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Project Title: Flight
to Ixcan
Recipient Organization: ODC/San Francisco
Lead Artist: Claudia Bernardi
Genre and Date Awarded: Visual Arts, June 2002
Premiered: February 2004
Visual artist Claudia Bernardi, choreographer Kimi
Okada, and the
modern dance company ODC/San Francisco are collaborating to create
a new work addressing how humans deal with death and personal loss
in times and nations of political repression and wide-spread tragedy.
Inspired by actual events, a family tragedy in the context of a rash
of political deaths, in Central America in the mid-1970s, Bernardi
and Okada are building a piece about survival and memory--the desire
to retain what is precious, the mercurial nature of memory, the urge
to forget, and the passion to resist forgetting.
The artists share
an intimate connect to the work's content. In 1976, Kimi Okada's
brother, a San Francisco physician doing humanitarian work in Guatemala
during the time of a repressive political regime, was killed in
a mysterious airplane crash. Lead artist Claudia Bernardi, a native
of Argentina and resident of San Francisco, worked with the Argentine
Forensic Anthropology Team. She has worked extensively throughout
Central and South America, exhuming grave-sites to investigate
war crimes. In her artmaking, she is deeply influenced by her field-work,
by the retrieval of bones and human artifacts and the spirit that
permeates both the objects and the process of uncovering. Her artwork
suggests the narratives of pieces excavated and explores the concept
of finding images through searching in layers of dust. Her pigmented
canvases often incorporate fragments of clothing, bones, and other
artifacts.
Bernardi writes, "We met as part of a group of people involved in
human rights. Kimi is a member of Coalition Missing, a component
of the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, made up of family members
of those disappeared, executed, tortured, and assassinated in Guatemala.
I have worked with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, and
was invited to speak at a Coalition Mission meeting.... After we met,
and saw each other's work, we felt an immediate and deep affinity
for each other." In collaborating with Ms. Okada, and in focusing
their work around the nature of memory, Ms. Bernardi will build upon
her current body of work to explore a new medium for her artwork:
as sets, installations and costumes to frame a company of dancers
in a new piece of modern choreography.
Flight to Ixcan is a full company work for ODC/San Francisco.
The multi-dimensional sound score by composer Jay Cloidt is a collage
of original and found music (Central American folk and modern),
Spanish newspaper texts, and transcripts of Congressional hearings.
Lighting design is by Alexander Nichols. The set design by Ms. Bernardi
includes natural wood illuminated boxes, personal objects, articles
of clothing which have been treated with paraffin to hold a shape,
and large quantities of earth.
The piece is structured in nonlinear
sections weaving the specific and the abstract. References to actual
place (the Guatemalan jungle, gravesites), events (the plane crash,
congressional hearings, the presence of the military), and familial
relationships are juxtaposed with fragments of remembered and imagined
images from the past. The incongruence of the mundane and the catastrophic
exist simultaneously. The piece is about the earth and about secrets
carefully revealed, and about that which the human heart and mind
uncovers. It is about the resistance to forget as much as the struggle
to avoid confrontation with facts of great damaging powers. There
are internal demons (i.e. survivor's guilt, incapacitating sadness)
as well as political demons. The dancers' roles constantly shift
as individuals, as groups (the family, the township, children,
the military), and as more abstract textural backdrops. The idea
of excavation (both literal and figurative) as a revelatory process
centers the piece - physical unearthing of
information, retrieval of memory, unlayering of historical facts
and fiction. It is this process of "unearthing" which ultimately
leads to a transformation in perspective and acceptance.
ODC/San
Francisco is a leading Bay Area modern dance company and a center
for dance and contemporary performance. Founded as the Oberlin
Dance Collective in 1971 by choreographer Brenda Way, ODC moved
to San Francisco from Ohio in 1976. Kimi Okada, Associate Choreographer,
is one of ODC's founding members. Today, ODC is a triumvirate of
ODC/San Francisco, ODC Theater, and ODC School. The company performs
in residence at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Its annual activities include a regular repertory season, a full-length
children's holiday program, three months of national and international
touring, informal performances, and company outreach.
A native of Argentina, Claudia Bernardi works as both an artist
and a human rights activist. As a forensic anthropologist, she has
exhumed the remains of many victims of political repression. According
to Angelina Snodgrass Godroy of the Center for Latin American Studies
at the University of California, Berkeley, "Claudia Bernardi's artwork
is inspired by suffering, yet infused with life. Drawing upon experiences
of state terror--such as the exhumation of mass graves in Central
America--the artist's challenge is to resurrect beauty amid the bloodshed
and in doing so, to refuse to succumb to the silencing embrace of
political repression."
She calls her technique "frescoes on paper," a method she developed
through which she applies layer after layer of pure pigments to wet
paper and runs that paper repeatedly--sometimes hundreds of times--through
a printmaker's press. No solvents or binders shape the pigments'
flow across the paper. Upon and between the layers of pigmentation,
Bernardi uses a porcupine quill to engrave images, sometimes words.
She also incorporates shards of bone, fragments of clothing, and
other artifacts in the work.
- "Human Rights Violations in Latin America and the Universalization
of Human Rights: Moral and Legal Concerns," with Marcelo Brodsky,
International Forum, University of Haifa, Israel (2002)
- "Steps Never Taken," installation and frescoes
on paper, Studio Soto, Boston, MA (2001)
- "Stains of Life/Manchas de Vida," collaborative
installation with Carlos Est J vez, MACLA, Movement of Art and
Culture from Latin America, San Jose, CA (2001)
- "Claudia Bernardi," Martha Schneider Gallery,
Chicago, IL (2001)
- "Claudia Bernardi," The College of Wooster
Art Museum, Wooster, Ohio (2001)
- "Stains of Life/Manchas de Vida," collaborative
installation Carlos Est J vez, Galer R a Habana, La Habana, Cuba
(2000)
- "Vientos Oscuros/Dark Winds," Center for Latin
American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA (2000)
- "The Useless Perpetuity of Distance/La Perpetuidad In d til de la
Distancia," Fresno Museum of Contemporary Art, Fresno, CA (1999)
- "Earth Remembers/La Tierra Recuerda," Carl
N. Gorman Museum, University of California Art Museum, Davis,
CA (1999)
- "Veiled Memories," collaborative installation
with Marjorie Agosin, Robille Frederick, and Sharon Siskin, Mathews
Center, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ (1999)
- "Taller del Sur/The Southern Studio," art
project designed for children of the Latin American refugee community,
The Potrero Nuevo Fund (2000)
- "The Wills Will Tell Our History and Our Dreams," mural
project created in collaboration with the children of the Latin
American refugee community and students of the California College
of Arts and Crafts, Center for Art and Public Life (2000)
- "Stains of Life," Creation of installation,
Artist in Residence, Villa Montalvo, Saratoga, CA (2000)
- "Taller del Sur/The Southern Studio," Artist-in-residence/Art
in Communities, California Arts Council (1989-2001)
- "Veiled Memories," The LEF Foundation, California
Council for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities,
Zellerbach Family Fund, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library,
Poets and Writers (1996)
Kimi Okada has been choreographing since 1969. Her work includes
commissions and collaborations with Geoff Hoyle, Bill Irwin, Julie
Taymor, Robin Williams, Edward Barnes, and Keith Terry. She was a
founding member of the Oberlin Dance Collective (now ODC/San Francisco),
for whom she has created more than 20 works, and currently holds
a position with the company as Associate Choreographer.
In addition to her work with ODC, she has choreographed theatrical
productions for The Children's Theater Company in Minneapolis, Theatre
for a New Audience in New York, The American Music Theater Festival,
the Santa Fe Opera, Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Los Angeles Theatre
Center, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing
Arts, the Pickle Family Circus, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
She was nominated for a Tony award for the Broadway production of Largely
New York , which she co-choreographed with Bill Irwin, originally
produced at City Center in New York with subsequent productions at
the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts. Ms. Okada has received seven National Endowment for the Arts
Choreography Fellowships.
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