Works-in-Progress

Short video works by Malick Ceesay, Marcela Michelle, Akiko, Addison Sharpe, and Kealoha Ferreira

Wednesday, June 2, 7 pm and Thursday, June 3, 7 pm

Presented live via Zoom. Video recording available to festival passholders through the end of the festival.

Akiko

28h

A multimedia piece with dance, poetry, and theater: it’s about wondering what tomorrow will look like after this social and political chaos, and wondering out loud how to build a new reality coming out of this time. 

Akiko is a visual artist, performance artist, teaching artist, curator, and an activist who lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A native of Osaka, Japan, she uses poetry, music, dance, collage, found objects and shadow puppetry to tell stories that reflect her time, and a narrative of immigrant women of color that is often underrepresented in white eurocentric society.

Collaborators: Peter Morrow, Ryan Milling, Crystal Spring

Marcela Michelle

Good Evening, My Name Is (GEMNI)

Good Evening, My Name Is (GEMNI) is a collection of works concerned with simultaneity, im/mutablity, and the platonic ideal host. Under the direction of Marcela Michelle, four trans/artists/activists/friends/collaborators work towards a we. In an empty theatre/In a downtown loft/In my/our/your bed/Under her eye/Do you remember when you had to be a serious multi-hyphenate to host an awards ceremony? What do I have to do to convince you that I am me?  

Marcela Michelle was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas on Payaya land and now lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Dakota land. She identifies most closely with Black/Indigenous/Mexican American communities, Trans/Queer/Lesbian-Identified communities, and various intersections therein. She is currently the Artistic Director of 20% Theatre Company, now in it’s 15th and final season. She is also the Artistic Co-Director and Director of Programming for Lightning Rod - a Trans-led arts organism. Lightning Rod is focused on legacy, development, and opportunity for QTGNC Artists and Activists. For more info about past/present/future works visit www.tctwentypercent.org. 

Collaborators: Commarrah J. Yochanan, Kat Purcell, Yoni Tamang

Malick Ceesay

MANSAYA

MANSAYA is a myth of Senegambia history. When Njaajaan’s father dies on the road, his mother is forced to remarry and chooses a servant. In an act of embarrassment and self-defiance, Njaajaan jumps in a river, never to return for years. When he emerges out of the water, he is met with tasks from the village that soon would crown him as King.

Malick Ceesay is a playwright from the Twin Cities. His work has been featured in the digital anthology, Black MN Voices (published in 2020) and has been a writer for The Plugged App. Malick sits as the Associate Artistic Director of Ambiance Theatre Company. Currently, he is pursuing his MFA in Playwriting at UCLA (Graduate Opportunities Fellow).

Ensemble: Averie Mitchell Brown, Nico Moore, Ololade Gbadamosi

Production: BGC Productions

Addison Sharpe

I Closed My Eyes and Drew a Rabbit  or  How to Break a Trance

What makes you Real? For the past year, writer and performer Addison Sharpe has been nibbled and gnawed by two concurrent thoughts: the awareness that something is missing from their mental health diagnosis and memories of Margery Williams’ classic children's book The Velveteen Rabbit. Weaving the tale of a stuffed animal’s passage from toy to Real, their experience undergoing neuropsych testing, a reluctant-yet-undeniable sentimentality and a fascination with pop-up books, Addison fashions a many-chambered den and invites you down the rabbit hole.

Addison Sharpe is a spiritual being taking a swing at this human experience they’ve been partnered with. Their work is concerned with grief, dreams, junk, desire, togetherness and the profound effort of sharing their Self (whatever the hell /that/ means).

Kealoha Ferreira

Heheʻe

Heʻe is an octopus; a line that supports the mast; it is the process of melting, flowing, spreading; an avalanche; a softening.  What is the sickness you wish to cast away? What must liquify to emerge and multiply? Drip, twist, slip, squeeze. We transform, after all, in the darkest waters.

ʻO Kealoha Ferreira koʻu inoa. ʻO Nuʻuanu kuʻu one hānau.  Kealoha Ferreira hails from Oʻahu, Hawaii. A dance artist of Native Hawaiian, Filipino, and Chinese ancestry, she works in Mnisota as the Artistic Associate of Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT) and Co-Leader of the company's St. Paul space, the Shawngram Institute for Performance & Social Justice. A practitioner of Yorchhā, ADT’s contemporary dance form, and a beginning student of Hula, Kealoha works at the intersections of transnational feminisms and Aloha ʻĀina embodied practices. She commits her artistry and activism to an expansive, complex practice of relationality while remaining rooted in cultural and kinesthetic specificity. Kū au i ka lōkahi me nā ʻŌiwi o kēia ʻāina Dakota nei a me nā ʻŌiwi o ka honua a pau.

Collaborators: Jenny Zander, Prakshi Malik, Noelle Awadallah

Isolated Acts

Lela Pierce

Between

Tuesday, June 7-Sunday, June 20

Video series released throughout the festival to festival passholders. 

This iterative video series seeks to sit, explore, and expand the often condensed, and unsettling space/state/site of "in betweenness." It doesn't have to be that way. Located sonically in the color black, sinking deep in the earth and reaching far out in outer space, this work teeters between spaces of perceived comfort and discomfort, longing, control, darkness and light—stretching and reaching towards cyclical spaces of joy, light spectrum, and becoming.

Lela Pierce is a multiracial black artist who grew up in rural Mnisota Makoce. Currently based out of Minneapolis, Lela has danced extensively with Ananya Dance Theatre as a founding member (2004-2016) as well as Rosy Simas Danse and Pramila Vasudevan of Anichha Arts (both 2015-present). In 2018 she was awarded a Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship for visual art - including her painting and installation work. Lela has presented work internationally in both Sweden and India as well as several Twin Cities venues. She holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Minnesota. www.lelapierce.com

Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra/Lady Xøk

Lady Xøk Exoskeleton

Thursday, June 12-Sunday, June 20

Audio-visual storytelling through the lens of a limited-edition mixtape, hand-printed and bound lyric book and artwork that arrives via USPS to festival passholders. An analog and digital audience experience. 

A somatic exploration of liminal space, a confrontation of good and evil, of trauma and liberation. An exploration of the Wilkala threads of time and a collection of cellular memories, embodied and meandering. Lady Xøk Exoskeleton is an uncovering, a cracking of the intimate cosmic shell, a dispelling.

Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra a.k.a. Lady Xøk (Maya-Lenca) is a Twin-Cities based multi/interdisciplinary artist, musician, and culture bearer whose work is rooted in Indigenous Futurisms. Performing as Lady Xøk, she mixes electric and Mesoamerican instruments creating multimedia installations of light and shadow projections for body-immersive experimental storytelling. She is a 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. 

Musician, audio engineer, screen printer: Xilam Balam

Videographers: GFTHRSE Video, Søren Olsen

Dancers: Pedro Pablo, Trey Chic

Bass/guitar: David Valentine

Alana Horton and Patrick Marschke

ANOMALOUS_U

Friday, June 11-Sunday, June 20

Web and audio experience that arrives via text messages, phone calls, and emails to festival passholders, over the course of 10 days.

This is an invitation. You are invited to join ANOMALOUS_U, a participatory experience exploring self-help and self-understanding. Enter into a series of self-guided self-inquiry modules over the course of ten days, which unfold through phone calls, texts, and audio experiences. Everything in your life has led THIS MOMENT.  Embrace the ANOMALOUS and journey into the infinite depths of YOU, through ANOMALOUS_U. 

Alana Horton is a theater and sound artist interested in devised creation processes. She is a core company member of Umbrella Collective and performs music under the name alone-a, a solo exploratory sonic project that explores the limits of memory and moment through vast tapestries of digital delays and densely rich signal processing. Patrick Marschke is a sound technologist who builds custom applications that examine the boundaries of aural perception through sonic obfuscation and live electroacoustic performance. Together, Alana and Patrick make immersive performance experiences that explore the emotional fragments ingrained in the liminal space between minds, bodies, and machines.  

Chitra Vairavan

ஒரு புனிதமான பிரதிபலிப்பு // Oru Punithamana Prathipalippu // A Sacred Reflection

Friday, June 11, 8:30 pm & Saturday, June 12, 8:30 pm

Live screening and gathering on Zoom. Link arrives via email to festival passholders. Video will be available for viewing on the festival website June 13-20.

Since spring 2020, Chitra Vairavan, as part of the Thamizh/Tamil diaspora living in Mni Sóta Maḳoce / Minnesota, has committed to a creative liberation practice in which she archives her self-recorded movement investigations at different sites as personal fieldwork research. This offering marks Fieldwork #230 and Fieldwork #231, entitled ஒரு புனிதமான பிரதிபலிப்பு // Oru Punithamana Prathipalippu // A Sacred Reflection. Each exploration combines a soundscape (created in collaboration with Renée Copeland), dance, and poetry that Vairavan synthesizes through the lens of re-learning, reclaiming and reflecting language, culture, and ancestral memory.

Chitra Vairavan (Concept, Choreography, Performance) is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, and arts and movement educator of Tamil/South Indian-American descent. Vairavan is immersed in both Tamil culture and progressive brown politics in the U.S. She dances to heal and creates dance and performance art to help heal others. Her embodied practice and experimental process is rooted in deep listening, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability and ancestral memory. The aesthetic of her training is through both yoga and contemporary Indian dance forms. Vairavan is the recipient of the 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Dance, 2018 Naked Stages Fellowship, and the 2020-2021 Springboard for the Arts’ 20/20 Fellowship among other honors. www.chitravairavan.com

Sound artist: Renée Copeland

Video editor: Søren Olsen

Witnessed by: Anita Chikkatur and Crixell Shell

Sites: Brooklyn Park and Mississippi River

All the thank yous are a part of the work.

Eric Larson/Toot

The Premise of Gripping the Wall When You’re Upset

Wednesday, June 16, 7 pm and Thursday, June 17, 7 pm

Film broadcast, only available at listed showtimes. Link arrives via email to festival passholders.

The Premise builds character, but mostly for scrapbooking. A film in three parts, “The Premise” furiously considers the uncanniness, pragmatics, and tiny politics of the actor’s thoughts while acting. Whose impulses are in our bodies? The Premise unfurls a dramaturgy of the mind-in-performance, and wonders slyly about the effects of continuously coping with fictional circumstances.

Toot is a whirlwind of theatrical performances and collaborators led by director Eric Larson. Toot’s work considers overlooked energies of contemporary life and amplifies the poetic relationships between performance, perception, and artistic production. Since 2018, Toot has premiered work in numerous Twin Cities locations and toured and developed work in Nashville, Seattle, and Raleigh, NC. www.tootperformance.org  

Created and directed by Eric Larson

Created with and featuring Sabrina Diehl, Kelly McKay, Sam Aros Mitchell, Emily Rosenberg, Saulaman Schlegel, and Jeffrey Wells