September 9, 2014
On Friday, 12 September 2014, CALIFIA AND THE TRESPASSERS will have its Danish premiere in Copenhagen at the delightful Aarhus Unge Tonekunstnere/AUT, in the equally delightful cultural hub Godsbanen (Skovgaardsgade 3 at 8pm), as part of the International Alliance for Women in Music Award performance “Concertini” presented by Line Tjørnhøj, Executive Director at AUT, a nonprofit supporting sound arts. CALIFIA will continue its international performance tour through the autumn, and into Spring 2015…more details to follow!
CALIFIA was created through the support of Creative Capital, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Montalvo Arts Center.
Click HERE to read more about the project, explore excerpts from the poems and libretto, a snippet of the video projection, and look at photos from our US premiere.
CALIFIA AND THE TRESPASSERS is a collaboration between Quintan Ana Wikswo (original concept, libretto, video projection, poems), composer Andrea Clearfield (music), and choreographer Manfred Fischbeck (movement), featuring performances by Amber Benson(voice), Gloria Justen (violin), and Stephen Kent (didgeridoo), and the dancers of GroupMotion Dance Theater.
Through composer Andrea Clearfield, CALIFIA was a winner in the International Alliance of Women in Music Annual Concert for her electroacoustic music set to my film/poetry. The work will be performed in a series of performances around the world in 2014 and early 2015. Performances in Philadelphia the weekend of December 12/13 will be presented by Group Motion Dance Company, Manfred Fischbeck, artistic director, who collaborated in the original project.
In 2012, CALIFIA’s US premiere was in Philadelphia in the Pew Festival, and continued in a performance series throughout 2013.
ARTIST’S NOTES /
CALIFIA AND THE TRESPASSERS was filmed and created in the California killing fields of Santa Clara County, at the murder site of the Coastal Redwoods, the Ohlone people, and Kathy Bilek, a teenage birdwatcher killed in a serial hate crime in 1971. Since 1472, millions of Native tribes, trees, and teenage girls have come to inhabit California’s legacy of ecological, racist, and misogynistic violence orchestrated by wave upon wave of pioneer ideologues who have struck disproportionately at women and people of color.
My earliest memory is of standing inside a burned-out Sequoia tree, looking at the sky through a distant opening at its top: a vision of the ancient ecologies, mythic cosmologies, and first inhabitants that are eternally linked in my mind to California.
My later memories as a small girl in Santa Clara County are of terrifying warnings about sexual and racial violence as the utopian dreams of the 1960s became the murderous nightmares of Charles Manson, backlash against people of color in the wake of civil rights advances, and white male serial killers who hunted women as prey across the glorious California landscape…vigilante violence and toxic whiteness that recalled the 1860s lynch mobs and race riots against the Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and other non-European Californians.
Today, Silicon Valley and the Tech boom perpetuate this heritage, as they increase the rate of ecological destruction and create a dystopian world in which women and people of color are refused employment opportunities, ensuring that white men of European descent remain the kings and despots of California.
