Robert Moses' KIN Announces 30th Anniversary Season

Robert Moses' KIN has announced its 30th Anniversary Season entitled The Kennings, world premiere program of work by Artistic Director Robert Moses and three new works created by the 2025 guest artists of RMK's New Legacies: One Acts program.

Moses delves into his signature exploration of sensuality, war, race, human rights, and individual freedoms through dynamic choreography with profound emotional depth, while also providing original sound and text for The Kennings. The works generated through New Legacies: One Acts, a platform for emerging and established voices in contemporary dance, feature collaborative teams working with choreography, text and music, resulting in dynamic, multi-disciplined works.​ This season's collaborative teams are: Yayoi Kambara (Choreography) and Loni Landon (Choreography), Janesta Edmonds (Playwright) and Angela Yam (Music); Nol Simonse (Choreography), Jim Cave (Text) and Lawrence Tome (Music); and Megan & Shannon Kurashige (Choreography and Text) and Erika Oba (Music)

Performances are Friday, March 14 and Saturday, March 15 at 7pm and Sunday, March 16 at 2pm at Z Space in San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$55. For tickets and information: https://www.zspace.org/kennings

Moses' The Kennings features eleven dancers, with original sound and text by Moses, and is marked by a commitment to pushing artistic boundaries and fostering a dialogue on shared experiences. Moses describes The Kennings as "a narrative impressionist anthology, a meditation on the emotional, societal, racial, political, and gender-oriented expectations placed on all of us, with a specific focus at times on the experiences of Black men and African American diasporic concerns. For me, the most direct way to effect social change and meaningful human interaction is by characterizing society through the body and the word."

With The Kennings, Moses seeks to engage audiences with a sense of shared community, exploring the communal struggle for understanding, love and the profound loss of both. He explains that the original text and movement of The Kennings are "a compound of accounts hidden over time by artists sentenced to an 'Artist Gulag.' These muted retellings, echo like barks from a kennel of the dead, are haunting, possessing a spectral quality. The utterances, poetically metaphorical, hint at profound loss endured."

RMK's New Legacies: One Acts

Also on the program, RMK presents three original works choreographed by three renowned artist teams: Yayoi Kambara and Loni Landon, Nol Simonse, and Megan & Shannon Kurashige. These premieres are part of RMK's New Legacies: One Acts, a unique platform for collaboration for emerging and established voices in contemporary dance which launched in 2024. Each piece showcases the creative interplay between dance, music/sound and text, and pushes the boundaries of contemporary performance while exploring diverse artistic perspectives.

The dancers for the RMK 30th Anniversary Season are Jenelle Gaerlan, Kai Hannigan, SiQi He, Julian Hernandez, Z Jackson, Eden Magana, Teddy O'Brien, Giovanna Sales, Giulia Sales, Ava Shannon, and Mitch Stone.

ABOUT ROBERT MOSES' KIN

Founded in 1995 at Z Space in San Francisco, the internationally celebrated dance company Robert Moses' KIN uses movement as the medium through which race, class, culture, and gender are used to voice the existence of our greater potential and unfulfilled possibilities.

The diverse company is known for its eclectic movement vocabulary, demanding choreography, ferocious dancing, and provocative themes. Artistic Director Robert Moses' focus on the expressiveness of the human body and his desire to speak with the voices of his African American heritage have produced works with global recognition. RMK has collaborated with prominent dancers, musicians, composers, sculptors, authors, poets, and designers to realize the concept of dance as a unifying art form.

Choreographer, Writer and Composer Robert Moses has created numerous works of varying styles and genres for his highly praised dance company, as well as composing many of the sound and narrative scores for those works since 2008. Moses has choreographed for dance, opera, and theater companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, San Francisco Opera, and Lorraine Hansberry Theater. His choreography has been presented at festivals and on college campuses throughout the US and internationally, including OPEN LOOK St. Petersburg International Dance Festival, Serendipity Arts Festival (Kolkata, India), Jacob's Pillow DanceFestival, UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco, Santa Clara University, and Stanford University, where he served as Lecturer and Choreographer-in-Residence from 1995 to 2016.

ABOUT THE 2025 NEW LEGACIES: ONE ACT COLLABORATIVE TEAMS

For detailed artist biographies, go to https://www.robertmoseskin.org/events

Yayoi Kambara (she/they) has been a freelance Bay Area dance artist since 2000 and a company member with ODC/Dance from 2003 to 2015. She was the rehearsal director for AXIS Dance Company in 2015, recently created staging for Opera Parallèle and was in the 4th Cohort of APAP (Association of Performing Arts Professionals) Leadership Fellows Program which led to her research Aesthetic Shift, a year-long Community Engagement Residency project for Bridge Live Arts analyzing aesthetic bias and relationality. She is co-interrogator of Dancing Around Race (DAR). She founded KAMBARA+ in 2015.

Loni Landon is a choreographer, producer, curator, dance educator, and creative consultant based in New York City. She is a Princess Grace Choreography Fellowship Winner and was recognized as a Finalist for the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography. Her work has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater, Keigwin and Company, BODYTRAFFIC, James Sewell Ballet, Whim Whim, LEVY DANCE, The Juilliard School, American Dance Institute, Northwest Dance Project, Groundworks Dance Company, Hubbard Street II, BalletX, Ballet Austin, SUNY Purchase, NYU, Boston Conservatory, and Marymount Manhattan College.

Janesta Edmonds (they/them) is a writer, choreographer, performance artist and community collaborator dedicated to creating sustainable and thriving BIPOC communities through the arts. A Santa Clara University graduate with a major in Theater (Dance emphasis) and History (Education emphasis), Janesta specializes in inclusive and culturally relevant artistic expressions. She has co-managed productions for San Francisco Trolley Dances and participated in Bay Area queer events like Oaklash, THE SHOW and Tenderloin Arts Festival at CounterPulse. As Director of Programs at SAFEhouse Arts, Janesta ran dance residencies, bilingual children's ballet workshops, and LGBTQIAA+ programming, partnering with organizations such as TAG, TNDC, and the Transgender District.

Angela Yam (she/her) returned to Boston Lyric Opera as an Emerging Artist for the 2024-25 season, performing the role of Ismene in Mozart's Mitridate. Recent projects include the world premiere of The Pigeon Keeper by David Hanlon and Stephanie Fleischmann with Opera Parallèle, New Year's Celebration with Boston Baroque, and Cavalli's La Calisto (Opera Memphis). Recent credits include Josephine Young understudy in Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang's An American Soldier (PAC NYC), Johanna in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (Chautauqua Opera, Opera Saratoga), and Diana in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride (Boston Baroque).

Nol Simonse grew up in Washington, D.C., and trained at the Boston Conservatory of Music. He is a founding member of Kunst-Stoff, Janice Garrett and Dancers, Garrett+Moulton Productions, and Sean Dorsey Dance. He is also a longtime collaborator/performer with Sue Roginski, Eric Kupers, Christy Funsch, Stephen Pelton, and Kara Davis, and has worked with Mark Foehringer, Mary Armentrout, Della Davidson, Carey Perloff, Val Caniparoli, Nancy Karp, and Mary Carbonara. He was awarded a 2011 Isadora Duncan Dance Award for individual performance and a 2019 GOLDIE for dance. He is a member of the choreographic collaborative 'the Straw Dogs', and created a piece for the Queering Dance Festival in 2024.

For the past forty years Jim Cave has focused on the development of new theater, multi-disciplinary and site-specific performances, demonstrations and general disruption. He has directed and designed plays, dance, dance-theater, opera, new music theater, site-specific spectaculars, and a flea circus for San Francisco's Exploratorium. He recently performed in Death Pod, with choreographer Nol Simonse at Counter Pulse & designed and co-directed recent experiments with choreographer Margaret Fisher. He directed Colm Tóibín's Silence, and co-directed (with Sheila Balter) Octavio Solis' Retablos and S. T. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (with Delia MacDougal) for Word for Word Performing Arts Company at Z Space.

Lawrence Tome is an Okinawan-American musician born and raised in the Bay Area, and currently living in Oakland on unceded Ohlone land. They work with a blend of acoustic and electronic elements and sampled sounds, tuning into the resonances of movement and story to build supportive scores. They have worked as a sonic collaborator with dance and performance makers including Nol Simonse, Nina Haft, Megan Lowe, Rebecca Fitton, and Melissa Lewis Wong. Outside of music, they also dance and work on environmental policy.

Megan & Shannon Kurashige are sisters and the co-directors of Sharp & Fine, a San Francisco-based dance theater company creating devised storytelling that provokes deep feeling and instigates transformation. Megan & Shannon have been commissioned by Oakland Ballet, the US/Japan Cultural Trade Network, and Soundwave, and their work has been presented by FACT/SF, the RAWdance CONCEPT series, and the Merde Project. As dancers, they worked with Liss Fain Dance, Mark Foehringer Dance Project, Christian Burns, Alex Ketley, Ballet Pacifica, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal.

Erika Oba is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. She has written works for jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and performs with her own groups the Erika Oba Trio, Ends Meat' Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble. She has also performed with Meredith Monk, Frances Wong, Jon Jang, Peter Apfelbaum, Lisa Mezzacappa, Jean Fineberg, Rent Romus, and many others. In addition to her own private teaching studio, she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley's Music Department.

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