Last Updated on April 9, 2021
Experience a site-specific dance performance that embodies Carolina Caycedo’s River Serpent Book, a recently completed publication that encompasses five years of research on the significance and impact of damming rivers. Using the book as both a score and prop, the performance incorporates ideas about fluidity, water, containment, and environmental justice through African Diasporic dance practices.
Along with Caycedo, River of Everyone River of No One,was developed and will be performed by Marina Magalhães, Isis Avalos, Samad Guerra, and the participants of Decolonizing the Body Through Dance: River Edition, a workshop that convened prior at Beta Main.
Performance followed by Q & A.
Please note that the museum will be closed before the performance.
Doors will open at 6pm. ATTEND ON FACEBOOK
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 to the main.
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 photography 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 street photography 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/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” band 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 KimBambula Productions and Viver Brasil.