Last Updated on April 9, 2021
This workshop has reached capacity and unfortunately, we are not able to accommodate additional signups or walk-ins.We welcome you to join us for the public performance River of Everyone River of No One presented in conjunction with the workshop on Sunday, November 12 at 6:30 p.m.
All Beta Main programs are free
114 W 4th St, Los Angeles, CA 90013
A workshop led by Brazilian-born dancer and choreographer, Marina Magalhães, Decolonizing the Body Through Dance is an ongoing series of workshops based on the belief that decolonization is a futuristic process of reclaiming and reinventing tradition. Alongside Magalhães, this iteration of the workshop was developed by The Main’s artist-in-residence Carolina Caycedo, in collaboration with Isis Avalos and Samad Guerra.
Carolina Caycedo’s River Serpent Book will be used as a score to catapult specific exercises around fluidity, containment, water, and environmental justice. Published in 2017, the foldout book encompasses five years of research and images on the significance and impact of damming rivers. Through both movement and conversations, dancers will develop a common language that will culminate in a public performance, following the workshop, on Sunday, November 12. Participants in the workshop are welcome to participate in the performance.
This workshop has reached capacity and unfortunately, we are not able to accommodate additional signups or walk-ins.
We welcome you to join us for the public performance River of Everyone River of No One presented in conjunction with the workshop on Sunday, November 12 at 6:30 p.m.
Holiday Wishlist Donations for Downtown Women’s Center at Beta Main
From now through the end of the year, Beta Main will be accepting donations for the Downtown Women’s Center holiday wishlist. Please bring donations with you to any of our upcoming programs, including the one listed above.
Downtown Women’s Center
Founded in 1978, the Downtown Women’s Center is the only organization in Los Angeles exclusively dedicated to addressing the needs of women overcoming poverty and homelessness in Skid Row.
Carolina Caycedo (1978, lives in Los Angeles) was born in London to Colombian parents. She transcends institutional spaces to work in the social realm, where she participates in movements of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right. Carolina’s artistic practice has a collective dimension to it in which performances, drawings, photographs, and videos are not just an end result, but rather part of the artist’s process of research and acting. Through work that investigates relationships of movement, assimilation and resistance, representation and control, she addresses contexts, groups, and communities that are affected by developmental projects, like the construction of dams, the privatization of water, and its consequences on riverside communities.
Marina Magalhães is a choreographer, dancer, and teaching artist from Brazil, based in Los Angeles. Magalhães’s work lives at the intersection between healing and provoking, social and concert dance, personal and political narrative, and traditional and contemporary practices. She has shared her unique movement approach throughout the US, Brazil, Cuba, Botswana and South Africa, earning her an LA Weekly Theater Award for Best Choreography and critical acclaim from LA Dance Review, “the type of show that keeps concert dance relevant in our lives,” and Creative Feel Magazine, “riveting… a physical and emotional feat.” She is constantly crossing borders, in dance and life, and thus, builds bridges.
Isis Avalos is a performing artist, teaching artist, and activist from South Texas, based in Los Angeles. Avalos received her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the University of North Texas where she trained in Modern Release technique. Her influences of Mexican regional (folk) dance, Modern release, Jazz, hip-hop, and most recently House, create a vibrant and culturally-bold aesthetic to her movement. Her activism through art derives from her lived experience as an undocumented child from Mexico and is now using her narrative as a form of social resistance through dance. Avalos is currently a touring performing and teaching artist for LA-based, Dance Activist company, CONTRA-TIEMPO Urban Latin Dance Theater. In 2014, she shared her movement in Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador as a Cultural Ambassador for the United States department of State through DanceMotionUSA. Making her the first U.S. Permanent Resident to travel abroad as a U.S. Cultural Ambassador. Through her work as a teaching artist, Isis is constantly investigating the ways in which movement/performance art can powerfully humanize the undocumented experience in America.
Samad Guerra began his arts training at the age of five, studying at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts in Oakland, CA. He learned to play Djembe and Dundun, as well as dance the “gumboot” from South Africa. At home, his father mentored him in Jazz studies and introduced him to the tenor saxophone. Samad was named a California Arts Scholar after completing the rigorous California State Summer School for the Arts training program in 2004. While traveling to Cuba, Samad discovered his passion for Afro-Cuban dance and studied for a year under master artist José Francisco Barroso upon his return. In 2010, Samad moved to Los Angeles to pursue his B.A. in World Arts and Cultures with an emphasis in Dance from UCLA. He was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Fellowship in 2014 to study Gnawa culture in Morocco, where he collaborated with local musicians and dancers on a multi-media project. Guerra completed his B.A. with honors in 2015. Currently, Samad dances full-time with CONTRA-TIEMPO (attracted to our blending of performance, activism, & community-building) and occasionally performs with Kim Bambula Productions and Viver Brasil.