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Dance Brigade / Dance Mission Theater presents

WAR CRY TEARS A marathon of dance, theater, spoken word, drumming, and truth telling commemorating the

12th Anniversary of the war in Iraq

Featuring Dance Brigade, Climbing PoeTree, Embodiment Project, Stephen Funk/Veteran Artists (visual art), and Aaron Loeb’s The Proud (excerpts)

Dates:  Saturday March 14, 2015 (7pm) and Sunday March 15, 2015 (2pm)Where: Dance Mission Theater (3316 24th St, SF CA 94110)Tickets:  $25 Reserved Seating (BrownPaperTickets.com) / Pay-What-You-Can for General Admission at doorInfo: www.dancemission.com 415-826-4441

(San Francisco – February 2015) WAR CRY TEARS commemorates the 12th Anniversary of the War in Iraq, an event that set in motion an ever-changing landscape in the Middle East, with deep ramifications on the Individual Armed Forces that served from the United States.

Bringing together several stunning artistic groups that have grappled with and investigated the heartbreaks and affects of war, Artistic Director Krissy Keefer weaves the work of Dance Brigade, with the spoken word of Climbing PoeTree, excerpts from Aaron Loeb’s new play The Proud, the visual art of Stephen Funk’s Veteran Artists, the music of singer-songwriter Gina Breedlove, and the raw street dance and poetry of Nicole Klaymoon’s Embodiment Project.

It is not secret that the war on Iraq in 2003 unleashed a fury of death and destruction across the globe. Upheavals in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Libya, Paris, Yemen and inside the homes of veterans in the United States continue. President Obama recently said that American troops would be deployed to train Syrian rebels and that there would be a three-year ISIS fight.  The wars go on and men and women in the United States continue to suffer from PTSD, depression, and suicide due to combat and military training.

This is the backdrop on which we present two days of artistic response to a war with out end - a war that

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moves from refuge camps, to combat zones, to secret prisons, to the often-tortured minds of American vets. Artists participating will speak directly to these currents affairs – looking at the wars waged both at home and abroad.

Occupying Dance Mission, WAR CRY TEARS features the fierce dancing and drumming of Dance Brigade, including excerpts from Hemorrhage, the company’s most recent work that had a sold-out and extended run in 2014 and honors peace activist Rachel Corrie. New York’s Climbing PoeTree, the combined force of  “gifted poets” Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman, will dominate the stage with “soulful expression,” as described by Cornel West. Aaron Loeb’s play, The Proud* takes a difficult look at the new face of post-traumatic stress syndrome and the (mis)treatment of women in the military and features actors Stacy Ross** (SF Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award winner) and Lucas Near-Verbrugghe** (Grimm). Embodiment Project (EP), with their dance that ‘speaks’ and language that ‘moves,’ looks at the war at home and how black, brown, and red men and women are often the victims of an increasingly militarized police force. Heart-stirring vocals accompanying EP are by Valerie Troutt’s Moon Candy, known for their ‘live’ house music. There will also be 'Folksoul' music by Gina Breedlove and Vicki Randle, and visual art by Stephen Funk / Veteran Artists.

In addition to performances held in Dance Mission Theater’s main stage, mini performances will be held throughout the building and will include work by Leila Baradaran, Grrrl Brigade and alumni, and others. The complete performance schedule will be available online at dancemission.com and audience members are encouraged to come to all are part of the marathon. The program begins at 7pm on Saturday March 14 and 2pm on Sunday March 15.

Reserved seating is $25 (available online at www.BrownPaperTickets.com). Dedicated to keeping art accessible to everyone, General Admission at the door is Pay-What-You-Can.

* This is a stage reading and is an Equity approved production. ** Appears courtesy of Actor’s Equity Association.

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ABOUT DANCE BRIGADE and DANCE MISSION THEATERDance Brigade has “ferocious dancing, powerful percussion, (and) self-conscious humor” – SF Weekly, Jan 2014

In 1975 Dance Brigade Artistic Director Krissy Keefer co-founded the Wallflower Order, the nation’s first feminist dance company.  Wallflower toured the nation for almost a decade, and staged many of Keefer’s original pieces before large, enthusiastic audiences.  Keefer developed a new kind of modern dance theater that was stylistically rooted in the martial arts, in female athleticism, and in social justice issues.  Keefer co-founded Dance Brigade out of the Wallflower Order in 1984 and her original works continue to explore social issues such as war, poverty, breast cancer, women’s history, and spirituality.      In 1998, Dance Brigade began to operate Dance Mission Theater at 24th and Mission Streets in San Francisco and added significant presenting, affordable theater and rehearsal space rental, artist development, and adult/youth dance instruction programs.  Dance Mission Theater is an 8,400-square-foot dance center, with a 140-seat black box theater with professional lighting and sound capabilities.  The facility also contains three dance studios.  Major artistic accomplishments include:  creation and

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production of 15 evening-length works of Keefer’s original feminist dance/theater for sold-out crowds; presentation of the pioneering CubaCaribe, SkyDancers, ManiFestival, Women on the Drum, and D.I.R.T. festivals; management of a welcoming, affordable, artist-led professional theater that presents more than 110 choreographers each year and helps emerging artists launch their professional careers through programs such as the Choreographers Showcase; and creating Grrrl Brigade, an intensive dance/leadership development program for hundreds of local girls age 9 to18. Dance Brigade also operates the Dos Rios Artist Retreat Center in Mendocino County, which offers space for performance, dance, drum, and yoga intensives, and artist residencies, serving both the Bay Area and the rural local Mendocino communities.  Dance Brigade has created a foundation of mutual support based on its mission, which values building community through arts. The organization has a long history of activism and community engagement. Its women identified feminist values hold social justice and inclusion as highest priority and has nurtured many artists both seasoned and emerging, working with diverse populations. Dance Mission is the preeminent Hip Hop and Caribbean dance school in San Francisco and the welcoming atmosphere encourages seemingly disparate communities to overlap and cross-pollinate.

ABOUT CLIMBING POETREE"Each time I have the pleasure of attending a performance by Climbing PoeTree, I feel enriched, renewed, and inspired. Alixa and Naima insist that poetry can change the world—and it is true that the urgency, power and beauty of their words impel us to keep striving for the radical futures toward which they gesture.” – ANGELA DAVIS

Climbing PoeTree is the combined force of Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman. Over the last 11 years, Climbing PoeTree has been at the forefront of social and environmental justice movements by harnessing their art as a tool for popular education, community organizing, and personal transformation. Their award-winning performance is composed of dual-voice spoken word poetry, hip hop, and multimedia theatre that dissolves apathy with hope, exposes injustice, and helps heal our inner trauma so that we may begin to cope with the issues facing our communities. Climbing PoeTree has independently organized 26 national and international tours bringing their performance to thousands of people across the U.S. and abroad from Mexico to the UK, South Africa to Cuba. Their soul-stirring performances have been featured alongside visionary leaders and artists such as Angela Davis, Cornel West, Alice Walker, Erykah Badu, Alicia Keys, Saul Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Naomi Klein, Danny Glover, and The Last Poets, among others. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Alixa and Naima created the award winning multimedia theater production Hurricane Season:The Hidden Messages in Water and traveled over 11,000 miles across the U.S. on a bus converted to run on recycled vegetable oil, merging theater and activism by creating a national network that gave voice to local organizations addressing and healing the effects of unnatural disasters in their communities. Climbing PoeTree’s artistic and organizing work can be found on the walls of galleries and museums through projects such as S.T.I.T.C.H.E.D and Shadow Boxing, the latter created by Garcia, and in the streets of Haiti Ayiti Resurrect, Co-Founded by Penniman.Innovative educators and performers, Climbing PoeTree’s work appears in high school and university curricula. In that last year alone, they were  selected to present and keynote at the New Story Summit, Scotland; Bioneers National Conference, California; and at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, MA to name a few.  They have lead hundreds of workshops in institutions from Yale University to Rikers Island Prison. They are currently developing a multimedia curriculum derived from their celebrated production, Hurricane Season, that employs art and culture to help learners analyze systems of oppression and resistance, and builds critical consciousness and imagination essential for fundamental social change.

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ABOUT AARON LOEB'S THE PROUD*

Aaron Loeb’s (Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party) The Proud takes a difficult look at the new face of post-traumatic stress syndrome of American Iraq War veterans and the (mis)treatment of women in the military. The Proud opens as Army psychiatrist Captain Beatrice MacDonald or “B” (Stacy Ross, SF Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award winner) meets the new soldier intake, Marine corporal Walter Barrett (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe, Grimm, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson). Walter has been admitted to the psychiatric ward for attempted suicide - accused of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a threat, and two attempts of intentional self-injury. When he denies trying to kill himself, B tries to unravel what really happened that night and why Walter is so haunted by the death of Cheryl and Lupe, two team members who appeared to have killed themselves weeks earlier. Choreographed by Krissy Keefer, Dance Brigade appears as a five person Greek Chorus, who, through dancing and Taiko drumming, help narrate the story. 

Krissy Keefer  has been developing the concept for the work with local Bay Area playwright Aaron Loeb and nationally renowned Director Emeritus of San Jose Repertory, Timothy Near, along with the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.  IVAW is leading the movement of veterans and GIs who are working to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Collaborators Loeb, Keefer, and Near, with the support of IVAW, gathered stories from Bay Area Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families to help inform the script. They were compelled to create this work after recent statistics from the Veterans Administration (VA) were released that an average of 18 Iraq War veterans commit suicide each and every day of the year, and that more than 6,552 have taken their own lives since the war began, which means more service people have committed suicide than have died in combat. Rape within the US military has become so widespread that it is estimated that a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire and that there is a culture of punishment for the women and men who report sex crimes and a simultaneous failure to prosecute the offenders. Aaron Loeb (Playwright) : Aaron Loeb’s work has been performed in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Ft. Worth, San Jose, and Connecticut. His full-length plays include Brown, First Person Shooter, Blastosphere (with Geetha Reddy), and Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party, which had its Off-Broadway premiere at in 2010. Among the honors Loeb has received are: two Bay Area Theater Critic Circle Awards for Best New Play (First Person Shooter in ’07, ALBGDP in ’08), Outstanding Play from the New York International Fringe Festival (ALBGDP ’09), GLAAD Media Award Nominee (ALBGDP ’09), and seven “Emerging Playwright Awards” from PlayGround. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Inc and a Playwrights Foundation resident playwright. Lucas Near-Verbrugghe** (Walter) : Lucas Near-Verbrugghe was born and raised in San Francisco.  New York credits include Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Broadway), The Ritz (Broadway), the NY premieres of Oohrah! by Bekah Brunstetter and BOOM! by Peter Nachtreib, Macbeth at the Public, and a three person version of Romeo and Juliet.  Regional credits include the Pittsburgh Public Theater and Texas Shakespeare Festival.  TV: “Grimm,” “Law and Order,” “Guiding Light.”  He can also be seen in the film, My Idiot Brother.  Lucas has an MFA from NYU. Stacy Ross** (B) : Stacy Ross collaborated with both Dance Brigade and Timothy Near on Iphigenia at Aulis at San Jose Repertory Theatre. Other credits include Book of Days (Mountain View), The Rivals (ACT), Major Barbara (San Jose Rep, for which she won SF Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award),

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Spring Storm (Marin Theatre Company) and Hamlet, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Cal Shakes). Stacy has also appeared with San Jose Stage Company, SF Playhouse, Best of PlayGround, and Berkeley Rep. * This is a stage reading and is an Equity approved production. ** Appears courtesy of Actor’s Equity Association.

ABOUT NICOLE KLAYMOON’S EMBODIMENT PROJECTEmbodiment Project in one of the "ten companies and artists who challenged expectations and unveiled surprises.” - Rita Felciano

Embodiment Project (“EP”) is a San Francisco-based urban dance theater company founded by Nicole Klaymoon. Dance magazine contributing editor Rita Felciano called Embodiment Project one of the Bay Area’s “ten companies and artists who challenged expectations and unveiled surprises.”  The SFBG wrote that Nicole Klaymoon’s signature work House of Matter, “(w)as one of the most rocking and joyous dance shows to hit the town in a long time.”  EP has performed at numerous festivals including the International Hip Hop Festival, Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Left Coast Leaning Festival, G.R.A.C.E. Africa (Kenya), Booking Dance Festival at Jazz at Lincoln Center (NY), Daedalus Project on the Elizabethan Stage at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OR), Dance Brigade's Manifest-ival for Social Change (CA), Cuba Caribe Festival (CA), West Wave Dance Festival at Z Space (CA), Dance Mission’s D.I.R.T. Festival (CA), ODC’s Walking the Distance Festival (CA), Krissy Kefer’s Voluspa: A Ghost Dance For 2012, Sean San Jose’s Block by Block, and four consecutive years in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Green Show (OR). EP has produced home season shows of original works to sold-out audiences for the past six years in San Francisco.  The company has been awarded an artist residency at Intersection for the Arts, Red Poppy Art House, Intersection for the Arts, Destiny Arts Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Dance Mission Theater. 

ABOUT GINA BREEDLOVE

Gina Breedlove began her career at age 15 singing backup for Phyllis Hyman, toured as a featured  vocalist with Harry Belafonte, and has since worked with such artists as Omar, Ani DiFranco,  Sekou Sundiata, Craig Harris, Toshi Reagon, and Lizz Wright. She also originated the role of Sarabi in The Lion King on Broadway. The website Blues and Soul called her album Open Heart “a celebration of womanhood” and “a courageous stand.” Gina is a creative force, tender and vulnerable, dynamic and full of power. Folksoul is what Gina Breedlove calls her signature sound. Think of classic rhythm and blues spiced with a big dash of folk and gospel. ABOUT VETERAN ARTISTS

Veteran Artists is a community conduit for connecting veterans with artistic opportunities. Veteran Artists partners with artists and activists to develop and participate in meaningful projects and programs that facilitate therapy, skill building and reintegration. It strives to counter destructive experiences with creative experiences, empowering veterans with tools to educate, inspire and connect with the general public. “Make Drag, Not War! is an annual event produced by Veteran Artists, which started at Dance Mission Theater.  

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 FOR CALENDAR EDITORS WHAT:War Cry TearsA marathon of dance, theater, spoken word, drumming, and truth telling commemorating the 12 th Anniversary of the war in Iraq. Featuring Dance Brigade, Climbing PoeTree, Embodiment Project, Stephen Funk/Veteran Artists (visual art), and Aaron Loeb’s The Proud (excerpts) with Stacy Ross and Lucas Near-Verbrugghe. WHEN:March 14-15, 2015Saturday March 14, 7pmSunday March 15, 2pm WHERE:Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF CA 94110 TICKETS:$25 Reserved Seating at BrownPaperTickets.com or  1-800-838-3006Pay-What-You-Can at the door, General Admission INFORMATION:DanceMission.com or 415-826-4441 PRESS PHOTOS:Available by request at dancemissiontheater@yahoo.com and online at http://dancemission.com/press/press_releases.html

VIDEO: Available by request at dancemissiontheater@yahoo.com

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