2010 FESTIVAL ARTISTIC DIRECTORS Carlos Carvajal, a native San Franciscan, is a distinguished dancer/choreographer of more than two hundred works for ballet, opera, musical theater and television. Beginning as a folk dancer, he went on to the San Francisco Ballet, then the Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas, Opera of Bremen, Opera of Bordeaux and Ballet Nacional of Venezuela as soloist, principal dancer and choreographer.He created more than twenty works for the SF Ballet as its ballet master and associate choreographer. He founded San Francisco Dance Spectrum, creating over fifty works during its ten year tenure. He has also choreographed for the SF Opera, Oakland Ballet and Dance Theater of Harlem, among others. His full length ballets include Cinderella's Crystal Slipper, Totentanz, Wintermas, Carmina Burana and The Nutcracker. Honors/grants/awards include five from the National Endowment for the Arts, the SF Art Commission, the Critics’ Circle and Isadora Duncan Lifetime Achievement. He holds a BA in Theater and MA in Creative Arts from SF State University. Carlos returns for the 4th season as an artistic director of this Festival.
New artistic director Maria Cheng’s choreography and performance, informed by western modern technique and Chinese martial arts, have been presented at major festivals across four continents including Jacob’s Pillow, Beijing Dance Association, Australia’s Green River Festival and Germany’s Nordrhein-Westfalen Tanzfestival. It has garnered four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and awards from the Bush, Jerome, Harkness, McKnight and Rockefeller [at Bellagio] Foundations. Theatre/music choreography includes productions with the Guthrie Theatre, Minnesota Opera, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Children’s Theatre Company, where she was featured as the White Demon Skeleton opposite Beijing Opera’s Xin Li in the first American production of The Monkey King. She partnered Bill T. Jones in his Break for PBS and chaired the University of Minnesota Dance Program to national prominence, garnering consecutive invitations to the Kennedy Center. She has served as a board member/panelist/advisor to Minnesota’s Chinese American Dance Theatre, New York’s Affiliate Artists and this Festival, among others. Maria is a daily practitioner of the chen and yang styles of tai-chi chuan.
CK Ladzekpo, PhD, is the director of the African music program at the University of California Berkeley. His is a distinguished career as a performer, choreographer, composer, teacher and published scholar in the African performing arts. He is a member of a renowned family of African musicians and dancers who traditionally serve as lead drummers and composers among the Anlo-Ewe people of southeastern Ghana in West Africa. He has been a lead drummer and instructor with the Ghana National Dance Ensemble, the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies and the Arts Council of Ghana. He joined the music faculty of the University of California Berkeley in 1973 and continues to be an influential catalyst of the African perspective in the performing arts. Awards include two choreographers’ fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Irvine Choreographer's Fellowship and the Ruth Beckford Extraordinary People in Dance Award. He has been a member of the faculty council of the East Bay Center for Performing Arts since 1974. This is his 4th season as an artistic director of this Festival.
2010 AUDITION PANELISTS
Zenón Barron was born and raised in Guanajuato, Mexico where be began his dance training at the age of 12. He studied with America Balbuena at the Universidad Autonoma de Guanajuato. He was honored with being selected to participate in the Cultural Exchange program with Casa Cultural Florencia Italia in 1980. Later he became a member of the Ballet Folklórico de la Universidad de Guadalajara under the direction of Carlos Ochoa. Deciding to further his professional dance training, he moved to Mexico City, attending classes at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes while a earning a degree in Dance Instruction. He was subsequently accepted as a member of the world famous Ballet Folklórico de Mexico de Amalia Hernandez. Moving to San Francisco in 1992, in September of that year he founded Ensambles Ballet Folklórico de San Francisco.
Yvonne Daniel, PhD, is Professor Emerita of Dance and Afro-American Studies of Smith College in Massachusetts. She is a specialist in cross-cultural dance performance and Caribbean societies. Her credits include two books, Rumba (1995) and Dancing Wisdom (2005), four documentary videos, over thirty juried and solicited articles on Caribbean dance and a body of choreography based on Caribbean dance practices. She has been awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and a Visiting Scholar Residency at the Mills College Women’s Leadership Institute. Her most recent book on sacred performance in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Brazilian Candomblé won the de la Torre Bueno prize from the Society of Dance History Scholars for best dance research in 2006. She continues to do research, write and give presentations in both academic and community settings.
Malia DeFelice is renowned for her knowledge of authentic Middle Eastern and North African dance, including Raqs Sharqi and various regional folkloric styles of Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf and the Levant. She has an academic background in cultural anthropology with a focus on dance and ethnomusicology. For over thirty-five years, she has been an educator, entertainer and dance/musicology researcher within the Middle Eastern, North African, and general communities of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Her mentors include Jamila Salimpour, Aisha Ali and Ibrahim Farrah. She performed for ten years as a core dancer with Rosa Montoya’s Bailes Flamencos. She has also conducted on-going classes, workshops, and seminars and was a featured soloist with her Middle Eastern Dance Ensemble, appearing five times on this Festival.
Renee Renouf Hall has written professionally on dance in the Bay Area since 1960. Her credits include publications in the area’s major metropolitan newspapers and The Christian Science Monitor, Dance News, Dancing Times, and Dance International. Her reviews of Asian classical dance have appeared in Hokubei Mainichi, Asian Week, and various English language publications in Asia. A member of the Dance Critics Association, she currently writes for the Website ballet.com. In 2000 in New Orleans, she was an organizing member of A Ballets Russes Celebration which served as a basis for the Ballets Russes documentary. She has drafted a history on the Asian Art Museum Docents and the memoirs of Tatiana Stepanova, de Basil Original Ballets Russes ballerina and grand prix winner at the First International Dance Competition in Brussels, Belgium 1939.
Ramya Harishankar is the founder and artistic director of the Arpana Dance Company. Over the past twenty-seven years, she has created fifteen full-length productions for this bharatanatyam company. As a performer, she has toured in India, Southeast Asia, the Far East, the Middle East, Europe, Australia and North America. She trained under the late Swamimalai K. Rajaratnam and Kalanidhi Narayanan. Awards include two choreography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Alliance for California Traditional Arts, Fund for Folk Culture, Helene Modjeska Cultural Legacy Award and the Outstanding Artist of the Year by Arts Orange County. An accomplished teacher, she has trained over 250 students at her Arpana School of Dance founded in 1982. She is most proud of raising nearly $100,000 for world-wide charities and presenting in California over forty soloists/dance companies.
David Lei worked as a social worker with at-risk youths in San Francisco’s Chinatown before starting his business in 1981 which specialized in exporting consumer products to Mexico. Selling his business and retiring, David then pursued his passion for building communities, youth education, social change and the arts. He serves the following non-profit organizations as a board member/advisor/panelist: Asian Art Museum, Chinese Performing Arts Foundation, San Francisco Lunar New Year Parade & Festival, Chung Ngai Dance Troupe (co-founder), Academy of Chinese Performing Arts, University of California Berkeley’s Berkeley China Initiative, the Asian Chefs Association and the Center for Asian American Media. He performed lion dancing for seven years, produced the National Lion Dancing Conference 1999, published William Hu’s Chinese Lion Dance and produced Cantonese opera exhibitions at the Performing Arts Library Museum and the Chinese Cultural Center.
Edwardo Madril is a distinguished performer, choreographer, singer and teacher of Native American dance and culture. He co-founded the dance company Four Winds in 1983 which has performed thrice on this Festival. He also founded the Revision Production Company which promotes the development, performance and research of Native American culture. As a recipient of a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Grant, a member of the artistic roster of Young Audiences, a lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute and an instructor at San Francisco State University, he has brought Native American dance to thousands of bay area students. He also serves on the board of the Friendship House of American Indians, Inc. and on the advisory council of the De Young Museum’s Native Programming. He is pursuing a BA in American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University.
Gabriela Shiroma, born and raised in Lima, Peru, devotes her life to promoting Peruvian folklore of African origin. She holds a BA in Creative Arts from San Jose State University, having also engaged in research in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Togo and Uruguay. A founder and current artistic director of the Afro-Peruvian Association’s De Rompe y Raja, her outstanding productions include Diaspora Negra, Zamacueca, Afro-Peruvian opera Recu-Tecu, El Cajon, patron saint of Lima story Cristo Moreno, CDs El Retorno and Diaspora Negra, DVD Afro-Peruvian Music & Dance and People Like Me. Honors include five appearances on this Festival and grants from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, la Peña Cultural Center, the Peruvian Consulate, Peruvian Institutions, US Peruvian Dance Contests and Zellerback Foundation; and artistic residencies across Argentina, Brazil, Ghana, Peru and the US.
Māhealani Uchiyama is a dancer, musician and composer. She holds a BA in Dance Ethnology and an MA in Pacific Islands Studies from the KaUaTuahine Polynesian Dance Company. She and her companies have appeared in this festival numerous times. She has studied extensively with one of Hawaii's premier hula masters, Joseph Kamoha'i Kahā'ulelio, and has performed with numerous award winning Polynesian, and Caribbean dance ensembles. In addition to producing her own series of instructional and performance videos and CDs of Polynesian music and dance she has also performed internationally. She is the winner of the Hawai'i Music Award for Best World Music for her CD A Walk by the Sea, and is the executive producer of the award winning documentary Black Pearl. She is also the founding director of the Māhea Uchiyama Center for International Dance in Berkeley.
