We-C
ZERO1, Cisco Systems, Bill Wilson Center,
San Jose, CA 2008Developed and Directed by Dorit Cypis, Project Management,
Carli LeimbachProject Development/Teaching, Zachary Watkins, Angela Carroll,
Carli Leimbach
Presented at the 2nd Biennial
01 San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge
We-C is
a comprehensive media arts program for creative young adults of the Bill
Wilson Center who are moving through challenging life situations. Based on
Cypis’ model
Kulture Klub Collaborative (www.kultureklub.org), We-C is
designed to introduce youth to professional art events of excellence spanning
music, dance, theater, film and the visual arts...to model for them innovation
and creativity and to inspire them to see the world and themselves in expansive
ways. We-C offers young adults perceptual and aesthetic skills to
deeply recognize themselves as well as others and to consider how they would
like to be recognized by others.
Download PDF Statement
Please see Artist/Public
Practice/Kulture Klub Collaborative
Present in Motion
True Body, ArtWorks and Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2006
Artist
and mediator Dorit Cypis has been invited to develop unique performance
strategies, including text, voice, photo and video, movement, props and
sound to engage a group of teen girls to explore the theme of “what/where
is my true body?” Our identities are never separate from past contexts
of culture, as social, as mythological, as dream and as memory. It is true
too that our identities are never separate from future contexts of fantasy
and desire. Our focus is how to stay present in our bodies when pulled
by forces of the future and the past? "Where am I in my body?”
Stories from CRASH
Santa Monica High School Continuation School, Los Angeles, 2006
The film Crash, 2006, offers
a unique way to look at our identities in relation to how we see ourselves
and how we see and treat others, especially pertaining to racial,
ethnic and gender differences. Screening Crash, which tells stories
of racial and gender tensions leading to violence, is well suited for at-risk
teenage youth who so easily absorb cultural beliefs and morals.
Exploring how we have been treated for our differences and how we treat
others is one way of reconciling a better future for all.
Time –Lines of Migration
Angelus Plaza Continuing High School, Los Angeles, 2006
What is the relationship of cultural migration to immigration? What is nationality?
In
a world that is fast becoming cross-global, who is an immigrant? At this time
when we are all being challenged to re-consider immigration and migrant status
in the United States, students of Angelus Plaza High researched and constructed
time-lines made of maps, image, text, sound and movement to illustrate the
migration patterns of their families, revealing patterns of rural/urban, crossing
countries, ethnicities, cultural habits, experiences of cultural oppression
and desire for change.
We Are In Between
Metropolitan High School, Los Angeles, 2005
A nation is made up
of many diverse communities, overlapping, discontinuous, collaborative
and competitive. Communities are made up of diverse individuals moving
between cultural spaces and dream spaces, belonging to many communities
simultaneously...from family, to school, friendship, commerce, entertainment,
religion, etc. A nation is public and private, self and other, the same
and different, full of contradiction and possibility.
Using text, image, sound and movement, students will identify aspects of their private and public identities to create personal posters. The posters will be presented in a dynamic public processional of picket signs at the near by Greyhound Bus Station, allowing students to engage with the public and challenge perceptions of identity.
ArtLink
Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, 2005
How do you define your identity as public and as private? What are your
experiences of how you have been seen by others? How would you like to
be seen?
To extend these questions,
youth work in teams to explore how one sees the other.
We will work with text, sound, photography, video, props, gesture, movement
to dynamically engage with and challenge beliefs on identity and social
relations.
Girls on Girls’ Night Out
Orange County Museum of Art and St Joseph Ballet, Santa Ana,
CA, 2003
Through movement, gesture and image, we will uncover how present day media
images of women live in the bodies and minds of Southern California Latina
youth. Youth developed a choreographed processional of picket signs as they
danced through the museum exhibition.
"The girls came out of class delighted. Naye, Nadia and Viridiana told me that they enjoyed the meditation exercise, picture analysis, personal reflections and Dorit's openness and "down to earth" personality. Viridiana commented that she became more aware of her classmates/friends similarities and differences and this surprised her…that even though most of them share a similar culture each of them has a different family situation and that this shapes their views. This sharing and expression exercise has united them even more."