Artists of Color Council Curation Spring 2018
Each season the AoCC invites a member of the community to curate artists to participate in Movement Research at the Judson Church. The Spring 2018 curator is Chloe C. Chotrani, who has curated Rina Casero Espiritu, Zavé Martohardjono and Jana Lynn (JL) Umipig, performing on February 12, 19 and May 7.
Curatorial Statement || Softness
These bodies draw from a post-colonial present that radiates the soft, fluid and the erotic as our creative power force. Embodied living is radically called for as we continue to dance within the global crisis. Diaspora discourse of the matriarch with Rina Casero Espiritu, Jana Lynn (JL) Umipig along with the queer vista of Zavé Martohardjono.
Spring 2018 Curator || Chloe C. Chotrani
Chloe C. Chotrani is a movement artist and writer based in Singapore. She was a dance scholar with Romancon Dance in Manila and has worked with Legit Status Philippines, B Supreme London, Evidence Dance Community, Movement Research and Gibney Dance in New York. Her creative research is oriented towards her ancestry, the dance ethnography of Southeast Asia, eco-feminism and the decolonisation of people. She holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and a BA in Arts Management from De La Salle — Saint Benilde in Manila completed through a Dance Scholarship.
Currently, she is an Artist in Resident with Dance Nucleus tacking the topic of “Post-Colonial Tactics” through dance and dance research. She is also a guest writer for Arts Equator and works in the field of permaculture (permanent agriculture) with Cultivate Central in Singapore, bridging creativity and ecology. She lives a soft approach through embodied research as the cyclical driving force of her collaborations and creations. Find her on her website.
Artists
Rina Casero Espiritu is an independent NYC local artist with a green card and a part-time restaurant job. She majored in Dance and has a minor in Asian American Studies and Psychology at Hunter College. Born and raised in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan, Philippines, she moved to NYC with her family in 2005 and resided in Jamaica, Queens. As a young immigrant in college she found her passion in performance and pursued a major in Dance in sophomore year against her family’s wishes. Her debut work premiered at Hunter College in the fall of 2014 titled Pacified. She has shown works at various places in NYC such as the Dixon Place, La MaMa ETC, Eden’s Expressway, Judson Church, Socrates Sculpture Park, Abrons Art Center, Jack Crystal Theater and Kaye Playhouse.
She’s been fixated on finding ways to represent feelings of being trapped- in our own physical body, by the structural systems we participate in and by our individual thought processes. She is looking for a way out. She’s curious about cryptocurrency, nomads and co-living. She often wonders, what if we value accessibility instead of ownership? What if we live in a borderless world filled with global citizens?
Jana Lynne (JL) Umipig is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, healer and activist who seeks to elevate narratives of re-membering self as a reflection of her own life’s journey toward decolonizing, re-indigenizing and humanizing self.
JL has continually witnessed and produced work that speaks to upliftment of the human spirit. Her training is rooted in classical and physical theatre work as she received her formal training at New York University, The Claire Trevor School of the Arts at The University of California, Irvine and The Accademia Dell’ Arte in Arrezzo, Italy. Much of her career has been heavily rooted in collaborative based, applied and experimental theatre that focuses on human rights advocacy, art therapy/ healing connected to the development of her work around “For the Movement Theatre” and “Theatre as Spiritual Practice.” She is also the Creator of “The Journey of a Brown Girl” that toured nationally and internationally as a Theatre Experience that invited audiences to witness the human being through the eyes of a Pilipina.
She has traveled to communities throughout the world sharing her cultivated knowledge of processes that activate and support self and community healing and empowerment. Particularly, JL has committed herself to bringing the presence of her ancestors from the Philippine diaspora into every space, with cultural teachings and practices being implemented in all of her work.
She is a core member of The Center for Babaylan Studies, an Inner Dance facilitator, and founder of Butikaryo mga Babae, which creates sacred space for Pinay Womxn Healers seeking to learn and remember healing practice and knowledge connected to our ancestral traditions.
Zavé Martohardjono is an interdisciplinary artist interested in geopolitics, social justice, queer glam, and embodied healing. Among many venues, they’ve performed at BAAD!, Boston Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance, Issue Project Room, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Movement Research at Judson Church, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Recess, Storm King Art Center, and the Wild Project. Zavé is in LMCC’s 2017–2018 Workspace Residency program and has previously had residencies at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Gibney Dance Work Up 3.0, Shandaken: Storm King, La MaMa, and Chez Bushwick, and was a Lambda Literary Fellow. They have danced in the works of Mariangela Lopez and J. Dellecave. They organize with artists of color and work at the ACLU to end mass incarceration. They received their BA from Brown University and their MFA in Media Arts Production from the City College of New York.
