A Conversation On Aesthetic Equity: With Jaime Cortez, Liz Lerman, Paloma McGregor and Michael Orange
Company:
Hope Mohr Dance/The Bridge Project
HMD's 2020 Bridge Project POWER SHIFT: Improvisation, Activism, and Community & Kambara+ present
A Conversation On Aesthetic Equity
Join panelists Jaime Cortez, Liz Lerman, Paloma McGregor, and Michael Orange for a conversation on aesthetic equity and aesthetic bias in the arts. Moderated by choreographer and HMD Director of Art in Community Cherie Hill. The moderated conversation will be followed by small group dialogues and a full audience Q&A with the event organizers and panelists.
Sunday OCTOBER 18, 2020, 1 PM - 2:30 PM (PDT)
TICKETS: $0 - $100, sliding scale.
This is an online event taking place on Zoom.
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ABOUT JAIME CORTEZ | Jaime Cortez is a Program Officer in Performing Arts at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Jaime has worked for over twenty years in the Bay Area arts ecosystem as an arts educator, artist, and in nonprofit arts management and consulting. He is experienced with arts grantmaking and philanthropy. Most recently, Jaime worked as the arts and creativity program officer at the Barr Foundation in Boston. There, he helped to manage a multidisciplinary, statewide grantee portfolio. Prior to that, Jaime held positions at the San Francisco Foundation and the San Francisco Arts Commission, where he oversaw numerous grantmaking and art award programs, supported technical assistance and capacity-building programs for grantseekers, and supported multidisciplinary artistic expression in diverse communities across the San Francisco Bay Area. Earlier in his career, Jaime was a program manager at Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. He also held positions as an art instructor at UC Berkeley, a writer and editor for AIDS Project Los Angeles, and as an artist in residence at the California Institute of Integral Studies. As an artist, Jaime has been in both group and solo exhibitions featuring his drawings, sculpture, and photography. As a writer, he has published short stories and essays in numerous anthologies and journals. Jaime wrote and illustrated a graphic novel, “Sexile,” and he is currently working on a feature film about the Clarion Alley Mural Project in San Francisco’s Mission District.
ABOUT LIZ LERMAN | Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and the recipient of honors including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. Key to her artistry is opening her process to various publics, resulting in research and outcomes that are participatory, urgent, and usable. She founded Dance Exchange in 1976 and led it until 2011. Her recent work Healing Wars toured the US. Liz teaches Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance at institutions such as Harvard, Yale School of Drama, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her third book is Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer. As of 2016 she is an Institute Professor at Arizona State University.
ABOUT PALOMA MCGREGOR | Paloma McGregor, originally from St. Croix, is an award-winning artist and organizer living in Harlem. Paloma’s work centers Black voices through collaborative, process-based art-making and organizing. A lover of intersections and alchemy, she develops projects in which communities of geography, practice, and values come together to laugh, make magic and transform. She has created a wide range of work, including a dance through a makeshift fishnet on a Brooklyn rooftop, a structured improvisation for a floating platform in the Bronx River and a devised multidisciplinary performance work about food justice with three dozen community members and students at UC Berkeley. Paloma was a 2013‐14 Artist In Residence at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, a 2014-16 Artist In Residence at BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a 2016-18 New York Live Arts Live Feed Artist, and is currently a Movement Research Artist in Residence and an Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellow. She has been nominated for the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship and the Herb Alpert Award. Recent support for her work includes grants from MAP Fund, Surdna Foundation, Dance/NYC, NYSCA and Dance/USA Engaging Dance Audiences. Paloma also facilitates technique, creative process and community engagement workshops around the world. She toured internationally for six years with Urban Bush Women and two years with Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange, and continues to perform in project‐based work, including Skeleton Architecture, with whom she received a 2017 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for performance.
ABOUT MICHAEL ORANGE | Michael Orange is the chief mobilizer, moving image and crowd, in the truest namesake of MATATU. In the proud lineage of Black librarians, Michael has found his purpose early in the preservation and presentation of heirloom truths. Such critical stories have peppered the earth in all directions, which he sees as elements necessary to forge the intersectional post-colonial identities of the African Diaspora. Each of Michael’s commitments are meditative actions of personal and public inquiry within the Afro past, present, and future. In this passion, he is a cultural bearer of the radical African imagination. The production of knowledge as power for a rising Black America in a time of wanton institutional violence and mass displacement, Michael feels is his responsibility–not by choice but by obligation. He partners with thought leaders and creatives, locally and internationally, to promote Black excellence through visionary and inclusive neo-Africana cultural experiences. Michael is an Association of Performing Arts Professionals Leadership Fellow (2018–2020; a participant in ACAM 2019, an art cinema executive management program presented by International Confederation of Art Cinemas; and conference chair for Arthouse Convergence (2019-2021), which works to advance excellence and sustainability in mission-driven media exhibition. He serves on the Intersection for the Arts (2019) and SFFILM Inclusion Advisory (2020) boards and the City of Oakland Cultural Affairs Commission (2020).
ABOUT CHERIE HILL | Cherie Hill (moderator) is a choreographer, dancer, teacher, and scholar, whose art explores human expression and how it is conveyed through the body in collaboration with nature, music, and visual imagery. Cherie is Co-President of the CA Dance Education Association and a Dance Teaching Artist. She co-directs The Bridge Project with Hope Mohr and Karla Quintero and is HMD’s Director of Art in Community.
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ABOUT KAMBARA+ | KAMBARA + DANCERS bridges art and audience through contemporary dance. Choreographer Yayoi Kambara focuses her work on diverse cultural, economic, and ethnic differences, creating a space for empathy and dialogue. kambaraplus.org
ABOUT POWER SHIFT | POWER SHIFT: Improvisation, Activism, and Community invites artists and activists to share the practice and performance of improvisation. Co-curated by Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero, POWER SHIFT brings you inside the improvisational practices of Black/African American, Latinx/Latin American, Asian American, female-identifying and queer improvisers and social justice activists. The program highlights voices from African dance, jazz aesthetics, social and street dance, contemporary forms, and Capoeira.
POWER SHIFT is about more than performance. A wide array of intensives and workshops at the intersection of dance and social action offer opportunities to build and share tools for the creative process. In these spaces, we will move and imagine together. We will cultivate power and resilience in the face of shifting and uncertain landscapes.
For the more information on the entire Power Shift line up visit bridgeproject.art/powershift.
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