ALL IN: a performance gathering hosted by First Nations Performing Arts
Credits: devynn emory working with a participant as part of SJ Norman's ensemble Cicatrix 1 (that which is taken/that which remains) for the artistic program KIN at First Nations Dialogues in Lenapehoking. Photo by Ricardo Martinez Roa

First Nations Performing Arts featuring Dakota Camacho, Kunu Bearchum, Allison Akootchook Warden, Autumn Chacon and Jess Abeita, Kevin Holden, morher feat. Chloe Alexandra Thompson, and Ed Bourgeois

 

ALL IN: a performance gathering hosted by First Nations Performing Arts

  

DESCRIPTION

First Nations Performing Arts is focused on cultural change, commissioning, touring, and presenting Indigenous performance, as well as capacity building for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts sectors.  

The work of First Nations Performing Arts (FNPA) is distinct in our national landscape. FNPA seeks to be the Indigenous-led initiative that makes visible, public, and transparent the urgent decolonizing work the performing arts field in what is currently called the US must do.

  

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Dakota Camacho is a Matao•CHamoru multi-disciplinary artist / researcher working in spaces of Indigenous lifeways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education.

Kunu Bearchum (Northern Cheyenne & Ho-Chunk Nation). Based in Oregon, recently producing award-winning documentaries for native-owned non-profit Wisdom of the Elders and releasing his debut Hip-Hop Album titled "Through The Battle Smoke" with local and regional mainstays in the music scene. Kunu creates his work as a tribute to traditional Native American storytelling but with a contemporary lens and toolkit.

Allison Akootchook Warden is an Iñupiaq futurism artist that resides in Fairbanks, Alaska, and is a tribal member of the Native Village of Kaktovik.  She translates her traditional values through the mediums of installation, music, performance, visual art, poetry, and dance.  Her most recent contribution took form as poems as a part of a hyphen-labs project for Google Arts and Cultures. She is the recipient of a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship in the field of traditional arts. She is most excited to work with Aqqalu Berthelsen, an Inuit producer and beat maker from Greenland.  www.allisonwarden.com 

Autumn Chacon (Diné / Chicana) is an artist and activist whose organizing work in media justice has led to the inception of three FCC-licensed community radio stations; while her work as an activist has led to meetings with the largest banks of the world in a successful effort to divest $3.8 billion from the Dakota Access Pipeline. Her work as a conceptual, installation, and performance artist has been shown among First Nations communities throughout North America and abroad. Many of Chacon’s pieces reveal Indigenous futurisms where technology has a sacred relevance, and exemplify her skills as a self-taught electronic engineer.

Kevin Holden (Diné, Irish, German, and Norwegian)

Kevin Holden is an artist and composer based in and around Portland, Oregon.

morher is a multimedia artist building synesthetic language to heal colonial trauma and ancestral memory carried in the body as a mixed Rroma and desendent of Quileute, and a multigenerational sex worker and survivor of sex trafficking, homelessness, and domestic violence. Their soundwork falls under the name Morher. https://morher.bandcamp.com/ or https://hal0.xyz/about 

Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree, Canadian interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound. https://chloealexandra.info

Ed Bourgeois is a theater artist of mixed—French, Iroquois, Algonquian, Italian, Scottish, diseased, orphaned, alcoholic, KKK, displaced and runaway—heritage. His Alaska Native Playwrights Project trained 32 Native playwrights from 2010-2013. Bourgeois’ plays have been included in Native Voices at the Autry’s Short Play Festival: Trail Trees; and Backstage, Blue Moon, which won the 2016 Von Marie Atchley Excellence in Playwriting Award. River of Blood was workshopped at Autry’s 2018 Playwrights Retreat and Native Earth’s 2019 Weesageechak Festival, received staged readings at LaJolla Playhouse and Oklahoma City Native American New Play Festival, and was a Semi-Finalist for the 2019 Blue Ink Playwriting Award. Through papier-mâché, recycled cardboard, and improvisational comedy, he’s working to disrupt family trauma and pass down good stories to his grandchildren.