February 6th MAPP: Stories of Revolt

The Red Poppy Art House presents Stories of Revolt, a trans-Bay, interdisciplinary exploration in narratives of belonging and displacement, culturally generative creative practices, and restorative justice. In collaboration with Dance Mission’s annual festival, D.I.R.T. – Dance in Revolt(ing) Times, the Red Poppy will feature original works from music, dance, film and storytelling artists that investigate how image, body and language become tools for transformation in a sacred space.

MAPP Schedule:

3:00-4:00pm: From Azonto to Zouk: Afro-Urban Dance Stories with Nkei Oruche
Presented by Dance Mission Theater’s D.I.R.T. Festival – Featuring a sampler of a few Afro-urban dance styles, Nkei Oruche shares personal narratives as a way to discuss the context of music and dance created by people of African descent in urban settings. (More info below!)

5:00-6:30pm: Classical Revolution
Chamber Music Sight Reading Session

6:30-6:40pm: Anne Carol
Sound Installation – Anne Carol uses simplicity, spaciousness, and beauty to evoke a sense of belonging with her music.

6:45-7:05pm: Valerie Troutt ft. Khalil Anthony
Odd Times JazzSoul Music

7:10-7:40pm: Intricate and Dopey Fresh ft. Amelia Romano
Turf Dancing and Electric Harp Improvisations – Amelia Romano performs fiery world and original works using the electric harp as her vehicle to express new and dynamic perspectives in the changing landscape of her environment.

7:45-8:00pm: Astu
Afro-Electric Soul

8:00-8:10pm: Anne Carol
Sound Installation – Anne Carol uses simplicity, spaciousness, and beauty to evoke a sense of belonging with her music.

8:10-8:30pm: Adrian Arias and Jackie Ramos
Love is Our Revolution: PerfoPoetica – Peeling the layers of love with performative poetry in times of change, metamorphosis and revolution.

8:35-8:45pm: Jason Wyman
The Seedling, A Coming out Fable / Film: Primordial Projections

8:50-9:15pm: Diana Gameros
Songs of Love, Migration and Identity – Through her own compositions and personal story, Diana presents a musical exploration of the hopes, hardships and dreams that drive humans to migrate.

9:20-10:00pm: WolfHawkJaguar ft. Prosperity Movement
Elevated Urban World Lifestyle Music – WolfHawkJaguar stirs the soul with mystic vibrations of prosperity.

Red Poppy Presents at Dance Mission!

3316 24th @ Mission
5:00-5:20pm: Red Poppy Art House Presents: Jackie Ramos, Adrian Arias & Misha Khalikulov
Love is Our Revolution: PerfoPoetica

24th Street Bart @ Mission
5:00-5:30pm: Red Poppy Art House Presents: Intricate and Dopey Fresh ft. Amelia Romano
Turf Dancing and Electric Harp Improvisations

About Nkei Oruche’s From Azonto to Zouk: Afro-Urban Dance Stories

While facilitating participants through high-paced, sensual and back-popping moves from the African-Urban Diaspora, Nkei Oruche will share of her dance journey: from childhood in Nigeria and the United States, to young adulthood in California, and now motherhood in Oakland. Nkei will reveal how soukous, dancehall, Coupe-Decale, hip-hop and the Nigerian pop soundscape play a role in her struggle with cultural identity, body image, and artistic expression. She hopes to use the practices of Afro-Urban dance as a way to help rehabilitate the gory effects of colonialism and displacement on people of African descent.

About Dance Brigade’s Dance Mission Theater & D.I.R.T.:

Residing in the heart of the Mission District of San Francisco, Dance Mission Theater is an artist-driven community facility dedicated to inclusiveness, fairness and justice. Dance Brigade‘s mission is to engage diverse Bay Area communities and artists in the exploration of contemporary social issues by creating, producing, presenting and teaching feminist and multicultural dance/theater. The troupe envisions communities and individuals connected and inspired by dance and engaged in collective action toward creating a more peaceful world.

D.I.R.T., or Dance In Revolt(ing) Times, is a political dance festival. The artist as activist is as old as time and D.I.R.T. presents the work of artists that are addressing local/global challenges through their creative process. There are many ways that an artist may address such challenges – be it from the explicit content of their choreography, to looking at who has a voice, to their process.

About the Artists:

Anne Carol uses simplicity, spaciousness, and beauty to evoke a sense of belonging with her music. Her experiences of nature inspire sounds and songs that speak to the elemental. Light through leaves, a stream’s movements, or the circling of the stars all become compositions, drawing listeners into the landscape with her music.

Bay Area born and bred, jazz and gospel trained, and internationally respected, Valerie Troutt is a musical collagist, borrowing from ancestral centuries of sound, channeling spirits, and delivering the stories of our love, loss and lives. Within this spiritual and social justice-driven performer is a lifelong hunger for craft, connection, and cultural narratives. (PC: James Knox)

Dopey Fresh has been a “T.U.R.F” dancer for 9 years. He found his foundation in a turf group called Unknown Artifacts, and in 2011 he joined the Knuckle Neck Tribe. From battling in dance competitions to performing on BART trains and theatre stages, his dancing is expressed through “inner feeling” and is influenced by various styles, such as capoeira, ballet, b-boying and popping. Dopey Fresh now teaches at city dance studios in San Francisco, spreading the knowledge of turfing and sharing the Bay Area culture.

Amelia Romano takes the path less traveled. A composer and arranger, she draws on life experience and inspiration to inform her work, using the harp as her vehicle of artistic expression. Performing arrangements as dynamic and diverse as Bach to blues and Mexican bolero, she integrates Latin rhythms and personal lyrics to produce an intimate and energizing musical experience.

Jackie Ramos, Womanist Warrior, is committed to the struggle of the people using expressive arts and the pedagogies of science and teaching to transcend the senses while breaking down walls of injustice and fear. Adrian Arias believes in the transformation of reality; his religion is poetry. He believes in the cells, the blood, in the ideas, and believes in the creative power of the community and also in the pleasure to work alone. He believes in the absurd and the power of love.

Co-founder of 14 Black Poppies, Jason Wyman is a life-long educator, writer, performer and learner. His skillful networking, which is rooted in compassion and creativity, has brought over a million dollars of in-kind services and peer-based education to communities across the San Francisco Bay Area with a special emphasis on marginalized communities, youth, seniors and cultural workers.

Diana Gameros is a singer-songwriter and music instructor originally from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Now living in the Bay Area, Diana has played with many local favorites, including the Oakland East Bay Symphony. In 2013, Diana released her first album, Eterno Retorno, a soulful retrospective of her journey as an immigrant. In October of 2014, she received the Emerging Leader Award from the Chicana/Latina Foundation for her work in music and social justice activism.

Prosperity Movement is music group and a record label of the same name. Created by a talented group of individuals in Oakland, CA, Prosperity Movement seeks to develop, promote and distribute its brand of urban world music. A core member, WolfHawkJaguar is an award-winning filmmaker (Search for the Everlasting Coconut Tree), actor and world-renowned musician. Prosperity Movement will host the first annual Orisa Urban World Festival this March in Oakland, headlined by Bobi Cespedes, Zion Trinity and WolfHawkJaguar.

About the MAPP Program:

Launched in 2003, the Mission Arts & Performance Project (MAPP) is a homegrown bi-monthly, multidisciplinary, intercultural happening that takes place in the Mission District of San Francisco. On the first Saturday of every even month of the year, the MAPP transforms ordinary spaces such as private garages, gardens, living rooms, studios, street corners, and small businesses, into pop-up performance and exhibition sites for a day/night of intimate-scale artistic and cultural exchange among a kaleidoscope of individuals and communities.

To learn more, visit the Poppy webpage and MAPP website.

Admission: Free. Event at 3:00pm. All ages welcome.

Join the conversation at the Poppy – volunteer with us! Click here.