metal to burn patterns into pieces of wood. FSU Ceramics Lab Manager, Gregg Matthews, built a “venturi” style propane kiln burner in support of the project. The resulting art pieces were shared with faculty and staff during a School of Dance forum later in the residency.
Professor Erika Nyborg-Burch, clinical professor at FSU and director of the College of Law’s Farmworker and Immigration Rights Clinic, met virtually with Navarrete and Kajiyama prior to their residency to discuss the state of farm workers and organizations that support them in the Big Bend Region. During their site visit in April, they had a meeting with Professor Terry Coonan, executive director of the Florida State University Center for the Advancement of Human Rights as well as Associate Professor of Criminology at Florida State University. During their October residency, NAKA Dance Theatre had the opportunity to meet with Professor Coonan again and share the development of their work.
The residency included an informal viewing of a film relative to their research, and two informal showings of their work-in-progress; one in the Black Box Theatre inside FSU’s School of Dance building, and another in the lobby of the Residence Marriott Hotel where they resided during their residency.
NAKA Dance Theater’s residency was made possible by support from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Mellon Foundation
Dismantling Tactic X
Visiting Artists | April 9 – 15, 2024
NAKA Dance Theater’s co-founders and artistic leadership, José Ome Navarrete Mazatl and Debby Kajiyama, came to MANCC for the first time for a site visit in Spring 2024 in preparation for their full ensemble residency in Fall 2024 where they will work on the newest iteration of their work, Dismantling Tactic X.
During their Fall 2024 MANCC residency, NAKA Dance Theater, consisting of Mazatl, Kajiyama and their invited cohort of social-change artists, will further investigate how artists and venues can be in community, modeling resistance to practices of white supremacy. The project supports a vision to develop methods of inquiry used during the cohort’s time together to fuel a cathartic game-changing conversation around privilege, supremacy, economics, and race. In gathering artists who have devoted their lives and practices towards addressing these systemic issues in various localities, Mazatl and Kajiyama build a foundation for initiating conversations, practices and consciousness shifts within the larger community.
To lay important groundwork for their fall residency work during this site visit, Mazatl and Kajiyama met with several Florida State University faculty. These faculty included Professor Paolo Annino, Director of the Public Interest Law Center and Director of the Children’s Advocacy Clinic; Professor Terry Coonan, Executive Director of the Florida State University Center for the Advancement of Human Rights; Liz Iaconis, Civic Engagement Programs Coordinator at the Center for Leadership and Service; Dr. Felecia Jordan, Communication Professor with a specialization in Interpersonal and Cultural Communication; Anne Meisenzahl, Founder of the Big Bend AFTER Reentry Coalition; Dr. Hannah Schwadron, FSU School of Dance Faculty and co-founder of the Tallahassee Bail Fund; and Elaine Webb, the Welcome Center Coordinator at the Big Bend AFTER Reentry Coalition.
With the multiple connections made and information gained during their site visit, Mazati and Kajiyama will return to MANCC with their full NAKA Dance Theater ensemble to further develop Dismantling X, which builds upon NAKA’s previous Dismantling experiments. A new section that they want to develop aims to bring individuals with very different perspectives together in conversation to learn, feel and think together in vulnerable and generative ways about the issues that may divide us as a population, within the United States and globally. Discussions within and outside of the university and through a shared creative dancing practice will aim to reveal pathways whereby innovative artists can digest, reorient, and present themselves.