The truth is that if you live in America, you are part of the cycle.  There is no way to take yourself out of the equation – not now.

As usual, Ananya’s choreography has served up even more tasty ideas for my design brain to munch on.  Our design process started out as it usually does; with inspiring talks, initial ideas and discussion.   Costuming is moving away from that glorious natural silk we’ve been using the past two years to embrace our guilty modernity with man-made materials.  Layered fabrics will wrap the women in a patchwork of texture and rectilinear shapes.

In the scenic world, we’re utilizing shadow puppetry for the first time to help us illustrate the past and present ghosts who are here to warn us – or punish us if need be.   A few key elements to give us a sense of OIL’s unique and sludgy texture will be featured in the background.

After being away from the production process last year (I was researching in China – not goofing off!) I’m ridiculously happy to be in the thick of it with the team – I promise you – production meetings are NOT supposed to be this much fun.

Enjoy!

Annie Rollins; Costume and Set designer for Moreechika: Season of Mirage

Costume Design by Annie Rollins

Costume Design 2 by Annie Rollins

Costume Design 3 by Annie Rollins

Shadow Puppet Design 1 by Annie Rollins

Shadow Puppet Design 2 by Annie Rollins

A seething

Foamy bubbling

The bottom of my gut

Heavy with blood turned to tar

Veins sagging into gravity

Walking, eyes blindfolded

Knowingly into the pitted earth

Falling, gliding

Drowning

Burning in a maze of dreams

Progressive labyrinths

Connected, falsely divided, congealed

Scratching

Swallowing a crystallized lump of coal

Eyes shriveling

Blacken and fall

Out of my skull

Onto the earth

Absorbed into the dirt

Replenishing the earth

Filmy iridescent saliva

Seething cracks of blackened enamel

Throwing up chunks

Porous sinus

A familiar perfume

A smell like reefs on fire

Beaches on fire

Water on fire

Wings on fire

Hair on fire

Gums on fire

Esophagi on fire

Underbelly of the earth on fire

A scorching

Scorching earth

Underneath the earth

On the earth

Made by

Regurgitating through

Holes plunged deep

Deep in blackened sockets

Within the dividing cells

Through the voice

Opportunity burning at the rig

Pipes carrying dreams decomposed

Making coal colored creatures

Making dream eating beasts

Snuggling fumes into lungs

A daughter’s body in every tank

Suction

Tubed

The body made liquid

Administered and prescribed

Called balmy and sanctioned for all

COAL COLORED CREATURE

by Mette Towley

As a senior, majoring in Dance and Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, Mette has found an empowering place in ADT that reflects her own pursuits.  She humbly thanks her parents for their examples of strong work ethics, from which she draws strength during footwork and emotionally demanding rehearsals.

I’m waiting

Waiting for you to say something

Something that will answer

Answer for what you’ve done

Done to a life

A life stopped so young

I’m waiting

Waiting for the story

The full story

Why

Why the vigilance?

Why the silence?

Why the brother?

Why the gun?

But your words

Now

Can never be enough

A style

Does not define

Should not confine

A life to death

Speak for yourself

Protect, accuse, defend or weep

But silence

Silence does nothing

Nothing but anger

No comment at this time

Time cannot undo the harm

Time cannot help

When we cannot sleep

Sleep

Secure

Safe

Silenced

Neighborhood watch

Everyone watch

Watch and see

Watch and wait

Wait until it is too late

Too late to care anymore

Too late, it is over

It is done

For him

For Them

Us

Our

We

Always move on

On to the next

The next we will forget

Forget that it, they, we connect

Connect to it all

To a cycle we don’t see

BUT

See the isolation

See the devastation

See the person

Words

Now

Are not enough

I’m wailing

Wailing for you to say something

Something that will answer

Answer for what you’ve done

Done to a life

A life stopped

by Sarah Beck-Esmay

The Gone Bird Song

The Gone Bird Song

Years of dreaming die in one moment

Yearning flight

Calls with no sound

I collect for you and this is how you greet me.

The weight of it all

Collapses

Washed up with no water

Slick with history

Sounds of hope whisper nothing

I stand here

Still

Stuck

And beneath me

You, my sky

Feel the breeze

Pain

On your back burden

These eyes

~Chitra Vairavan

We delighted in the opportunity to honor this enduring company advocate and benefactor, by dedicating our performance in celebration of her 80th Birthday.  For as long as we have known her, her tremendous enthusiasm for the arts and for artists, and her unparalleled encouragement combined with her thoughts, her energy, and her devotion, continues to help sustain and inspire us. We were very excited to have this chance to demonstrate our gratitude.

For us, opportunities such as this one are precious. Dance is a phenomenon of the present: its life is fleeting. Yet, the power and poetry of dance lives on in the hearts and memories of those who support our work and become advocates for it. The joy in our hearts as we danced for one of our beloved community members, and the look of total surprise on Jean Ann’s face when we called her up to stage will be cherished by so many of us for a long time to come.
We thank Jean Ann for her guidance and friendship and we look forward to many more chances to celebrate her! We also want to thank the many friends who came forward to organize this event and join us! We especially thank Yvonne Cheek for spearheading this effort, and other friends who worked hard to get a proclamation from the Mayor honoring the brilliant Ms. Durades, and for making this event a huge success.

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I was inside, cooking a meal with my daughter and we heard the younger children’s shouts as they played in the waters after their baths splashing in it, swimming in it, drinking it. We all thought it was water until that day.

As I cooked in silence the children’s voices mixed with the hiss of my stove “Look! There is a rainbow in the water!” hisssssss. Such words sound beautiful at first. Like words in a lullaby. I thought, it is possible a rainbow has appeared in the sky and is so strong that they can see the rainbow’s reflection in the Aguarico.

But the sound of my food bubbling and boiling in the pans made me think of the way the earth has been feeling beneath my feet for a while now. There is a discolored sludge around many of the new homes that have been built. It seeps up to our toes and draws us down as we walk. Some days I feel like I am fighting off my own burial, I sink so low.

I know it has to do with the oil drills that have loomed over my community for years I have watched my land become a kitchen for Texaco cooks. And it is true; they came to the Amazon, and found a place full of ingredients and supplies, but they are the worst cooks and do not know what to do with our appliances, so they have brought their own and they have chopped up our trees and sampled our waters as broth and created a stew. The stew is toxic air, liquids, and earth combined and they are spilling it all over my ancestral lands. Gaseous and curdling, it spreads, and I fear we have no choice but to eat it.

So I knew all of this, and I listened to the children talk about rainbows in the water and I felt a panic hit my throat. I think I cried out, because I remember the shocked look on my daughter’s face. But my ears were ringing with the hiss and bubbles of the stove and my mind kept flashing the vision of a gigantic oil drill’s outline against an orange sky.

Behind my home, there is a stream. I left my daughter in the kitchen and ran to the stream. I looked at my reflection and saw nothing but swirls of rainbow on top of a thick, dark mirage. My face looked strange. I felt I was in a bad dream. I reached my hand through the black and rainbow surface to search for the water below and cupped it all in my hand as if to take a sip. But I knew I shouldn’t, because of the smell—a distinct odor. I ran to the kids who were then drying-off on the banks and grabbed a young boy’s arm and held it to my nose—the same smell. I felt dizzy. The Texaco cooks have prepared for us a meal of contaminated crops and animals. Now, they fill our water pots with poisonous rainbows.

To live in San Carlos means living at the intersection of two powerful rivers. Living in this town once had some blessings, and now there are just burdens. Texaco’s main production site is just 10 meters from my home. Cancer has found my body and my daughter’s liver. I know it is not my cooking that her liver is unable to process, but that of Texaco’s. My daughter is eighteen and recently married. I was just thinking how fast she is growing up! Now, all I can think is that she is still just a child, too young for cancer, too young to have problems eating. There is something wrong with the food. I feel trapped into poisoning my daughter. I boil the water, but every meal I make seems to be a Texaco recipe.

Contributed by Renee Copeland

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Texaco Recipe is closely inspired by the story of Maria Garafolo, a woman interviewed in the documentary titled, Crude. The oil company Texaco, now called Chevron, began drilling all over Ecuador in the ‘60s. Their promotional video made in the ‘70s claims that Texaco the pioneers “bring muscles and machines to a territory untouched by civilization.” The reality is that the Siona, Cofán, Huaorani, Quichua, and all indigenous Amazonian people, have suffered through displacement, loss of culture, and illnesses and death due to the unethical installation of this billion dollar oil industry, set up by colonizers and most often worked by locals.

In 1992 Texaco/Chevron handed their operations over to PetroEcuador and supposedly got out of the country. While PetroEcuador’s methods and facilities are still harmful and not much of an improvement, what is so shocking is the existence of thousands of toxic waste pits that are full of drilling mud, solvents, and chemicals that came from drilling the initial well 40+ years ago. Texaco/Chevron claimed that they had a Government-supervised, highly responsible and expensive clean-up program, so why, after a supposed 10+ years of their absence, is their presence so dreadfully obvious?

Maria’s interview took place in 2006. I wonder if she and her daughter have made it. Their cancer treatment is expensive, demanding that both of them still work in the fields, and they must travel 18 hours by foot and bus to reach the chemo center. It was evident in the film that both of these tactics for recovery are also causing more exhaustion and sickness.  I wonder if that’s what Texaco had in mind in the ‘70s when they chimed: “Take the glorious gamble and drill!”

References and other important sites about oil in Ecuador:

Crude. Joe Berlinger. 2009. DVD

http://www.crudethemovie.com/

http://amazonwatch.org/

http://www.chevroninecuador.com/2009_06_01_archive.html

http://thechevronpit.blogspot.com/2008/12/us-congressman-jim-mcgovern-chevrons.html

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Chitra Vairavan trained in Bharata Natyam with Hema Rajagopalan. In 2004 she began her journey in contemporary Indian movement through Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT). Chitra has since become a principal dancer in the company and received the 2008 Sage Cowles People’s Choice Award and been named Artist to Watch by Minnesota Monthly in 2011.

“Find Me” By Chitra Vairavan

Where do I go when I dance?

There’s nowhere to go but rather pass through your moments into my tomorrow. The news will only reach you late. And timing is everything in your today.

Digging for something that will never be found but still exists in my safe space. That is where my body breathes in tomorrow. Come find me there.

Intentional eyes see beats vibrating from feet, no stomping. Foot-working the love it has for earth, stepping in its own sweat. Not yours. Understand what is left to be understood.

My hands will only reach beyond your sight. Needing more than wants will offer. What’s to become of me in your moments? Whispers in the wind.

Days pass yet when my tomorrow comes it will last beyond dreams. Walk with me for a  while. Tomorrow catches what today lets slip through its fingers.

Movement is my lifetime, not moment, in tomorrow. What you see is how I seem to be. Turn away and look again.

Where do you go when I dance?

Tushaanal Fires of Dry Grass

What does it mean for women of color to collectively perform their relationship to gold? Ananya Dance Theatre explores this question in their latest dance performance piece, Tushaanal Fires of Dry Grass. In the opening scene of Tushaanal Fires of Dry Grass, dancers engage the glitter of gold. Blanketed by a sheer golden coverlet, a dancer writhes underneath exposing the shimmer and sheen of shiny objects. By beginning their work with the allure of gold, Ananya Dance Theatre exposes what literally lies beneath the mining, production and consumption of gold. Second in a series on the systemic violence that affects women, gold is seen as an alluring resource that belies virulent exploitation. As the dancer writhes underneath the shimmering blanket of gold at the left of the stage, the other dancers perform to the right their conflicted relationship to the shimmering play. The dancers seem enticed and yet controlled in their movements. One is left to wonder what will come next and one has a sense that “all that glitters is not gold.”

With great skill in movement interspersed with spoken word and haunting music of women’s wails, Ananya Dance Theatre exposes how gold affects women. Some of the themes they explore are the lure of gold for power and status embodied in a story they tell about the Empress Dowager Cixi, gold as a source of oppression for women who work in the mines, gold as a lure of survival for sex workers who live around the mines, and gold as a form of control of women in dowry exchanges. What is impressive about Tushannal is not only the range of stories that Ananya Dance Theatre exposes in women’s relationship to gold, but also how these stories are artistically rendered. Starting form the Indian Odissi dance form as inspiration, the dancers combine several other traditions of dance, yoga and martial arts to create a syncretic form that speaks not only contemporaneity in dance but also solidarity in struggles. Unlike modern dance, which speaks of individual self-expression, Ananya Dance Theatre speaks of how women of color bodies inspire relationships based in unity.

I return to the question with which I began. What does it mean for women of color to collectively perform their relationship to gold? Ananya Dance Theatre builds not only an aesthetic vocabulary to express solidarities between women of color but a real dialogue about what brings women together and what separates them. Gold, as a natural resource much sought after, illustrates perfectly the idea that capitalist patriarchies generate competition between women over resources. What then does resistance to capitalist patriarchy mean in relation to gold? Women of color share in histories of colonial exploitation of the western world of non-western labor exploitation. Resistance, in this instance, means different things for different women. Sex workers around the mines have a different relation to the allure of gold then women who suffer from dowry exploitation, and yet if we come to the realization that these women’s stories are linked through the structures of capitalist patriarchy, we realize also that resistance may look different in these circumstances conditioned as they are by class and sexuality. Nvertheless, women in these circumstances may come to see how their reistance is linked rather than prioritizing their differences. This is the message that Ananya Dance Theatre communicates so well with its expressive movements but also how the group comes together to create such a piece of work.

Ananya Dance Theatre creates solidarities across women of color’s struggles by creating a strong woman-centered space. In this day and age where discussions of post-race and post-feminism pervade our culture, the importance of such a space is not to be overlooked. More than a movement vocabulary, Tushaanal creates a vocabulary for collectivities of resistance. Each dancer contributed to the piece through research and dialogue and the strong connections forged through that dialogue are reflected in the beautiful dance movements.

Ananya Chatterjea’s vision to create a woman of color dance group of women from different communities speaks to what is missing from racial and gendered discourses which privilege representation over inter-relationality. By having their voices heard loudly and clearly Ananya Dance Theatre is a space where each women of color performer can express her loving support, conflicted realities, and sympathies for other women.  In this way, Ananya Dance Theatre is more than a performance group; it revises what performance and communication mean to people of color communities.

Kulvinder Arora is a cultural critic and Professor who teaches courses on transnational film, feminist theory and gender studies. She is currently working on a book project on positive representations of women of color in feature films that is provisionally tiled Plotting Resistance: Acts of Social Justice in Women of Color Films. In shifting the conversation to positive representations, she asks the question “How does viewing women of color resisting oppression rather than being victims of it alter social stereotypes?” By looking at women of color’s struggles across racial and ethnic communities, she argues that there is something productive in seeing similarities between women of color to build solidarities between them and yet important differences between nationalism, patriarchy and colonialism need to be recognized to see how women resist oppression differently.

Our total donated was $1280 + $1000 (match) =$2280!  The most ever donated on Give to the Max Day!

Your support is so important to us.  It will help us keep the momentum going and allow us to keep giving back to everyone in our community!

November 5^th 2011 (Callbacks November 6^th)

10:30am – 1:30pm

Barbara Barker Center for Dance; Studio 200

500 21^st Ave S, Mpls, 55455

ANANYA DANCE THEATRE SEEKS 2 NEW DANCERS TO JOIN OUR COMPANY

About the Company:

ADT dancers work at the intersection of artistic excellence and social justice and work through a unique process that brings together research, improvisation, training in contemporary Indian dance, performance, discussion, and touring.

YOU are the dancer we seek if:

• you have trained in any particular form of dance for at least 5 years
• you have a deep interest in social justice work and are interested in bringing it together with your artistic work
• you are able to remain committed to long-term, deep process work
• you are at least 16 years old (mature dancers especially welcomed!)
• you are interested in building a community with other women dancers who together aspire towards excellence!

Audition will be held on November 5^th, beginning at 10:30am and will run until 1:30pm. Come prepared to dance. No shoes. Please wear shorts or pants that show from your knees down (no jeans, baggy pants, sweat pants or booty shorts).

Call backs will be held on November 6^th beginning at 10:30am and will run until 1:30pm. Dancers will be notified via e-mail if they are called back for the November 6^th session. Note: if you have a special talent which may not fall within the above described parameters of our work, please let us know about it through an email to Gina…. Come to the audition and be prepared to demonstrate this unique skill afterwards.

Please email Gina Kundan: Organizational Director, gina.kundan@ananyadancetheatre.org to sign up for the audition.

If you have any questions or concerns please direct them to Gina Kundan: Organizational Director, gina.kundan@ananyadancetheatre.org

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