The Mapping Project

Description

The Mapping Project is an evening of installation performance created by Navarrete x Kajiyama, Element Dance Theater, visual artist Ilya Noe, and animator Chris Lanier. The work explores the human penchant for creating maps of our geographies and our histories, and will include oral histories, dance, theater, sculptural stage design, and video projections.

The Mapping Project explores the ways in which mapmaking can drive our perceptions of the world, and the ways in which we can create our own maps to change our realities. Using visual installation, narrative, and contemporary movement, the artists will construct ancestral and present-day maps that examine the fallout of history through family stories and political dynamics. These maps will trace some of the strange continuities between the upheavals of the mid-20th century and the current "War on Terror," and address current debates on immigration across the highly charged US-Mexico border.

Co-artistic Director of Navarrete x Kajiyama, Debby Kajiyama said of the project, "Although we often think of maps as objective representations of the world, maps have often been used to illustrate the reality that colonialists wanted to impose on a territory and the people living there. Map creators were often successful at imposing their borders and categories, thus altering people's lives and conceptions of themselves. But maps have also been used as a tool of empowerment throughout history by those who dared to question existing classifications, boundaries, and ways of seeing the world. In the theater, we will distort the normal orientation of the audience-performer relationship by using the space in unexpected ways. We will theatrically create a zone where North becomes South; South becomes North."

Navarrete x Kajiyama and Element Dance Theater have repeatedly dealt with political and historical themes, giving theatrical form to contemporary anxieties. The two companies have come together for this project to re-map the traditional borders between dance companies and visual artists. They are joined for this project by guest visual artist Ilya Noe from Mexico City who said of the collaboration, "Our hope is that this collaborative cross-pollination will challenge us to take artistic risks and generate fertile soil for new ideas and ways of working together."

This project has been funded in part by the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Lanier Family Foundation.

Navarrete x Kajiyama
Navarrete x Kajiyama has a passion for immersing themselves in communities and sub-cultures, exploring people's histories, and expressing experiences through performance that is accessible, but that challenges the viewer to reflect on our times. Their modern dance theater vocabulary has been enriched by studies of Japanese Taiko drumming, Latin American social dances (such as Tango and Danzón), and the cultural significance of these community-building art forms. Since 2001, Navarrete x Kajiyama has created work involving members of the Latino transgender community, the Mexican-American community, the Japanese-American community, and the local community of Argentine Tango dancers. This year, 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. This past summer, Navarrete x Kajiyama was invited to present their work at the Hemispheric Institute on Performance and Politics' Encuentro in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in 2008, they will tour to Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Seattle as part of the SCUBA National Touring Dance Alliance.

Navarrete x Kajiyama's work has been shown in the West Wave Dance Festival, ODC Theater, Dance Mission Theater, the Queer Arts Festival's Fresh Meat, Arts in Action (Los Angeles), Judson Church (NYC), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the East Bay Dance Festival, and the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center Performance Series. Last year, Navarrete x Kajiyama was named one of the 25 to Watch by Dance Magazine. Their work has also been presented by the Yerba Buena Choreographers Festival, California State University at Hayward, the Oakland Museum of California, and the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. They have taught dance to youth and adults in the San Francisco Bay Area and Mexico.

Element Dance Theater
Element Dance Theater's mission is to produce engaging dance works for San Francisco audiences that explore the physical and emotional effects of contemporary culture on the body, using a range of styles and mediums that resonate with today's viewers. The company grew out of work its Artistic Director, Kristin Heavey, began while earning an M.A. in Dance Education at Stanford University in 1998. Element dancers come from a variety of technical backgrounds, including Cunningham technique, release technique, trapeze, theatre, ballet, and gymnastics. The company investigates how styles clash and harmonize, forging an energetic choreographic hybrid capable of creating meaning in our cultural landscape. Element has staged a number of full-length evening works. Civi[lies]ed (1999) explored the myths of polite human society and our too-close-for-comfort relationship to animal behavior. Solitude (2002) considered the effect of media images on human relationships, using a split-level set with aerially suspended furniture, which dancers climbed over and swung from. Aerial work was expanded in Full Scale in 2003, a piece created in reaction to the increased militarization of U.S. society in the wake of 9/11. It included, in its set design, two rotating cages or scales that, at various times, provided avenues of escape or entrapment — zones where figures who were hooded or blindfolded worked out their histories and their fates. Zoetrope (2004/2005) employed multimedia projection to look at the entwined development of dance and animation, the one form based upon movement, and the other upon the illusion of movement. In 2006, Kristin Heavey and Element Dancer Anne-Lise Reusswig created choreography for the stage production The Faith Project, performed at the Mondavi Center at UC Davis.

Element Dance Theater's work has been presented at ODC as part of the Flight series, the Women on the Way festival, and as an opening for Dance Brigade's "Cave Women 2000," as well as being staged at the Cowell Theater, Venue 9, Dance Mission, UC Hayward, Stanford University, and the Electric Light Lodge. The company has been privileged to receive funding from the Zellerbach Family Fund, Theater Bay Area, and San Francisco Grants for the Arts.

More Info

Link

http://www.sfiaf.org/2008/artists/dance/info.php?12

Call

415-399-9554 (Box Office)