(This is a draft of an article for Dance & Theatre Journal (UK)...but it is way too long for them so I am also seeking other sites for distribution...your comments and suggestions are very welcome, especially via email. thanks.)
848 was an artist-run, collective art space and home in San Francisco. Inspired by Tim Miller and Linda Burnham at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, I went to an Alternate ROOTS gathering at the site of the original Black Mountain College in the summer of ‘91. I met people who were fusing community-based art-making with social justice work, devising original works for the stage across genres, and having a very developed conversation on race that I wasn’t having in San Francisco. That fall, some friends moved out of a funky, second floor, commercial space on Divisadero Street...
Read moreA performance poem based on a protest chant spontaneously created by 30 or 40 mostly anarchists and witches during a protest against the first Gulf war, in February 1991. When AWOL (Artists and Writers Out Loud) asked me to perform at a rally "after the war", I scribbled it down and yelled it from a megaphone in front of SF City Hall. Then it was integrated into my solo performance, The King Is Dead (Long Live The King) which was presented in San Francisco and Auckland. In collaboration with Essex Hemphill (RIP), the text was edited slightly and then performed as a duet to benefit The Bastard Review at New College of California, later in 1991.
Dedicated to the 200,000 Bay Areans who publicly protested the oil war.
Read morefrom the solo performance Chosen (2005).
(Performed in a re-purposed, long, white wedding gown with fetish details by Jack Davis, periodically drinking apple cider vinegar with a straw, gagging and drooling excessively, while standing on the fire escape of Dance Mission Theater in a piss and junk alley off 24th St. in San Francisco.)
A piss and vinegar letter in honor of the dead world citizens
since September 11, 2001...
Read more... Then Sellars asks a really big question about the role of culture in globalization, and much more. Ponifasio does not answer the question and this is only the beginning of a relationship where two colleagues speak about the same project from two very different positions. Ponifasio’s refusal to answer questions, or to directly address Seller’s framing of the issues, becomes a kind of game among colleagues with mutual respect. It’s as if Sellars agrees to ‘play’ the white man so that Ponifasio can speak from a position of difference and resistance. He reminded me of several Native or indigenous teachers I have experienced, who resist the (white, liberal framing of the) interview process almost as a matter of principle....
Read moreHere are some of my favorite responses to Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA poli sci student who, during the stress of exam week, uploaded an anti-Asian rant. If you haven't seen her Youtube video, here's the re-posting which had received over 5 million hits in about 2 weeks...
Read moreTwo hours of folkloric performance – storytelling, shadow dancing, masks, dance, martial arts – appropriated in the service of hoity-toity art. Brook would have referred to this bourgeois exercise as deadly theater, meaning soulless or no longer relevant to today’s audiences and issues. But slapping this production with the label of deadly is a complicated move. The makers of this performance and the tactics they celebrate (with their considerable personal and financial investment) are heavily influenced by Brook’s generation of dance, theater, art, and social experimentation. What went wrong? I mean besides the gentrification of the world through a corporate takeover of government and society?...
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