THE DREAM INSIDE US
The Dream Inside Us is one woman’s reckoning with the ecological devastation that now threatens all life. She seeks sustenance from her Civil War ancestors’ extraordinary survival stories, her encounters – both real and mythical - with the Gobi grizzly bear, and from the silent slow-motion procession of 26 red-robed fellow climate activists.
THE LOST AMERICAN JAZZBOOK
The Lost American JazzBook won "Jazz Vocal Album of The Year" from both the 14th and 18th Independent Music Awards. How swell is that?
BURNING LIBRARIES
Stories from the New Ellis Island
Burning Libraries: Stories from the New Ellis Island premiered in 2010. The title comes from the saying, ‘If a person dies without their story being told, that’s like a library burning down’ (unattributed). Burning Libraries is an original performance work that brings to life 35 immigrant stories—from Yemen to Guatemala and from Vietnam to East Texas—through music, dance, aerial arts, puppetry, and video, etc. It was drawn from over 400 oral history interviews, that we conducted over a 6 year period from children in Oakland schools. Because of the enormous challenges that these immigrant communities face, we are working to bring Burning Libraries back into the world.
THE PREPARED TABLE
The Prepared Table: A Feast of Foods, Live Performance and Stories from Iraq, Afghanistan and the F.O.B. (Forward Operating Base of the U.S. Military) was presented on November 11, 2015 as an alternative Veterans Day event at the Bellevue Club. It premiered one day before the terrorist attacks in Paris. Looking back, it feels that in some small way we were able to create an island of sanity in a world gone mad—at least for a few moments. As imperfect as it is, the San Francisco Bay Area is a safe harbor for all of our multicultural identities, including the Iraqis, Afghans and military veterans who so generously agreed to be interviewed, and who were present at The Prepared Table. And there were a lot of multicultural identities among our performers—from a Palestinian-American singer to a Japanese/Filipina dancer to an Israeli-American pianist. It’s what makes our part of the world a living, breathing answer to all the xenophobia that infects so much of this country and the rest of the world.
Why Black Swan Arts & Media?
We’ve taken the name, “Black Swan” from an expression that was popularized in 16th Century London. Because there were no black swans in Europe, the phrase, “black swan” first came to symbolize something that had no basis in reality.
Then in 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia. The metaphor took on a whole new meaning. Any system of thought could be upended by a single observation. In an instant the unimaginable could become reality—like a black swan.
We have chosen to adopt this vivid metaphor for our work in media and the performing arts, such that a “black swan event” is characterized as: beyond the realm of normal expectations and impossible to predict.