Dancing Back into the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Area, 1973–1976

Author(s):  
Halifu Osumare

Chapter 4 chronicles the author’s return to her home area after five years, now as a professional dancer-choreographer. She establishes her professional reputation in the Bay Area, one that will serve as the foundation of her future work as a regional dance catalyst and cultural activist. As an artist, she develops the artistic theme central to her developing career in The Evolution of Black Dance. She creates and produces several evening-length productions during this three-year period, begins to learn arts administration, and forms Halifu Productions, a company that helped catalyse the mid-70s black dance scene in the Bay Area. She also meets the poet Ntozake Shange and artistically collaborates with her and her poems on a project that will become the famous production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enough. Ntozake Shange gives her an African name, and the author becomes Halifu Osumare.

Author(s):  
Halifu Osumare

As the longest section, chapter 6 covers sixteen years of the author’s career as dancer, choreographer, dance educator, and arts administrator. During this period, she solidified her reputation in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area as a leader in the growing black dance and multicultural arts movements when she founds the non-profit dance institution Everybody’s Creative Arts Center (ECAC). She assess her development as a dancer-choreographer, discussing some of her key dance works as well as the creation of the center’s resident dance company, CitiCentre Dance Theatre, which was an important contemporary dance company that operated from 1983 to 1988. She also explores her simultaneous adjunct dance position at Stanford University and several of her choreographic and directorial commissions. The chapter articulates how, in 1989, her accumulated artistic and administrative experience culminated in her founding a major national initiative in black dance: Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. She concludes with how she eventually transitioned from the arts to academia after going to graduate school, and how dance and “writing dancing” are similar.


Author(s):  
Halifu Osumare

This chapter tells the author’s beginnings in dance in high school and her developing dance training as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University. She also probes the unique qualities of the SF Bay Area in the latter 60s, specifically as it relates to the Black Arts Movement-West, the hippie counterculture movement, and black militancy leading to the formation of Oakland’s Black Panther Party and the SF State Strike for Ethnic Studies. She shows how she situated dance as her unique revolutionary statement and took this approach when leaving the US for Europe as a young woman.


Author(s):  
Sheigla Murphy ◽  
Paloma Sales ◽  
Micheline Duterte ◽  
Camille Jacinto

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
José Ramón Lizárraga ◽  
Arturo Cortez

Researchers and practitioners have much to learn from drag queens, specifically Latinx queens, as they leverage everyday queerness and brownness in ways that contribute to pedagogy locally and globally, individually and collectively. Drawing on previous work examining the digital queer gestures of drag queen educators (Lizárraga & Cortez, 2019), this essay explores how non-dominant people that exist and fluctuate in the in-between of boundaries of gender, race, sexuality, the physical, and the virtual provide pedagogical overtures for imagining and organizing for new possible futures that are equitable and just. Further animated by Donna Haraway’s (2006) influential feminist post-humanist work, we interrogate how Latinx drag queens as cyborgs use digital technologies to enhance their craft and engage in powerful pedagogical moves. This essay draws from robust analyses of the digital presence of and interviews with two Latinx drag queens in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as the online presence of a Xicanx doggie drag queen named RuPawl. Our participants actively drew on their liminality to provoke and mobilize communities around socio-political issues. In this regard, we see them engaging in transformative public cyborg jotería pedagogies that are made visible and historicized in the digital and physical world.


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