Search Results for: 97

March 1, 2016

What is the Scandal? The ignored cry of an immigrant

Following rave reviews and a successful sell-out run in New York and San Francisco, 3 Lopez Productions brings a new version of the one woman play, “What is the Scandal? – The ignored cry of an Immigrant” performed by Eliana Lopez.

What is the Scandal? is a one-woman show that explores what it means to be an immigrant woman of color in the USA, the injustice and political and social biases against immigrants in our system. Through different characters played by the actress, we discover that immigrant women of color don´t face only the outside challenges of the system, but face the internal challenge of adaptation, isolation and language barriers. Based on a real story, this Dramatic Comedy is also a reflection of self-transformation. A journey of human growth as a result of a very public and at the same time private experience.

Eliana is a Venezuelan actress who arrived to San Francisco after falling in love with a raising American politician. She left behind her country and career and when their new son is born her new family became her only priority. However cultural differences, language barrier, her fear to lose her son because her immigration status, racial bias and a highly publicize political scandal will break her family until she almost losesit.

Over 2,000 people have seen this piece in NY and San Francisco, and the story has been eye-opening for some and cathartic for others. After 34 performances and plenty of feedback, 3 Lopez Productions took the time to work in the evolution of the play rewriting several scenes and cutting out some others, in order to explore the effects of criminalization in a more intimate and personal way.

La Peña Cultural Center

3105 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA 94705

February 23, 2016

De’Anza: Si Señor Tour w/ Special Guest Natasha Blume

$10 ADVANCE, $12 DOOR

De’Anza (Sounds like: Anita Tijoux, Lila Downs, and more)
Pulling from various ends of the musical spectrum while taking cues from traditional mariachi sounds and blending layers of modern sonics, De’Anza is a breath of fresh air in a rather smoggy metropolis. Redefining what it is to be Latin Alternative, De’Anza creates an eclectic mix of music, crossing borders and boundaries, resulting in a new take on an old form.

“From hip-hop to jazz and everything in between, there’s no doubt that the United States is musically rich and, like many Latino bicultural homes, I was also exposed to music in Spanish at a very early age,” De’Anza says. “Being that my grandmother was Mexican, it definitely wasn’t uncommon to hear mariachi blasting from the speakers of her boombox. When I began writing music, it only felt natural to also represent that part of me.”

Joel Moya of Remezcla.com writes, “Despertar” is the first single and a hypnotic and catchy tune, thanks to a few plucks and strokes on a vihuela, some beats and, yes, that magical voice.”

With support from MTV Tres’ “La Hora Nacional,” NPR affiliated stations KEXP Seattle, 90.3fm, KLAX Berkeley, CA 90.7fm and KPFA Los Angeles 90.7 fm, Despertar is poised to convert any first-time listener within an earshot of “that magical voice.”

Amoeba Music, the world’s largest indie music retailer, has selected De’Anza to take part in its Home Grown artist program to coincide with the release of her EP for the month of March. This includes a running ad in LA Weekly newspaper, a feature on the retailer’s website and a prominent display of the EP inside its Hollywood store.

Her long-awaited EP debut Despertar will be released March 3, 2015, with spring and summer tour dates to follow.

Natasha Blume (Sounds like: a playful Lana del Rey with more interesting lyrics)

A living documentary, emerging poet laureate and wanderlust bohemian, Natasha’s music–like her life–is a story unfolding. Literally the daughter of a preacher man, she developed her musical roots performing in the churches her father ministered. Appointed principal keyboardist of the church band by age twelve, Natasha was given the mic at fourteen to lead congregations through their Pentecostal Christian revivals.

Empowered and motivated, she took her enthusiasm to any stage including the political–tenuring four years as class president. A momentum that was soon met with tragedy–including the loss of her father. Pain proves the birthplace of artistry, as Natasha secretly began to write what she had always understood as secular music, speaking to the angst and trappings of early adulthood through the eyes of an ambitious, type A and eventual sorority misfit. Traveling the world as a student enrolled in Semester at Sea, far from the church and its regiments, Natasha found her true voice performing these songs for both her alma mater and the anonymous passerby. Deciding to commit wholly, her arrival in Hollywood was picture perfect: hopelessly unemployed, unknowingly housed with a heroin-addicted prostitute and fending off induction by the nearby Church of Scientology.

Enter producer Jay Arr through a chance Hotel Roosevelt encounter that led to a miscegenation that literally writes the score of Natasha’s biography. His contemporary, apocalyptic compositions and her eerie vocal impertinence stretch the definition of a recycled pop genre with its soulful originality and powerful illustration of unspoken emotions.

Natasha Blume is less about tragedy itself, but the bittersweet reality of acceptance. Her songwriting expands upon these experiences and their asylum in a mesmerizing, urban electropop sound.

February 23, 2016

20TH ANNUAL YOUTH SPEAKS TEEN POETRY SLAM

2016 Preliminary Finals is FREE and open to the public!

Celebrate the voices of 21st century America! Youth Speaks hosted the first Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam in 1997, the first poetry slam for teenagers in the country. The annual slam (an Olympic-style poetry competition) features hundreds of young writers, emcees, and performers from throughout the Bay Area and Northern California, and attracts almost 10,000 audience members during its month-long run. La Peña Cultural Center is happy to be a venue for the Preliminary!

The Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam is open to any youth 13-19 years old in the greater Bay Area. Join hundreds of young artists and leaders as they take the stage, speak truth to power, and perform for a chance to represent at the Grand Slam Finals.

More information at http://youthspeaks.org/

February 18, 2016

Press Release: La Vida Vence La Muerte

February 18, 2016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Psychologist, tireless advocate for justice and human rights, and burn victim and survivor of Pinochet reign, Carmen Gloria Quintana, to visit the Bay Area.

Carmen Gloria Quintana will attend the encore performance of the cantata La Vida Vence a la Muerte / Life Triumphs Over Death, on Saturday, March 19th, at Berkeley’s La Peña Cultural Center. She will be in the Bay Area, March 18th, 19th, and 20th, and will be available for one-on-one interviews on those dates.

Contact Information:
Chilean Exiles Bay Area: Victor Martinez 510-333-3294 <marelectrician@earthlink.net>
La Peña Cultural Ctr: Aaron Lorenz 510-849-2568 <aaron@lapena.org>
La Peña Community Chorus: Lichi Fuentes 510- 593-3706 <lichifuru@gmail.com>

Berkeley, CA – On the morning of July 2, 1986, during a two-day national strike and protests against the military rule of General Augusto Pinochet, two teenagers, Rodrigo Rojas de Negri, 19 year-old, and Carmen Gloria Quintana, 18, were cornered by a military patrol brutally beaten, doused with petrol and set them on fire. The patrol then dumped them in a ditch alongside a deserted road on the outskirts of Chile’s capital city, Santiago.

Rodrigo, a photographer who lived in Washington, DC, with his exiled Chilean family, died four days later from his injuries. Carmen Gloria, severely disfigured by burns on over 62 percent of her body, survived to became a symbol of the struggle for democracy in Chile. The case was one of the most notorious human rights abuses committed by the Pinochet regime following the U.S.-backed military coup of September 11, 1973.

On July of 2015 – 29 years after this event – the case was revisited when a Chilean judge ordered the arrest of the seven officers involved. One of the perpetrators, Fernando Guzmán, told Judge Mario Carroza that Lieutenant Julio Castañer, the patrol’s commanding officer, gave the deadly order.

Denouncing the event and saluting the resolve of Carmen Gloria, La Peña’s then Artist-in-Residence, Fernando Torres, wrote seven poems and a narration which musician Leonardo Cereceda set to music, embracing various folk rhythms and styles. Out of this collaboration, the cantata La Vida Vence a la Muerte / Life Triumphs Over Death, was born. In the spirit of Nueva Canción, and a testament through poetry and song to the ability of the human spirit to overcome terrible treachery, the cantata was premiered at La Peña in April of 1987 by an ensemble of musicians from a class taught at La Peña by La Peña Community Chorus’s director, Lichi Fuentes. On Saturday, March 19th at La Peña, Carmen Gloria will hear the cantata for the first time.

What: Cantata: La Vida Vence a la Muerte performed by the La Peña Community Chorus
When: March 19 @ 8pm
Where: At La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, Ca. 94705

Tickets: $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Available online:

eventbrite.com/e/la-vida-vence-a-la-muerte-tickets-20979872363?ref=ebtnebtckt

lapenachorus.org

lapena.org/event/la-vida-vence-a-la-muerte

January 28, 2016

Beyond Dreams: Hip Hop Performances and Immigration Panel

Join us for BEYOND DREAMS pt. 3 Saturday FEBRUARY 20th!
Featuring performances by
BAMBU
NAIMA SHALHOUB
DIANA GAMEROS
KIN FOLKZ
STEELO (DJ set)
HOSTED by RAW- G
IMMIGRATION PANEL DISCUSSION W/ ALL THE ARTISTS Moderated by DAVEY D starts at 7PM
Live Painting by James Gayles Art
$12 Advance, $16 Door

Beyond Dreams is a series that celebrates the cultural richness and diversity that immigrants contribute to our communities through the performing arts.
Feb. 20 is the third installment of a four-month long series of panel discussions, performances, pre-show workshops, and community events at schools and other community sites and public spaces showcasing artists who engage the four elements of hip-hop in their work and are also immigrants with both the greater hip-hop culture and the pressing dialogue in immigration policy in the United States. The project is a cultural activist series that makes an asserted attempt to bridge the cutting-edge music of artists with their identity as immigrants uncovering some of the important historical and current day dialectic through music, dialogue, activism, and community engagement. Beyond Dreams makes the link between immigration and the arts, and has the capacity to educate all audiences but particular young people about the contributions of immigrants to our culture and musical heritage, especially here in the Bay Area. Each event will showcase the impact of music and art by immigrants and the impact on the hip hop movement and arts and culture locally and globally. This series builds on the 2012 NEA supported program Hip Hop Beyond Gender, a project that illuminated the inherent connection between hip hop culture and the struggle against misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. BeyondImmigrant Dreams takes the art form of hip-hop and explores it within another civil rights struggle of time in the context of immigration, documentation, and “dreamers.”

Live performances by:
Bambu
Bambu music is not for mere performance – he utilizes his music as a tool for a larger goal – to reach and support youth who face similar issues that he did, and move them to question what goes on in the world. Bambu has reached audiences across the country and internationally with his explosive and engaging live performance, and has shared the stage with such acts as Common, X-Clan, Medusa, Dilated Peoples, Psycho Realm, Planet Asia, Zion-I, the Blue Scholars, Immortal Technique, the Visionaries, Pac Div and more. For more on Bambu, visit www.bambu.la.
Naima Shalhoub
Naima Shalhoub is a vocalist, composer, musician, actress, and educator. A first-generation Lebanese American, Shalhoub’s parents were born in Sierra Leone and raised in Lebanon weaving her artistic influences at a young age with a range of sounds and cultures that reflect in her music and work. After receiving her MA in 2008 in Postcolonial and Cultural Anthropology, Naima turned her focus toward music and song as vessels for freedom, advocating for social justice and inspiration for healing and feeling deeper.
Diana Gameros
Diana Gameros creates authentic, inspiring music that reflects the 21st century experiences of a young indie artist at the borderlands between cultures, languages, and genres. Whether teasing every ounce of expression from her acoustic guitar in an intimate cafe or bringing people to their feet in a club with her dynamic full band, Gameros transfixes listeners with her soaring vocals, impressive playing and captivating stage presence.
Kin Folkz
Kin Folkz is the founder and CEO of Oakland’s Spectrum Queer Media, is founder and host of Oakland Queer Open Mic, a published author, poet, Creative Artivist! Indigenous Digital Interstellar Dandy, Two-spirit Queer Mama – Solution Wired – Matrix moving maven.
Raw-G
Raw-G Born and raised in Gaudalajara Mexico. She brings her own distinct cross-cultural, multi-lingual, politically charged Hip-Hop to the Bay Area music scene captivating audiences with her passionate and aggressive performances. Raw-G developed an engaging, insightful, social conscious flow that challenges our musical and gender preconceptions of Hip-Hop culture.
Davey D
Davey D is a journalist and Hip Hop activist who is originally from the Bronx and now lives in Oakland where he does a daily radio show –Hard Knock Radio heard on KPFA 94.1 FM and writes a column for the San Jose Mercury news. Davey D also teaches a class on Hip Hop culture and politics at SF State. He maintains the website Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner which is one of the oldest and largest Hip Hop websites.

$12 Advance, $16 Door

Search Results for: 97

Following rave reviews and a successful sell-out run in New York and San Francisco, 3 Lopez Productions brings a new version of the one woman play, “What is the Scandal? – The ignored cry of an Immigrant” performed by Eliana Lopez.

lapenaculturalcenter

La Peña Cultural Center