Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Presents Amy O' Neal's OPPOSING FORCES and A Tribute to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) presents Clas/sick Hip Hop, three evenings of hip hop dance and music with an energetic double bill now in its third iteration. The evening opens with Amy O'Neal's Opposing Forces, featuring breakdancing, dance battles, and intimate duets by five world-class B-Boys, followed by twelve unique Bay Area bands paying homage to Grammy award winner Lauryn Hill's critically acclaimed hip hop album with a night of covers and reinterpretations in UnderCover Presents: A Tribute to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Clas/sick Hip Hop aims to surface questions about the role of hip hop through music, movement, and the politics of freedom with an emphasis on gender norms.

Amy O'Neal's Opposing Forces opens with a dance party at 7:00 pm leading into the performance, followed by UnderCover Presents: A Tribute to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill at 9:30 pm.

Ticket packages are available starting at $50. Individual shows start at $20.

Amy O' Neal's Opposing Forces

YBCA is excited to welcome back Amy O'Neal to Clas/sick Hip Hop with Opposing Forces, a piece that utilizes tropes of contemporary performance to expose fears around feminine qualities in our culture through the hyper-masculine dance style of breaking. With curiosity, vulnerability, and power, five world-class B-Boys uncover binary perceptions of gender using a diverse range of dance contexts: battling, commercial dance, intimate duets, and cyphering, all set in a futuristic geometric landscape. City Arts magazine praises O'Neal's work: "O'Neal synthesizes complex themes with a cohesive, penetrating aesthetic. Her latest work transcends disciplines and boundaries. It is a bridge between worlds, a translator for opposing points of view, a force for good."

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Chief of program and pedagogy at YBCA, explains, "I've been tracking Amy O'Neal's work for the better part of the last ten years, from her multimedia collaborations with the group locust to her off-the-cuff work with avant-garde comedian Reggie Watts. Throughout her career, she has mined the interstitial spaces between movement traditions to excavate a fascinating and hard-to-pin-down vocabulary. Opposing Forces applies this same ethic to the subjects of gender and race. It's a daring unpacking of hip hop-specific cultural norms that lands at YBCA in a fertile moment of our own institutional investigation of freedom, design, and creative struggle in search of something new, inclusive, and expansive."

Opposing Forces features Fever One of Rocksteady Crew, Brysen "Just Be" Angeles of Massive Monkees, Alfredo "Free" Vergara of Circle of Fire / Soul Shifters, MozesLateef Sa'Leem of Circle of Fire / Soul Shifters, Michael O'Neal Jr. of Beat Hippies/CHPT 1, an original and live score by WD4D, stage design by Ben Zamora, and lighting design by Amiya Brown. Opposing Forces runs Thursday, February 16, through Saturday, February 18, 2017, at 7:30 pm.

(Please Note: Opposing Forces contains a brief section with explicit language.)

UnderCover Presents: A Tribute to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Then at 9:30 pm YBCA and UnderCover present a showcase of highly curated local bands paying homage to the classic Lauryn Hill soul and hip hop album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which won five Grammys and sold more than eight million copies in 1998. Twelve diverse musical ensembles each lend their unique creative voices to a song from the album, reinterpreting the entire classic record from start to finish, creating a musical cross-pollination you're unlikely to see on just one show bill.

UnderCover Presents is an award-winning team of arts enablers dedicated to exposing audiences to a wide variety of quality local acts while celebrating the influence of classic albums. Established in 2010, they have paid tribute to 12 influential albums (by artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to Sly and the Family Stone) and have worked with more than 100 Bay Area bands. UnderCover reinterprets albums with one song per band, each not merely "covering" the song, but presenting the track in their own creative voice. The San Francisco Chronicle lauded an earlier endeavor: "Reinterpreting such a personal statement might seem like a fool's errand, but for the Bay Area collective UnderCover Presents, Mitchell's masterpiece provides an ideal forum for marshaling a cornucopian array of the region's most creative musicians."

Presented by guest musical director Meklit, participating bands include Faye Carol, Cosa Nostra, Femme Deadly Venoms, Fr333 feat. MADLines, Howard Wiley and Extra Nappy, Inspector Gadje, Jennifer Johns, Josh Jones Latin Ensemble, Katdelic, Kev Choice, Kimiko Joy and the RubADubs, RyanNicole, and Vocal Rush. Clas/sick Hip Hop: UnderCover Tribute to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill runs Thursday, February 16, through Saturday, February 18, 2017, at 9:30 pm.

About Amy O'Neal

Amy O'Neal is a dancer, performer, choreographer, and dance educator equally participating in street and club dance culture and contemporary dance and performance. She is passionate about the intersection of these worlds while honoring their complex cultural differences. A sought-after teacher and artist for the past seventeen years, O'Neal works nationally and internationally, choreographing for stage, commercials, rock shows, galleries, dance films, and music videos. Her work is an amalgam of her diverse movement and life experiences, presenting social commentary with dark humor and heavy beats. Based in Seattle for twenty years, O'Neal was awarded the first Distinguished Alumni Award from Cornish College of the Arts in 2014. She is a DanceWEB scholar (ImPulsTanz Vienna), a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, and a two-time Seattle Stranger Genius Award nominee. She is a longtime collaborator of the musician and comedian Reggie Watts and danced in the Pat Graney Company in her formative years. From 2000 to 2010 she was co-director of locust music/dance/video with the musician-composer Zeke Keeble and the lead singer of their former band, Marrow. In recent years, she was an invited dancer for Clas/Sick Hip Hop in 2014 at YBCA, a guest panelist for 206 Zulu Nation's Meeting of the Minds, and twice invited to battle in Queen of the Hill: All Ladies/All Styles battle in Seattle. She spent half of 2015 in the Bay Area working as a guest artist in residence at Mills College and serving as choreographic architect for Citizen Dance, a large-scale dance event with a corresponding mobile app at UC Berkeley. She is currently living and working part time in Los Angeles. For more information about Amy and her mission, visit www.amyoneal.com

About Undercover Presents

UnderCover Presents was founded in 2010 and has established itself as an inspirational collective that gathers musicians and artists from every facet of the San Francisco Bay Area's creative community. The concept is simple: reinterpreting an entire classic album from start to finish, one band per song. Each artist is highly encouraged to put their own sound and personality on their rendition. The result is a cross-pollination of cultures, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, writers, and visual artists that doesn't typically happen on one show bill.

UnderCover Presents is a fiscally sponsored nonprofit and member of the Intersection Incubator, a program of Intersection for the Arts providing fiscal sponsorship, incubation, and consulting services to artists. Intersection for the Arts is San Francisco's oldest alternative arts space, presenting groundbreaking works in the literary, performing, visual, and interdisciplinary arts. www.undercoverpresents.com/mission

About Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is one of the nation's most innovative contemporary arts centers. Founded in 1993, YBCA's mission is to generate culture that moves people. Through powerful art experiences, thoughtful and provocative content, and deep opportunities for participation, YBCA is committed to creating an inclusive culture that awakens personal and societal transformation. YBCA presents a wide variety of programming year-round, including performing arts, visual arts, film/video and civic engagement. YBCA venues include the Forum, Screening Room, Galleries and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. For tickets and information, call 415.978.ARTS (2787).

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