Take Root Presents: OcampoWang Dance & Janis Brenner at Valerie Green/ Dance Entropy

OcampoWang Dance will present three dance works that will transport the audience along the pathways of immigration. Equanimity investigates relational experiences from the perspective of immigrants: phases of love, creating beauty amidst misfortunes and disagreements, and the tensions between duty & desire, wants & needs. LOSS looks within the human spirit, enlivening hope and empowering the soul. 7456 Miles Journey shines light onto the complexities of immigrant identities with a focus on the experiences of women and children.

Janis Brenner’s new, interdisciplinary one-woman show, She Remembers her Amnesia, is a personal narrative, dance-opera-play, and comic drama. Based on true stories, over the course of a lifetime, Ms. Brenner investigates and reveals her own bizarre forays and adventures all in relation to the head, the brain, and the circuitous, unintended paths we take that create who we are and ultimately become. Prolific composer Jerome Begin and Ms. Brenner marry both recorded musical episodes with “live” vocal narration and original songs written for her particular vocal range and performance personas. Could the question we often ask, “Is it Nature or Nurture” be expanded to include “Isn’t it also Fate or Happenstance or that one moment of good or ill-fortune that guides our unique and unpredictable lives?” And what is a “normal brain" anyway? There is no moral, no culmination, no cathartic finish-- only a circuitous, unpredictable life on-going, as is each of ours.