Why focus on one theatrical discipline when you can take a needle and thread to all of them? With fifteen years' worth of multimedia dance/theatre/music hybrids on her resume, Kim Epifano has three new works going up at ODC Theater this weekend.
Inspired by her 2009 residency in Ethiopia, Kim Epifano developed Heelomali, a mash-up of movement, song, photos and personal narrative, developed with didgeridoo expert Stephen Kent and Burmese harpist Su Wai. Under the mentorship of Epifano and Kent, teens from Burma and Nepal fuse the traditional dance and music of their homelands with hip hop, Bollywood, and breakdancing to create a unique multicultural infusion.
Epifano’s interdisciplinary exploration also includes a dance film made in Mexico and a Remy Charlip airmail duet. If you just blinked and muttered “What the hell is a Remy Charlip?” - allow us to explain. After posing that very question to Wikipedia, we discovered that Charlip is a revolutionary choreographer who devised the airmail dance form in the 1960s. He sends a set of drawings (by airmail, we assume) to a company and the dancers create context and put the positions in order.
And all three works get the Epifano treatment: “In Kim Epifano's hands the abstract becomes personal and the intellectual, physical," says the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "The passion - which sometimes approaches ecstasy - sets her works soaring.”
June 17-19. ODC Theater, 3153 17th Street. Tickets are $15-20 at 415-863-9834 or odctheatre.org.
