2024 cross-cultural collaboration resident artists

While in residence, Asha and Erica Jo will choreograph a 20-30 minute original dance piece. Renée Copeland will craft sound for the piece and will be a virtual presence throughout the process. Er ca Jo is a mixed Mexican and Sicilian American, Asha is Afro-Panamanian and Punjabi, and Renée is Sicilian American. Our piece will draw from a few specific cultural symbols and use elements of trance and ritual remembering/making to tell the journeys and meeting of the Fish, the Blue Deer and the Snake. All of these beings carry remembered reminders of relationship to Land and Water, embodied practices of Land Back, understandings of personal and collective grief and pathways forward to our liberated futures.

We are artistic colleagues and friends Isabella Dawis, composer/performer, and Kyle Weiler, choreographer/director. We share an enthusiasm for breaking away from engrained industry conventions to create truly community-based performance art. As a Filipina-American playwright and composer, Isabella works to weave global traditions and feminist perspectives into American onstage storytelling. As a white arts educator and leader who has worked in over 25 countries, often in predominantly POC spaces, Kyle uses his creative voice in the service of uplifting all voices, especially young people. Both of us carry our own history of making performance art that not only challenges the boundaries of genre and form, but that brings together cultural traditions from around the world. With Kyle as choreographer/director and Isabella as composer, we are proposing an innovative cross-cultural dance/music video, centered around the concept of the “quartet.”

Both Masa (Masanari Kawahara) and Yumi (Alys Ayumi Ogura) are originally from Japan and we each settled in Minnesota at different times. We're first-generation Japanese immigrants who are also artists, performers, and community members. Although we share the same basic cultural backgrounds, we've practiced very different types of dance. Masa is a Butoh dancer, and Yumi is a modern/contemporary dancer. This is a parallel to our life experiences and identities. We share some similar theater training, yet as movers, we have different identities. We want to explore movements in our bodies—the way we use our body in our own movements—to see if we can make cohesive performances while celebrating each other's differences and expertise. Our project will involve an in-depth research and self-exploration phase, where we'll delve into our individual movement biographies. This research will serve as the foundation for the development of a new movement vocabulary, which we'll use to create a final performance for the residency.