For the company’s 20th anniversary GERALDCASELDANCE presents two world premieres: Cover Your Mouth When You Smile and Not About Race Dance, a preview. In collaboration with Na-ye Kim (Korea/Hong Kong) and Peiling Kao (Taiwan/U.S.), Cover Your Mouth When You Smile explores the model minority myth, racial melancholia, and the concept of mimicry among Asian immigrants. Not About Race Dance confronts hierarchical structuring in choreography and dance presentation, demonstrating how it fails to accurately represent ethno-cultural identity. The dance comments on the realities of systemic racism and oppression that persist today while also drawing a parallel to Neil Greenberg’s seminal work, Not About AIDS Dance (1994), which underscored illness, death, and disappointment that was rampant during the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s.
Gerald Casel is a ‘Bessie’ award winning dancer, ODC Theater resident artist, choreographer and teacher. Born in the Philippines and raised in California, he received a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School in 1991 and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2007. He has danced in the companies of Michael Clark, Sungsoo Ahn, Stanley Love, Zvi Gotheiner, Russell Dumas, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Lar Lubovitch and Stephen Petronio and is an assistant professor of dance at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Photo by Tim Russell
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