August 22, 2013
CALIFIA AND THE TRESPASSERS will premiere in Philadelphia on 28 September as part of the Pew Foundation’s “New Spaces New Formats” project. It will be site-located with multiple projections, spacialized sound, and immersive dance scores at Christ Church, the historic Quaker meeting house in Center City Philadelphia.
Original concept, performance text, and film by Quintan Ana Wikswo. Original music by Andrea Clearfield. Choreography by Manfred Fischbeck. Performed by GroupMotion Dance Theater.
A collaboration across film, poetry, music, and dance, CALIFIA questions the intersection of violence against women within the contexts of colonialism in California. From 1472 t0 1972, the ancient redwood and sequoia groves of California have seen many inhabitants – spiders, coyotes, and two young women who reach towards one another across time when predators invade their wilderness terrain.
CALIFIA was written and filmed in the endangered redwood forests on racist eugenicist James Phelan’s California estate, where a young birdwatching girl was murdered by a serial killer in 1971. Created in residency at Montalvo Center for the Arts, with the participation of the Pew Foundation and the support of Creative Capital.
Artist’s Statement:
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 mythic cosmos that is eternally linked in my mind to California. Over the decades, I’ve watched heartbroken as the transcendent beauty of coastal California is inexorably destroyed wave upon wave of interlopers and trespassers who blaze new and often destructive paths through an ancient ecology and cultural heritage. My later memories, as a small child in Santa Clara County outside San Francisco, include when the utopian dreams shifted into the nightmares of Charles Manson, Patty Hearst, the Zodiac killings, the Zebra killings, and violence that struck disproportionately at women and people of color. While the visual and textual imagery of CALIFIA is located within the mythic ecology of my childhood, at heart this piece inhabits the cycle of ecological, racist, and misogynistic violence orchestrated by wave upon wave of pioneer ideologues who have been attracted to that soil since the Spanish conquistadores committed the early genocides against California’s coastal tribes.