Shooting Columbus

March 31, 2013

In the works:

Shooting Columbus is an evening-length, interdisciplinary performance in which a Yaqui theoretical physicist and Okinawan engineer build a time machine with plans to go back in time to the Bahamian Islands to kill Columbus in 1492. Their story is periodically interrupted by Indians and other people whose lives have been altered in powerful and bizarre ways by the assassination.

The project examines ethics and consequences of time travel, with the United State’s continual genocide of native people serving as a backdrop. It also responds to anti-immigration law SB1070 – the “papers please” clause of which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court – that has spread fear throughout the South Tucson community. Native Americans, who have lived in the region for generations before the U.S.-Mexico border was drawn, are caught in the midst of this ongoing xenophobia.

Three award-winning artists, video/audio designer Adam Cooper-Terán, performance artist/playwright Denise Uyehara and director/dramaturge Rachel Bowditch will develop and premiere this evening-length work in Phoenix in 2015, with plans to subsequently tour nationally and abroad. All three artists hail from highly collaborative, interdisciplinary backgrounds. These artists will also work with a small ensemble of performers to ready the work for its premiere.

This project marks the fourth collaboration between Uyehara and Cooper-Terán since they began working together in 2008. Major past projects include BUS STOP DREAMING, a site-specific, interdisciplinary performance, located at sites of deportation in South Tucson (MAP Fund 2012, in collaboration with Jason Aragon/Pan Left) and ARCHIPELAGO, which explores Yaqui and Okinawan creation stories, reset in contemporary times of war and occupation (National Performance Network Creation Fund).

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“Shedding Light on Memory and the Occupied Body” performative talk, Pitzer College

February 4, 2013

• I’m excited to announce I’ll be an Activist/Artist-in-Residence (AAIR) this February and March at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. Activities include:Opening Performative Talk:
  “Shedding Light and the Occupied Body”
  February 13^th, 2013, 7:00 p.m.
  Benson Auditorium, Pitzer
  Community and class workshop showing:
  Saturday, March 9, 3pm, Kallick Family Gallery at Pitzer College

AAIR is the signature project of the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at the Claremont Colleges, offering public events and workshops with activists and professional artists representing diverse cultures and art forms that are usually not part of “traditional” college curricula. More…

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Bus Stop Dreaming in Casa Libre’s Edge 50 series, Jan 23

January 22, 2013

Denise Uyehara/Yvonne Montoya perform excerpts from Bus Stop Dreaming (the roving unplugged version!) as part of an evening of poetry and performance, presented by Edge 50: a Reading Series of Emerging and Younger Writers.  Evening also features work by Cybele Knowles, Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

Wednesday, January 23, 
7:30 p.m.
Suggested Donation: $5
Casa Libre
228 N. 4th Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85705
view video here

Bus Stop Dreaming is a series multi-disciplinary performances that appear at community sites around Tucson in response to the ongoing deportations of thousands of undocumented immigrants in the city. Bus Stop is a collaboration between documentary filmmaker Jason Aragon of Pan Left Productions and performance artist Denise Uyehara, with Yvonne Montoya of Safos Dance Theater, video/audio artist Adam Cooper-Terán.  interviews and footage from residents of South Tucson.  Made possible in part by the MAP Fund and the P.L.A.C.E./Open Society Fund from the Tucson Pima Arts Concil. More…

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Archipelago (2012)

December 8, 2012

ARCHIPELAGO is a new multidisciplinary work by critically-acclaimed performance artist Denise Uyehara and award-winning visualist Adam Cooper-Terán. Through video, image and movement they remix ancient myths of Okinawa with the story of Batuc, a village in the Yaqui River Valley which was flooded by the Mexican government. They weave together loss, cultural survival, wrath of the deities, spirits of past, present and the future.  Premiered at Highways Performance Space, with support from the National Performance Network Creation Fund.   Click here for video and details.

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Bus Stop Dreaming March 22 and 23, House of Neighborly Services, South Tucson

October 2, 2012

Traffic Stop.  Border Patrol. Deportation.

Bus Stop Dreaming will appear as part of Safos Dance Theater’s “Vignettes”
House of Neighborly Services
243 W 33rd St, Tucson, AZ

Friday, March 22 at 7pm
Saturday, March 23 at 7pm
Admission: $14 suggested donation, $12 seniors/students
and special free matinee for community on Saturday March 23, 1pm
for more info on community matinee and accessibility call (520) 481-1656
Click here for video

Choreography by Denise Uyehara in collaboration with Yvonne Montoya, video/audio design for Bus Stop Dreaming by Adam Cooper-Terán, based on an interview with Alex by Jason Aragon.  “The Dove” image used with permission © 2009 Ed Braverman.  Photos by JP Westenskow.  Bus Stop Dreaming is supported by the MAP Fund and the P.L.A.C.E. grant from the Tucson Pima Arts Council.  Photos taken at MOCA-Tucson.

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Bus Stop Dreaming at MOCA-Tucson, Saturday Sept. 29

September 2, 2012

Saturday, September 29
Bus Stop Dreaming (excerpts) as part of INDEBTED / ENDUEDADO
Museum of Contemporary Art – Tucson
7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
265 South Church Avenue Tucson, AZ 85701
$5 for members, $8 for non-members

Bus Stop Dreaming is a series of short, multi-disciplinary performances that will appear at community sites around Tucson in response to the ongoing deportations of thousands of undocumented immigrants in the city. Bus Stop is a collaboration between documentary filmmaker Jason Aragon of Pan Left Productions and performance artist Denise Uyehara, in collaboration with Yvonne Montoya of Safos Dance Theater, video/audio artist Adam Cooper-Terán, and interviews and footage from residents of South Tucson.  Made possible in part by the MAP Fund and the P.L.A.C.E./Open Society Fund from the Tucson Pima Arts Concil.  More…

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Archipelago this weekend at Highways, Santa Monica. Feb. 17 & 18, 8:30pm

February 2, 2012

Archipelago by Denise Uyehara and Adam Cooper Teran

To reserve special $10 tickets call (310) 315-1459, give the code word “Denise,” and pay at the door.

Press Kit

Preview articles in Blue Fat’s Triple Echo
and The Rafu Shimpo

 

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| Tags: Adam Cooper-Teran, Archipelago, Denise Uyehara, Highways, Okinawan, Yaqui

Workshop at USC

January 21, 2012

Performance artists Denise Uyehara and Erin O’Brien will lead a hands-on workshop that explores the materialization of memory in everyday objects. Through embodied practice, we will explore how memory becomes embedded in or evacuated from objects. Participants are encouraged to bring an object from their daily lives that holds some meaning them. Objects will also be available at the workshop for participants to use.  Space limited.  To secure your spot please RSVP to: tdc@dornsife.usc.edu

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Transitions (2012)

January 20, 2012

Denise Uyehara and James Luna, photo/design: Adam Cooper-Teran

Transitions by Denise Uyehara and James Luna
Everybody has a past.  For James Luna and myself, that past began in Orange County — land of malls, surfers and the 405 Freeway.  How did we evolve from being ethnic minorities in suburbia to the artists we are today? And in the sea of consumerism and cultural amnesia, what makes an Indian or Asian American truly “authentic?”

In this project we revisit one of James Luna’s performances from the 70′s, also entitled Transitions, in which he unpacked a bag full of “Indian” objects and created a new rituals with them.  We’ll spring board off the earlier work and unpack the metaphorical bag to revisit what’s inside.  Together we’ll conduct a series of rituals that recount surviving life behind the “Orange Curtain.” We’ll be remixing surfing music, disco, narrative and home movies and surfing footage projected onto a psychedelic kimono with 30 foot long arms that can wrap around Denise like a cocoon or straight jacket.

Transitions is commissioned by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) for Los Angeles Goes Live as part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty. Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California coming together for the first time to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene, beginning in the fall of 2011.

Premiered at LACE Thursday, November 10, 2012
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028

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| Tags: American Indian, Asian American, Denise Uyehara, James Luna, LACE, Native American, Performance Art, Transitions

Bus Stop Dreaming (2012)

January 12, 2012

Bus Stop Dreaming is a series of short, multi-disciplinary performances that appear at various community and art events in response to the ongoing deportations of thousands of undocumented immigrants in the city of Tucson. Bus Stop is a collaboration between two award-winning artists – documentary filmmaker Jason Aragon, and performance artist Denise Uyehara – and Pan Left Productions, a grass roots video collective working toward social change. At each new location they will create an expansive moment to remember someone recently deported by the the U.S. Border Patrol.

Bus Stop Dreaming will appear as part of Safos Dance Theater’s “Vignettes”
House of Neighborly Services
243 W 33rd St, Tucson, AZ

Friday, March 22 at 7pm
Saturday, March 23 at 7pm
Admission: $14 suggested donation, $12 seniors/students
and special free matinee for community on Saturday March 23, 1pm
for more info on community matinee and accessibility call (520) 481-1656

More on the project

The Uyehara and Aragon work closely with award-winning video/audio artist Adam Cooper-Terán they will project video footage – such as interviews, desert imagery and Border Patrol deportations – onto a slowly moving ensemble as they “migrate” through public spaces.

Instead of reenacting deportations, the ensemble “remixes” everyday movements into a slowly-moving dance that add new information to the scene. Each performance is a poem in motion: layering together memories, image, song, gesture and moving bodies to shed light on the “humanness” of people caught in this ongoing crisis. In addition each performance will involve community members who will recite fragments of poetry, names of those deported, testimony by family left behind, or who perform in the piece, “standing in” for someone who was deported.

Credits: Choreography by Denise Uyehara in collaboration with Yvonne Montoya, video/audio design for Bus Stop Dreaming by Adam Cooper-Terán, based on an interview with Alex by Jason Aragon.  “The Dove” image used with permission © 2009 Ed Braverman.  Photos by JP Westenskow.  Bus Stop Dreaming is supported by the MAP Fund and the P.L.A.C.E. grant from the Tucson Pima Arts Council.  Photos taken at MOCA-Tucson.

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Bus Stop Dreaming awarded PLACE grant

December 14, 2011

Bus Stop Dreaming has been awarded a P.L.A.C.E. III Initiative Grant.  This grant is from the Tucson Pima Arts Council with funding received from Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Open Society Institute (see side bar to the right for project details).

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Arts, Culture and Democracy: A Tucson Community Discussion

November 17, 2011

Friends, if you’re in Tucson – join us for a cup of coffee and engaging discussion.

“Arts, Culture and Democracy” hosted by TPAC on Nov. 17, 9am.  
Temple of Music & Art at the Cabaret Theatre in Tucson, November 17^th, from 8:30 am – 11:30 am.  Admission is free, but seating is limited.

Keynote by Douglas McLennan, founder and editor of ArtsJournal, featuring Ron Barber, District Director for the Office of Gabrielle Giffords; and James Garcia, Co-founder of the Real Arizona Coalition and the Producing Artistic Director of New Carpa Theatre; Denise Uyehara, an award-winning performance artist, writer and playwright.

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