Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

If you're in Oakland this weekend (September 15-17), come on out to the Great Wall of Oakland to watch local, highly acclaimed aerial dance company Project Bandaloop soar in their 20th anniversary celebration "Bound(less)."

For our final installment on the SF Ethnic Dance Festival, dancer/choreographer Rasika Kumar discusses her artistic process and her take on cultural fusion (versus collaboration) in dance and music.

Eric Solano of Parangal Dance Company talks about Filipino artistic traditions, and the delicate dance involved in honoring your mentors while creating contemporary work.

Rumia brings together eighty dancers from 10 different Tahitian dance companies, bringing disparate Tahitian dance styles into an exploration of freedom and unity.

The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, now in its 33rd year, is a huge, 5-weekend extravaganza that features 50 performance companies working within traditional music and dance genres. But as many of us living in the Bay Area already know, it is also a showcase for virtuosic local talent, for every single "traditional" dance performer must also be a Bay Area resident.

"Our Daily Bread" currently playing at San Francisco's CounterPULSE Theater, pushes us towards a gut-level realization: we are what we eat.

Photo credit: JJ Casas

Calling all San Francisco Hyphenites! A reminder that A Sensory Feast with Kearny Street Workshop and SOMArts will close this week, Feb 24 to be precise. So, if you want to see a show by local AsAm artists where you can not only look at stuff, but touch and smell stuff too, you gotta do it soon.

In the spirit of a feast for all senses final blow-out, I'll cut the chit-chat. See and decide for yourself. The following are images of the show by JJ Casas and Patrick Rafanan.

Yummy.

A Sensory Feast, presented by SOMArts and Kearny Street Workshop, opened on Friday, Feb 4, and I -- lured by the promise of free admission and Senor Sisig and art that also had food in it -- emerged from my bedroom. I put on clothes, gritted my teeth, and prepared to have fun.

"You are getting to know the inner me!" photo courtesy of Virginia Rodrigues

Dancing on Glass, a work by Ram Ganesh Kamatham, premieres in North America at San Francisco's Counterpulse. It opens today at 8 pm. Finally, this girl has a reason to get out of her pajamas on a Friday night and into a seat at the theater.

Judging from the pre-press for this play, I know two things.