September 11-12

Saturday, 7pm

Jules (U.S.) Written and Directed by Carey Tully, 2009, 9:40 min. 
Alone and brokenhearted after learning that the love of her life has found someone else, 25-year-old Jules wanders into a park where she finds a homeless man who helps her realize life’s bigger picture.

Creative Spirit Behind-the-Scenes (U.S.) Produced by Inter Tribal Entertainment, 2010, 6min
A fast-paced look at what goes into the making of Creative Spirit films in California and New Mexico.

Pow Wow Dreams (U.S.) Written and Directed by Princess Lucaj, 2006, 9 min.
The story of four sisters living life on the road from pow wow to pow wow until one creates a crisis by deciding to leave the group. Best Short Film, 2007 International Cherokee Film Festival.

He Can’t Be Caught (U.S.) Written by Clementine Bordeaux, Directed by James Lujan, 2006, 13 min. (Remastered)
Set on Halloween night, this comedy-suspense thriller tells of a couple, who, on their way home in the dark from a costume party on the reservation, come across a fallen figure who may or may not be wearing a costume and may or may not be Bigfoot. Official selection, American Indian Film Festival.

Ancestor Eyes (U.S.) Written and Directed by Kalani Queypo, 2008, 19 min.
Pain caused by a daughter’s illness turns into a source of inspiration, igniting a mother’s gift for storytelling and ultimately paving a path of magical transformation. Winner of Best Drama Short, 2008 Action on Film International Film Festival; Directorial Discovery Award, 2008 Rhode Island International Film Festival.

Indios Primeros (U.S.) Written by Roberto A. Jackson,  Directed by Roberto Jackson and Two Worlds Creative Spirit New Mexico Class of 2009,  2009, 18 min.
In an impulsive act of courage, a Pima Indian man helps a young family of illegal Mexican immigrants.

Search for the World’s Best Indian Taco (U.S.) Written and Directed by Steven Judd, 2010, 15 min.
Based on a story by Judd, Tvli Jacobl and Thomas Yeahpau. Framed by a tale a Choctaw grandfather tells his little grandson, “Search” is about Three Shades of Black, whose search for the best Indian taco leads him not only to the object of his quest but also to a young woman named Rose and true love.

Sunday, 2pm

NDN General Clinic (U.S.) Written and Directed by Jan Woomovoyah, 2005, 9 min
A day in the life of patients who sit all day in the waiting room of the Squaw Creek health clinic, enduring a crazy nurse and second-class health care.

Creative Spirit Behind-the-Scenes (U.S.)Produced by Inter Tribal Entertainment, 2010, 6 min.
A fast-paced look at what goes into making Creative Spirit films in California and New Mexico.

Edgar’s Journey (U.S.) Story by Rhett Lynch. Written and directed by Two Worlds Creative Spirit New Mexico Class of 2008, 2008,15 min.
The humorous story of an American Indian from Malibu who gets lost in a mountain forest while making a movie for the History Channel. Audience Award, Taos Shortz Film Festival.

Two Spirits, One Journey (U.S.) Written by Shawn Imitates Dog, Directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman and Chad Richmen, 2007, 18 min.
A story about forbidden love on the reservation. Official selection, Los Angeles Outfest.

The Migration (U.S.) Written by Cody Harjo, Directed by Sydney Freeland, 2008, 10 min.
In a future wracked by global warming, an authoritarian government forces siblings to flee with seeds that may save the world. Official selection, L.A. Skins Fest.

Liminality (U.S.) Written by Migizi Pensoneau, Directed by James Lujan, 2008, 13 min.
A young Indian man gets more than he bargained for when he enters a reservation bar looking for help against a gang of vampire bikers. Official selection, ImagineNative Film Festival.

Search for the World’s Best Indian Taco (U.S.) Written and Directed by Steven Judd, 2010, 15 min.
Based on a story by Judd, Tvli Jacobl and Thomas Yeahpau. Framed by a tale a Choctaw grandfather tells his little grandson, “Search” is about Three Shades of Black, whose search for the best Indian taco leads him not only to the object of his quest but also to a young woman named Rose and true love.

Suggested donation: $5
Info: (505)-344-4542

Photo: Search for the World's Best Indian Taco

VSA North Fourth Performance Listings

September 18, 19, 25, 26

Saturday, 7pm & Sunday, 2pm

War Paint is set in modern-day Muskogee, Okla., near Bacone University.  College student Christina Yahola, half Creek Indian and half white, is determined to prove herself in college, but a class assignment to delve into her Native heritage alienates others and  tests her family’s patience.

Playwright  Bret Jones of the Creek Nation is director of theater at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. He is a novelist, screenwriter and lyricist as well as a playwright. War Paint and Kindred,  another of Jones’ plays,  have won the Garrard Playwriting Award sponsored by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee.

Kim Delfina Gleason, who is Navajo, coordinates the Two Worlds program and is the director of War Paint. She teaches theater, music, dance and Native American art at the North Fourth Art Center and is a veteran of the Two Worlds program.

Suggested donation: $5
Info: (505)-344-4542

photo: War Paint, NACA collaborative
exhibit with VSA AmeriCorps 2010

VSA North Fourth Performance Listings

October 2-3

Saturday, 6pm

FAAT KINE (Senegal) Directed by Ousmane Sembene, 2000

In FAAT KINE, Ousmane Sembene, the unquestioned father of African cinema, calls his fellow Africans to a reckoning of the post-independence era at the beginning of a new century. At 77, he sums up 40 years of path-breaking filmmaking with a penetrating analysis of the interplay of gender, economics and power in today's Africa. Sembene accomplishes all this through the deceptively light domestic drama of FAAT KINE, a gas station operator born, significantly, the same year as Senegalese independence, 1960. From its first shot to its surprising last, FAAT KINE is Sembene's tribute to what he calls the "everyday heroism of African women."

Saturday, 8pm

THE END OF SUMMER (Japan) Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, 1961

THE END OF SUMMER, Yasujiro Ozu's penultimate film: the old vs. the new, generational shifts, family loyalty, death. It's all in there in this wonderfully elegiac film. Leave it to Ozu to make the smoke from a crematorium chimney look positively poetic. 'It's the cycle of life,' someone watching the smoke comments. Indeed. - Donald Wilmott

Sunday, 4pm

QUAND LES ETOILES RENCONTRENT LA MER (Madagascar) Directed by Raymond Rajaonarivelo, 1996

Raymond Rajaonarivelo follows his epic first film on the Malagasy liberation struggle, Taba Taba, with a very different, poetic film exploring the relationship between traditional and modern concepts of human freedom. As the title suggests, Rajaonarivelo frames his film around three visual symbols or leit motifs, sky, sea and, by implication, the land marooned between them or life between birth and death.

Sunday, 6pm

FLOATING WEEDS (Japan) Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, 1959

"FLOATING WEEDS is like a familiar piece of music that I can turn to for reassurance and consolation. It is so atmospheric--so evocative of a quiet fishing village during a hot and muggy summer--that it envelops me. Its characters are like neighbors. It isn't a sad story; the central character is an actor with a healthy ego, who has tried to arrange his life according to his own liking and finds to his amazement that other people have wills of their own. He is funny, wrong-headed and finally touching."  -Roger Ebert

Tickets: $5 Day Pass

Info: 505-344-4542

Photo: Faat Kine

VSA North Fourth Performance Listings

October 8 - Friday, 8pm

Event will be held at 516 ARTS

(located downtown Albuquerque at 516 Central Ave SW)

Global DanceFest and 516 ARTS welcome Jonathan Khumbulani Nkala from Zimbabwe for a series of performances in Albuquerque. A published playwright, actor, poet, musician and comedian, Nkala’s work is informed by his harrowing escape from Zimbabwe to South Africa in 2002.

At 516 ARTS, Nkala will perform The Talking Drum, poetry and music piece For STREET ARTS: a Celebration of Hip Hop Culture & Free Expression. Nkala says about The Talking Drum, “Many, many years ago, in the days of our ancestors, when people lived according to their clans, villages were very far apart and separated by big mountains. When the Chief of a certain clan wanted to send a message to another clan, he would send the Nyanduri, a poet, to the top of the mountain. Using his drum, the Nyanduri would play different tunes according to the message. The messages would be replied to or passed on in the same way. This is how messages were communicated. This was the ancient and reliable way of communication. This was the talking drum.”

Tickets: $8, General Admission / $5, 516 Arts Members
Info: (505)-344-4542

For a complete Schedule of STREET ARTS programs and events, visit www.516arts.org or call (505)-242-1445

Photos: Erica Petersen

VSA North Fourth Performance Listings

October 9-10

Saturday, 8pm & Sunday, 6pm

Global DanceFest and 516 ARTS welcome Jonathan Khumbulani Nkala from Zimbabwe for a series of performances in Albuquerque. A published playwright, actor, poet, musician and comedian, Nkala’s work is informed by his harrowing escape from Zimbabwe to South Africain in 2002, when as a 21-year-old, Nkala and his friend made their way to Beitbridge border post, South Africa, with a plan to get across it by any means necessary to escape the political and economic chaos of their country. In the end they walked over 200km, swam across the Limpopo River and went through numerous challenges to get into South Africa. For the first time ever, the survivor of this ordeal is in the U.S. to tell his story.

At N4th Theater Global DanceFest will present U.S. premieres of two unique theatrical storytelling works written and performed by Jonathan Nkala: The Crossing, the story of Nkala’s journey from the ravaged Zimbabwe, and The Bicycle Thief.

Upon arriving in South Africa Nkala worked as a gardener, a handyman and a vendor and performed his story in the streets of Cape Town. In 2006 he was cast in a Motorola commercial where he met Erica “Bo” Petersen, an actress, producer, director and writer who worked with him as his drama coach. After forming a partnership, Nkala and Petersen presented The Crossing at the Harare International Festival of The Arts in 2009. The Crossing was part of The Voorkamerfees in Darling and toured schools in the Eastern and Western Cape. Both The Crossing and The Bicycle Thief were also performed at Grahamstown National Arts Fringe Festival, The Baxter Theatre, New Space Theatre, The Cape Town Holocaust Centre and many more.

Post Performance Discussion

Tickets: $20 General Admission/$12 Students & Seniors

Info: 505-344-4542

Jonathan Nkala/The Crossing, photo courtesy of Erica Petersen

VSA North Fourth Performance Listings

October 15 & 16

Friday & Saturday, 8pm

Backed by mesmerizing and rhythmic music renowned South African choreographer and performer Vincent Mantsoe and four other dancers from southern and southeast Africa and France transport audiences with a new piece about the San, the Bushmen, living witnesses of a long human journey that started over 20,000 years ago.

Since 1997, Global DanceFest has presented Mantsoe twice—in 2005 with a solo work NDAA/Awaking of the Self, and again in 2007 with his company performing Men Jaro. In SAN, Vincent’s signature movement is transposed on five dancers of various heights and nationalities, colors and degrees of sinuosity, a fascinating juxtaposition. Meanwhile the historical and spiritual ambience of the search for the ancestors, which is at the heart of the work, takes the dancers back and forth across the stage guided by a crisscrossing of white string and accompanied by hauntingly beautiful Sufi music and verses from Rumi. SAN is mesmerizing—always a good word to describe this artist and his work. Local dance aficionados will celebrate this beautiful work and new dance lovers will join the Vincent Mantsoe fan club!

Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe grew up in Soweto dancing with his mother and aunt, traditional ‘sangomas,’ learning the particular rhythms that result in a state of trance. With this as the basis for all that would follow—training in world and contemporary dance—his unique movement style he describes as "Afro-fusion and beyond" was born. Mantsoe currently resides in France but returns often to his home in Soweto. SAN is his newest artistic exploration of humanity's adaptation to change, a quest for balance and how life may be lived in the 21st Century.

Post Performance Discussion

Tickets: $20 General Admission/$12 Students & Seniors

More info:
505-344-4542
www.vincent-mantsoe.com

Vincent Mantsoe © Pascale Beroujon

VSA North Fourth Performance Listings

October 22 & 23

Friday & Saturday, 8pm

Tyler Tyler puts Japanese classical Kabuki dance/theater and American postmodern dance together onstage in a contemporary retelling of a war tragedy from Japanese history. The new work was created by NYC choreographer Yasuko Yokoshi in artistic partnership with Masumi Seyama, revered master teacher of Kabuki Su-Odori dance and the heir to the legacy of Kanjyuro Fujima VI, one of the renowned Kabuki choreographers of the 20th Century in Japan. Collaborators Yokoshi and Seyama dare to face boundaries of different training, cultural code and social hierarchy yet simultaneously desire to cherish the forms and beauty of universal language of dance.

Tyler Tyler features a Japanese actor and two Kabuki dancers, including Kayo Seyama, the oldest disciple and member of Seyama Dance Family and a woman who has spent over 50 years assisting Masumi Seyama in preserving this traditional dance form. The Japanese performers' cultural counterparts are American contemporary dancers Julie Alexander and Kayvon Pourazar, along with musician Steven Reker, who toured the world as a guitarist, singer and dancer with Everything will Happen Today, a musical performance composed by David Byrne and Brian Eno. 

"...From his first calculated stumble, while Alexander plays on a tiny, toy grand piano and sings in Japanese, we are being primed for the subtle refined ambiguity that will play out over the course of the work. This and the section that follows, with Asaji playing the mini piano and singing “every Sha-La-La-La-La, every Whoa-o-o-o” from the Carpenters “Yesterday Once More” complete with merged phonemes, serve as primers letting the audience in on the challenge and joke of cultural confusions. There is a clash of cultures, there is a merging of mores, and while at moments light and delightful, it is never trite." —Culturebot post by m.donohue/March 21, 2010

Yasuko Yokoshi was born in Hiroshima, Japan but has lived in NYC since 1981. She has been contrasting and combining the two cultures ever since. Yasuko is the recipient of numerous awards including two “Bessies.” Her work is performed throughout the US, Europe and Asia.

Post Performance Discussion

Tickets: $20 General Admission/$12 Students & Seniors

More Info:
505-344-4542
http://mappinternational.org/programs/view/211

Tyler Tyler; photo by Alexandra Corraza

VSA North Fourth Performance Listings