QUITTING THE SELF: ON EMBRACING the Fragments I’d Yet to Center Within My Own Being
A Conversation Series in Three Parts
Curated by Michael Orange & Angela Mictlanxochitl, MATATU performative think tank
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ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Martín Perna is a musical polyglot: A Grammy-nominated producer, musician, writer, and music scholar, he has performed over 2,000 concerts in 43 countries on five continents. He began his music career on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label in 1995, and helped build the soul revival movement as a founding member of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings and associated bands. As founder/bandleader of the group Antibalas, he has served as musical director at Carnegie Hall for several all-star homages honoring Paul Simon (2014), David Byrne & Talking Heads (2015) and Aretha Franklin (2017), as well as “The Music of Billie Holiday” at the Apollo Theater (2017).
Perna has lived and worked in diverse locales, from the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, where he arranged and co-produced an album with Creole Palo de Mayo music legend Mango Ghost, to Sicily where he helped produce and arrange work by Palermo troubadour Fabrizio Cammarata. In 2017, he travelled to Benin, West Africa, to collaborate with Angelique Kidjo and student musicians at the CIAMO arts academy to produce the “Kids Against Malaria” PSA song and video. In 2018, he served on the faculty of African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University teaching Africa Diaspora Music. He was named director of the SFJazz / Oakland Public Conservatory’s youth jazz orchestra for their fall 2019 season. As a writer he has authored liner notes for the 2018 Grammy-nominated Orquesta Akokan and liner notes/bios for several contemporary global music artists. In July 2020, he scored and performed music for Daveed Diggs’s performance of the poetry polemic “Fourth of July.” He is a contributing editor for the literary travel magazine Stranger's Guide.
Paul S. Flores is a performing artist, playwright, and bilingual literacy advocate who creates and implements successful justice-oriented arts programs for Latino communities in both urban and rural settings. His work incorporates music, dance, and theater as a powerful tool for communities divided by issues of police violence, racism, gentrification and economic disparity to discover opportunities for solutions, healing, and unification. Flores’ play On The Hill: I am Alex Nieto dramatizes the life and death of Alex Nieto who was killed by San Francisco Police Department, and his previous play, PLACAS, was a deep look into incarceration, immigration, and street warfare based on testimonies of members of MS-13 in California barrios. His solo show You’re Gonna Cry about tech-driven gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District garnered him recognition as the SF Weekly Best Politically Active Hip-Hop Performer. Flores is a Doris Duke Artist, a MAP Fund awardee, a Gerbode-Hewlett Theater commission recipient, a NALAC Fund for Arts recipient, and a NPN Creation Fund awardee. He is the co-founder of Youth Speaks, and currently an adjunct professor of Theater at the University of San Francisco.
Michael Montgomery of Long Beach, CA, trained at the Orange County High School of the Arts and studied at the Alvin Ailey School in the Certificate program. In 2011 he graduated from the Alonzo King LINES Ballet BFA Program at Dominican University of California. Montgomery was awarded the American College Dance Festival Association’s best student performer award for the Southwest Region in 2008. In 2010, he joined LINES Ballet and was named a Shenson Performing Arts Fellow that same year. Montgomery was named to the list of “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine in 2013.
Irene Faye Duller’s professional life blood is to support passion and mission-driven organizations or companies in telling their stories and, at best, telling the story that serves transformation in small and big ways. Good stories will solicit political action, encourage smart consumer decision-making, shape collective identity, provoke thought, inspire change, define humanity, address income inequality, and say yasss out loud.
“I have only a history of working with and for the community of OTHERS across intersections: immigrant, working class, brown, Black, womxn, artists, lgbtqix, displaced. The underestimated, underinvested, and historically x politically under attack. These are the stories that have mattered to me for 20 years.”
With more than 14 years of experience, Maxwell Keller has had a long-standing interest in and success with individuals who have taken back their lives from the effects of addiction, trauma, abuse, anxiety, and/or depression, and helping families find healthy and meaningful ways of being in relationships.
His therapeutic approach focuses on the stories of people’s lives and involves discovering ways in which people can change their relationships to the problems or difficulties they are facing. Keller believes that clients should have a say in the treatment process; therefore, he works from a strength-based, collaborative perspective, incorporating such therapeutic approaches as Narrative therapy, Brief Solution-focused therapy, EMDR, and Mindfulness. This way of working opens up space so that clients can heal from deep historical wounds, acquire skills to make needed life changes for today, and collaboratively explore and examine the challenges that create difficulties and barriers in their lives. Through this approach, Keller has helped a countless number of individuals and their families become successful in recovery.
Ras K’dee is from Sonoma County, California, is a Native California Pomo/African musician, community educator, and renowned lyricist, producer, & lead vocalist/keyboardist for Bay Area-based live world hip-hop ensemble, Audiopharmacy. For K’dee, his musical inspiration is deeply rooted from his experience as a cultural artist. Translating artistically through world music, hip-hop, rhymes and soulful melodies, K’dee invokes the songs and dances from traditional ceremonies of his native people, and tells stories of resistance, healing, community & empowerment that can be understood and felt universally by all people. K’dee has toured locally and internationally with Audiopharmacy for 16 consecutive years, traveling to Germany, Austria, UK, Holland, Switzerland, France, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, Fiji, and more. In 2003, K’dee co-founded a Native youth media organization Seventh Native American Generation (SNAG) whose annual publication features the art, photos, music and writing of Indigenous Youth. K'dee is currently building the first ever sustainably built, Indigenous led, multi-media center of its kind the NEST Community Arts Center in his Pomo homeland.
Michael Orange is the chief mobilizer, moving image and crowd, in the truest namesake of MATATU. In the proud lineage of Black librarians, Michael has found his purpose early in the preservation and presentation of heirloom truths. Such critical stories have peppered the earth in all directions, which he sees as elements necessary to forge the intersectional post-colonial identities of the African Diaspora. Each of Michael’s commitments are meditative actions of personal and public inquiry within the Afro past, present, and future. In this passion, he is a cultural bearer of the radical African imagination. The production of knowledge as power for a rising Black America in a time of wanton institutional violence and mass displacement, Michael feels is his responsibility–not by choice but by obligation. He partners with thought leaders and creatives, locally and internationally, to promote Black excellence through visionary and inclusive neo-Africana cultural experiences. Michael is an Association of Performing Arts Professionals Leadership Fellow (2020); a participant in ACAM 2019, an art cinema executive management program presented by International Confederation of Art Cinemas; and a commissioner for the City of Oakland’s Office of Cultural Affairs.
Angela ‘Mictlanxochitl’ Anderson is a scholar practitioner, creative strategist, and psychopomp working to challenge dominant epistemologies and advance matters of of cultural and racial equity in the arts. As Director of Operations for Institute for Diversity in Health Management, Anderson co-founded of the National Forum for Healthcare Executives, the Asian Health Care Leaders Association, and expresiones-artisticas. She continued her work in the healthcare space as Executive Director of the National Forum for Latino Healthcare Executives, leading to her initiating the “Indigenous Knowledge Gathering” in Ohlone territory in 2015, and on Tohono O'odham land in 2016. The institution works to bring together indigenous peoples (Native and within the diaspora), scholars, and community organizations to talk with one another and build culturally competent partnerships with one another. In her MATATU leadership role, she has led innovative and controversial discourses on “White Privilege in Socially Engaged Art,” “Reclaiming the Commons of Contemporary Art,” and “Too Black to be French?” Anderson serves as a council member of Danza de la Huitzlimetzli and Danza de la Luna Xinachtli Meztli, and as an initiated ‘Abuela’ in the lineage of Danza de la Luna–a transterritorial Mexica ceremonial practice. She is a specialist in the effective communication of pluralities of knowledge across cultural and organizational borders and completed a Doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology, focusing on the intersections of people and their reclamation of ancestral spiritualities.
