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Spring 2008
PRESS RELEASE
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San Francisco International Arts Festival & Cultural Odyssey
Presents
Brazilian Dancer/Choreographer
Cristina Moura in
"like an idiot"
The San Francisco International Arts Festival celebrates its Fifth Anniversary featuring the California performance premiere of extraordinary Brazilian dancer/choreographer Cristina Moura in her solo production "like an idiot." Presented in collaboration with Cultural Odyssey the performance will take place on Thursday May 29, 7:00pm, Saturday, May 31, 9:30pm, and Sunday June 1, 4:30pm at Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th Street (@ Mission Street). Tickets are $20 general, $15 for groups, students, seniors and advance. For reservations and tickets for all shows please call, 415-292-1850 or 800-838-3006 or visit www.culturalodyssey.org or www.sfiaf.org.
CRISTINA MOURA is one of Brazil's most provocative and exciting performing artists. Cristina studied classical ballet and contemporary dance and has been a professional dancer since she was 15 years old working and touring worldwide with different companies from Brazil and Europe. From 1995 to 2002 CRISTINA MOURA has been working and living in Europe. She went back to Brazil in 2002, where she premiered her dance solo "like an idiot" at the Panorama de Dança Festival Rio de Janeiro. Since then the solo has been presented almost 100 times in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, UK, USA and Uruguay. This will be the West Coast premiere of the production!
"like an idiot" is a performance that combines a brilliant unique dance vocabulary with performance art, and theater. Utilizing otherworldly recorded music and her own idiosyncratic choreographic movement, Cristina moves about the stage as if possessed, drawing pictures in midair speaking with her hands, head, arms and body creating a mosaic of images, sounds, and gestures. Childlike pedestrian movement morphs into stamina driven excerpts of physical dance prowess. The piece explores the multifaceted personalities and the multiple impulses and expressions that constitute self-identity. The performance portrays the body in transformation and as a storehouse of emotions. It aims to communicate personal evolution in an objective, clear and direct way through the language of dance. "like an idiot" plays to the child in all of us. As an audience we can all commiserate with Cristina when she says, "sometimes I feel like an idiot!"
Cristina Moura's was booked for the San Francisco International Art Festival after Cultural Odyssey's Co-Artistic Director Idris Ackamoor visited Brazil as part of the curatorial team of the National Performance Network's Performing America's Project. His job was to find exciting, innovative Brazilian artists to tour to America. After visiting Cristina in her Rio de Janeiro studio he was smitten by her audacious and energy infused dance and choreography.
Cristina Moura's "like an idiot" is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network's Performing Americas Project. Major contributors of the National Performance Network include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), Altria and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. For more information: www.npnweb.org.
Cultural Odyssey's mission is to support the artistic work and vision of Rhodessa Jones and Idris Ackamoor, as well as an ancillary group of emerging, community, and established performing artists. To implement its mission, Cultural Odyssey locally premieres the original productions of Jones & Ackamoor, presents the Cultural Odyssey Performance Series, offers free and low cost technical assistance/consultancies to artists, students and small arts organizations, and conducts residencies, lectures and national and international tours. As well, it operates a community-based program entitled, The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women that serves female inmates, ex-inmates, and female community participants. In addition, the company conducts jazz programming spearheaded by the Idris Ackamoor Ensemble targeting youth and the general public.
Cultural Odyssey is supported in part by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Grants for the Arts of the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Foundation, Arts, the San Francisco Art Commission, the Grousbeck Family Foundation, the National Performance Network, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and individual donors.
The San Francisco International Art Festival's mission is to promote the arts and San Francisco through production of an annual, multi-disciplinary festival that brings together the world community of artists and audiences.
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