It asks, as it echoes and expands the familiar, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one sees it, does it make a sound” proverb with, “Deaf people have voices do you hear them?” Instead, the new dance work made by Hunter in collaboration with Epiphany Dance Theater and special artists, declares, “Don’t miss the land for the sculpture” (a transformative version of missing the forest for the trees). Native Land, Native Hands investigates and unfolds the historic oppression and racial injustice enacted toward Bay Area Deaf communities and communities of color in several performances. Separated by geography and time-but tightly interwoven in theme and purpose-the production takes place May 7 on the UC Berkeley campus and May 14 in San Francisco. The work combines dance, text, American Sign Language and original music composed by Radha Mehta. Epiphany’s Kim Epifano is dramaturg, and costume design is by Jhia Jackson. Lead Deaf actors are JAC Cook and Sarah Young Bear-Brown. The dancers are members of artistic director Hunter’s Urban Jazz Dance Company: Kelly Garrett, Marissa Head, Cynthia Rodriguez, Danielle Silk, Zahna Simon, Piper Thomasson, Korea Venters, Geraldine Wong and Linda Steele II. Hunter, in an interview, says the work is not centered on but was in part created in response to four sculptures by Bay Area Deaf sculptor Douglas Tilden (1860-1935). The bronze sculptures depict realistically rendered muscular men, sometimes scantily clad, engaged in various physical pursuits: The Football Players (1898), a football player having a leg wrapped Bear Hunt (1892), two men wrestling a bear the Mechanist Monument (1901), five machinists engaged in their craft and Admission Day (1897), commemorating the admission of California into the United States, with a man holding aloft a flag that appears to flow forcefully in the wind. Hunter views the sculptures and, more crucially, their locations as symbolic of historic and current marginalization and relocation of Deaf and Indigenous people in the East Bay and San Francisco. Hunter, aka PurpleFireCrow, is an award-winning African, Indigenous, Deaf, Disabled, Two Spirited choreographer, dancer, actor, instructor, speaker, producer and Deaf advocate. He founded Urban Jazz Dance Company in 2007 and the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival in 2013. As an ambassador for social change related to the Deaf community and BIPOC artists, he has presented keynote lectures at Kennedy Center’s VSA, Harvard and Duke universities, the National Assembly of State Arts and more. His shoe company, DropLabs and Susan Paley, produced a haptic product that allows hearing, limited-hearing and Deaf people to feel music.ĭuring 2020, he created #DeafWoke, an online talk show that amplifies BIPOC Deaf and Disabled stories as a force for cultural change. “I’m still unpacking many stories,” he says, about the new work.
“When I say Native Lands, that comes in many layers.
The stories spring to life out of questions Hunter finds intriguing. “Who truly owns the sculptures is a really good question you just asked.
Why did the City of San Francisco place that sculpture there? Why this street? Why did the street change where is the garden that used to be here, the place I would sit and have lunch, the circle that’s now v-shaped? Why did the people of Berkeley want to keep Tilden’s Bear Hunt sculpture?” The answers to these questions and others he leaves unspoken steer Hunter-and will steer audiences-directly into conversations about the marginalization and segregation of the Deaf community in mainstream society and about BIPOC people being pushed out of native lands and groups.