NAKA Dance Theater

NAKA Dance Theater

Founded in 2001, NAKA Dance Theater creates interdisciplinary performance works that explore ritual, cultural studies, and contemporary socio-political and environmental issues. Through dance, storytelling, multimedia installations, and site-specific environments, NAKA builds deep partnerships with communities, engages people's histories and folklore, and expresses experiences through accessible performances that challenge the viewer to think critically about social justice issues. NAKA brings together and creates rapport among diverse populations, encouraging dialogue and civic participation. Rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area’s culturally diverse communities, NAKA has also established a strong relationship w/Casa Tecmilco (Morelos, Mexico), whose mission is to support a network of small, hyper-local resistance movements across Mexico on land rights, migration and forced disappearance. NAKA has been presented by Dancers' Group's ONSITE, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC, Queer Arts Festival, Yerba Buena Choreographers Festival, Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center Performance Series, the Oakland Museum of California and San Francisco's Asian Art Museum.

Visiting Artists | April 9-April 15, 2024

Dismantling Tactic X

NAKA Dance Theater’s co-founders and artistic leadership, Jose Ome Navarrete Mazatl and Debby Kajiyama, came to MANCC for the first time for a site visit in Spring 2024 in preparation for their full ensemble residency in Fall 2024 where they will work on the newest iteration of their work, Dismantling Tactic X.

During their Fall 2024 MANCC residency, NAKA Dance Theater, consisting of Mazatl, Kajiyama and their invited cohort of social-change artists, will further investigate how artists and venues can be in community, modeling resistance to practices of white supremacy. The project supports a vision to develop methods of inquiry used during the cohort’s time together to fuel a cathartic game-changing conversation around privilege, supremacy, economics, and race. In gathering artists who have devoted their lives and practices towards addressing these systemic issues in various localities, Mazatl and Kajiyama build a foundation for initiating conversations, practices and consciousness shifts within the larger community.

To lay important groundwork for their fall residency work during this site visit, Mazatl and Kajiyama met with several Florida State University faculty. These faculty included Professor Paolo Annino, Director of the Public Interest Law Center and Director of the Children’s Advocacy Clinic; Professor Terry Coonan, Executive Director of the Florida State University Center for the Advancement of Human Rights; Liz Iaconis, Civic Engagement Programs Coordinator at the Center for Leadership and Service; Dr. Felecia Jordan, Communication Professor with a specialization in Interpersonal and Cultural Communication; Anne Meisenzahl, Founder of the Big Bend AFTER Reentry Coalition; Dr. Hannah Schwadron, FSU School of Dance Faculty and co-founder of the Tallahassee Bail Fund; and Elaine Webb, the Welcome Center Coordinator at the Big Bend AFTER Reentry Coalition.

With the multiple connections made and information gained during their site visit, Mazati and Kajiyama will return to MANCC with their full NAKA Dance Theater ensemble to further develop Dismantling X, which builds upon NAKA’s previous Dismantling experiments. A new section that they want to develop aims to bring individuals with very different perspectives together in conversation to learn, feel and think together in vulnerable and generative ways about the issues that may divide us as a population, within the United States and globally. Discussions within and outside of the university and through a shared creative dancing practice will aim to reveal pathways whereby innovative artists can digest, reorient, and present themselves.