Somi: Creative Process as Anthropological Witness

Using examples based on her life journey through Lagos, Dakar, Johannesburg, and New York City, Somi leads audiences through a retrospective survey of her recording career to date while offering insight into how personal story, people, and/or place can inspire deeper storytelling. Moderated by Professor Walton Muyumba of Indiana University.

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Day With(out) Art 2020: TRANSMISSIONS

UC San Diego is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2020 by presenting TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States. The video program brings together artists working across the world: Jorge Bordello (Mexico), Gevi Dimitrakopoulou (Greece), Las Indetectables (Chile), Lucía Egaña Rojas (Chile/Spain), Charan Singh (India/UK), and George Stanley Nsamba (Uganda).

The program does not intend to give a comprehensive account of the global AIDS epidemic, but provides a platform for a diversity of voices from beyond the United States, offering insight into the divergent and overlapping experiences of people living with HIV around the world today. The six commissioned videos cover a broad range of subjects, such as the erasure of women living with HIV in South America, ineffective Western public health campaigns in India, and the realities of stigma and disclosure for young people in Uganda. 

As the world continues to adapt to living with a new virus, COVID-19, these videos offer an opportunity to reflect on the resonances and differences between the two epidemics and their uneven distribution across geography, race, and gender.

Celebrate the Arts 2020

Join us for a Zoom webinar to learn all about arts on campus. Watch info videos from campus arts departments and student orgs, ask questions to representatives from each of the arts organizations, and play a friendly game of Kahoot to win prizes.

Participating organizations include:

    • ArtPower at UC San Diego
    • Ballet Folklorico La Joya de Mexico
    • UC San Diego Music
    • UC San Diego Theatre & Dance
    • UC San Diego Visual Arts
    • UC San Diego Division of Arts & Humanities
    • Stuart Collection
    • UCSD Extension: Arts, Humanities, & Languages
    • KOTX
    • La Jolla Playhouse
    • UCSD Zor
    • and more!

Dom Flemons | The American Songster

GRAMMY award winner, two-time Emmy nominee,  and cofounder of GRAMMY award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops—Dom Flemons has been branded the moniker “The American Songster” since his repertoire of music covers over 100 years of early American popular music. Flemons is an American old-time music, Piedmont blues, and neotraditional country multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter. An expert player on the banjo, guitar, harmonica, jug, percussion, quills, fife and rhythm bones, Flemons is a true modern Songster, engaging audiences from the green Carolinas to the ruddy Southwest with personalized interpretations of folk, blues, early jazz and rock, country, and original material.

Campus Partner:
This program was made possible by a grant from the office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at UC San Diego

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Emily Steel
19 Weeks

“unflinchingly honest”—The Guardian
“We leave, changed. That is what theater is about.”—Glam Adelaide

In June 2016, playwright Emily Steel had a termination at 19 weeks after her baby was diagnosed with Down Syndrome. When she told people about it afterwards she expected them to judge her, but instead they told her stories in return—about abortions they’d had to keep secret, miscarriages they couldn’t really talk about, struggles with IVF. This was the inspiration for 19 weeks—telling her story publicly to encourage more openness and understanding. It’s sad and funny, familiar and surprising, not self-righteous or guilt-ridden but complex and truthful. Come sit by the (virtual) pool, put your feet in the water, and listen.

Some (perhaps surprising) statistics: 18% of US pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) in 2017 ended in abortion. The abortion rate in the US in 2017 was 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44. 13% of couples in the US struggle to get pregnant at all. These experiences are common, but they can make you feel very alone.

In the US, there are projects like the 1 in 3 Campaign and the Sea Change Program that work to end the stigma around experiences like abortion, pregnancy loss and infertility by sharing women’s personal stories.

Our hope is that, with 19 weeks, we can help open up this conversation.

Performed by Tiffany Lyndall Knight. 2018 tour directed by Nescha Jelk, with music by Josh Belperio.

Original 2017 production directed by Daisy Brown, with music by Mario Späte.

Dance Camera West: Selected winners from the 2020 Dance Film Festival

The Dance Camera West (DCW) 2020 touring program features the top 15 award-winning dance films from the 2020 DCW festival, which screened world, US, and Los Angeles premieres of over 50 international dance films. DCW 2020 showcases the best examples of the expanded possibilities of dance beyond what is presented on stage. Films from Asia, Europe, and the Americas represent dancers young and old, tell stories, and show new visions of the body as the moving image.

The film festival is curated by DCW’s Artist/Executive Director Kelly Hargraves, one of DCW’s original cofounders, and a dance-filmmaker herself. Since 2000, DCW has connected diverse cultures and environments through its exploration of dance on screen, bringing hundreds of challenging and provocative films from around the globe. This film screening will be followed by a Q&A with Hargraves and Marlene Mille and Philip Szporer (directors of Bhairava) and Tanin Tarobi (director of The Dérive).

The film screening will include the following:

  • The Dérive
  • SISTERS
  • ALI
  • Bhairava
  • HOME
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Kristina Wong for Public Office: Live from Her Home!

Written and performed by Kristina Wong
Directed and dramaturgy by Diana Wyenn
Devised by Kristina Wong and Diana Wyenn

“These days electoral politics changes from day to day — hell, minute to minute. But one thing doesn’t change… Koreatown’s Wilshire Center Neighborhood Council Kristina Wong’s gift for fusing performance art with political commentary and edgy humor.”LA Weekly

Performance artist, comedian, and elected representative Kristina Wong is taking her raucous campaign online to arouse civic engagement and counter-hijack our democracy! An actual elected representative of Koreatown in Los Angeles, she was once a scrappy performance artist with a bright future in reality television. The system she used to ridicule is now the one she’s become a part of. Is she more effective as a performance artist or a politician? Can she abolish ICE?

This interactive, 65-minute comedic performance mashes up campaign rallies, church revivals, and solo theater shows to uncover the history of voting, what it means to run for local office, and the impact artists can have on democracy. Originally built to tour alongside the rallies leading up to the 2020 Presidential election against a charming hand-sewn felt set she sewed herself, this rally is now being broadcast live from her home to yours!

Want a Zoom screenshot with a real life elected official? This rally will be followed by a candidate “Meet & Greet” with Kristina!

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Rev. Sekou
The Task of the Artist in the Time of Monsters

Whether from fine arts museums or foot-stomping juke joints, artists have long played a key role in the movement for social justice. Critically acclaimed musician and activist Rev. Sekou believes that artists will play an essential role in healing the acrimony that besets much of our national dialogue. Rev. Sekou’s own music builds upon movement music by the SNCC Freedom Singers, the Staple Singers, and the blues tradition. By accessing the work of cultural geniuses such as Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Rosetta Tharpe, Rev. Sekou unearths the ways in which artists have historically provided a balm for wounded social justice warriors.
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ArtTalk with Ephrat Asherie

Join Ephrat Asherie in an intimate conversation with UC San Diego dance lecturer Grace Jun .

Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie is a New York City-based b-girl, dancer, and choreographer and a 2016 Bessie Award Winner for Innovative Achievement in Dance. Asherie has received numerous awards to support her work including Dance Magazine’s Inaugural Harkness Promise Award, the Jacob’s Pillow Fellowship at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts at LIU, and a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. Last year, she received a National Dance Project award to support the development and touring of her newest work, Odeon. Asherie is also the recipient of a Mondo Cane! commission from Dixon Place, a Creative Development Residency from Jacob’s Pillow, Workspace and Extended Life Residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and two residencies through the CUNY Dance Initiative. Asherie is a regular guest artist with Dorrance Dance and has worked and collaborated with Doug Elkins, Rennie Harris, Bill Irwin, David Parsons, Gus Solomons Jr., and Buddha Stretch, among others. She earned her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University in Italian and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she researched the vernacular jazz dance roots of contemporary street and club dances. Asherie has been on faculty at Wesleyan University and set pieces for students at Smith College, SUNY Brockport, Alvin Ailey Dance Center, University of Texas Rio Grande, Old Dominion University and teaches at Broadway Dance Center. Asherie is a co-founding member of the all-female house dance collective, MAWU and and is forever grateful to NYC’s underground dance community for inspiring her to pursue a life as an artist.

Film Screening with Ephrat Asherie
Everything Remains Raw

Film Screening and Conversation with Ephrat Asherie and Moncell Durden (Director of the Film)

Everything Remains Raw: Hip Hop’s Folkloric Lineage traces the fundamental role African Americans have had in American popular dance. From the Lindy Hop to hip-hop, from cakewalk to the moonwalk, much American dance was created on the streets and in the clubs by African Americans. This fascinating film breaks down the moves and movements and is filled with truly spectacular dance. In her recent work Odeon, Ephrat Asherie employs many of the techniques documented in the film. After the screening, join Asherie in conversation with Moncell “ill Kozby” Durden as they discuss social dance and its physicality, including how it has popularized these forms at the same time it has been used to marginalize the communities from which it arose.

Download Program Note (PDF file)

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