The LAX Micro Fest: Closing Day
The final day of the LAX Festival features a closing ritual from meital yaniv, a new performance work from rafa esparza, and a cathartic dance party with Dance Church!
meital yaniv (b. 1984, Tel-Aviv, occupied Palestine) is learning how to be in a human form. they do things with words, with moving and still images, with threads, with bodies in front of bodies, with the Earth. they are a death laborer tending to a prayer for the liberation of the land of Palestine and the lands of our bodies. they keep Fires and submerge themselves in Ocean and Sea Water often. yaniv is learning to listen to the Waters, birdsongs, caretakers, and ancestors as they walk as a guest on the home and gathering place of the Cahuilla-ʔívil̃uwenetem Meytémak, Tongva-Kizh Nation, Luiseño-Payómkawichum, and Serrano-Yuhaaviatam/Maarenga’yam. yaniv is the author of bloodlines. They make offerings through true name collective. Instagram: @bloodlines_book
rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Woven into esparza’s bodies of work are his interest in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize. Esparza has performed in a variety of spaces including AIDS Project Los Angeles, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, SOMArts, Vincent Price Museum, LACE and various public sites throughout Los Angeles. He is a recipient of an Emerging Artist 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts, a 2014 Art Matters grantee, and a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Esparza was recently part of the 2016 Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum and the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
Dance Church has been bringing people together through the joy and release of dance since 2010. Designed for people of all shapes, sizes, backgrounds, and identities, Dance Church is on a mission to empower people everywhere through dance. Visit go.dancechurch.com to take class online or sign up for class in a city near you. Experience the joy and release of dance in this all-levels movement class made for every body. Taught by professional dance artists in cities across the country, the class moves through a series of guided movement cues, set to a curated playlist of multi-genre pop music. No previous training is required, but open-mindedness is a prerequisite! Named “the best dance workout” by WIRED Magazine and “a state of therapeutic release” by Vanity Fair, let the music be your guide as you join us for this one-of-a-kind experience. This LAX Micro Fest class will be led by Dance Church® founder Kate Wallich.