Jamuna Chiarini Presents:
Arpan — An Offering
Join us for an exciting and enlightening evening of dance, color, and storytelling through the lens of Odissi dance.
Performing in the classical Indian dance style of Odissi, from the East Indian state of Odisha, Jamuna, a student of Srimati Yashaswini Raghuram, will showcase a traditional repertoire demonstrating the form’s graceful, lyrical, rhythmic, and spiritual aspects. The evening will also include a dance film directed and edited by Portland dance photographer Jingzi Zhao. The film follows Jamuna as she adapts to the grim isolation of the pandemic and finds new and meaningful ways to continue dancing without a stage. The show also includes a post-show Q&A with Portland dance artist Linda K. Johnson.
Click link here for
Ticketing information at eventbrite.
When:
March 25th, 7pm
Where:
Echo Theater
1515 SE 37th Avenue
Portland, OR
Jamuna Chiarini is a dance artist, producer, curator, and writer who produces DanceWatch Weekly for Oregon ArtsWatch. Originally from Berkeley, CA, she studied dance at Berkeley High School, East Bay Dance Center, Shawl Anderson, Oakland Ballet School, The School of The Hartford Ballet, and Florida State University, to name a few. She has also trained in Bharatanatyam and Odissi and is a student of Odissi teacher Srimati Yashaswini Raghuram. She has performed professionally throughout the United States as a dancer, singer, and actor for dance companies, operas, and musical theatre productions. Choreography credits include solos and group work for opera and contemporary dance companies in various dance styles. She received a Regional Arts & Culture Council project grant to create a 30-minute trio, “The Kitchen Sink,” performed in November 2017, and was invited to be part of Shawl-Anderson’s Dance Up Close/East Bay in Berkeley, CA. Jamuna was a scholarship recipient to the Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute, “Undoing Racism,” and was a two-year member of CORPUS, a mentoring program directed by Linda K. Johnson. As a producer, she is the founder of The Outlet Dance Project in Hamilton, N.J., a platform dedicated to producing the choreographic work of women-identified choreographers at Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey.
Photograph by Debojyoti Dhar
YASHASWINI RAGHURAM is a Bharatanatyam and Odissi dancer and teacher. She has been learning Bharatanatyam under Srimati Shubha Dhananjay from Bangalore, India, and Odissi under Srimati Aparupa Chatterjee. She is also the Assistant Director of Odissi Dance Company, the only actively touring Odissi company in the United States. As a learner and performer for the past 25 years, along with the company and her teachers, she has performed extensively in India and the USA. She received the “Odissi Prativa” title and was selected as one of the “’Top 10 Talents” at the Odissi International Festival in 2016. She was also invited to perform at the International Odissi Festival 2019 conducted by the Odissi Research Center, Govt of Odisha.
She has also assisted her Odissi teacher in conducting The Kelucharan Guna Keertanam, a flagship event of ODC, all over the USA and in India. Yashaswini has also curated dance festivals in Portland, Nrityarpanam (2015), Nritya Shubha Dance Festival (2017), Pratham Odissi Festival (2018), and Srinivasa Kalyana- A Fundraiser For the HECSA Temple (2019).
SONAKSHI CHOUDHURY
Sonakshi is 13 years old, is passionate about science, and loves playing chess.
She has been dancing Odissi for the last six years under the guidance of her guru Srimati Yashashwini Raghuram.
JINGZI ZHAO was born in Shanghai and has lived and worked on four continents before making a home in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. She has been a professional photographer since 2005. Jingzi photographs what she loves: people, dance, and stories.
In 2011 and 2012, she was living in Argentina, where she was inspired by the passion and hard work of performing artists. She shifted her work to the capture of dance and theater. She photographed theater and dance productions at the Teatro Regio and the Teatro San Martin in Buenos Aires. After returning to Oregon, she continued the pursuit of dance and theater photography through her work with many performing arts organizations in the greater Portland area.
Her dance photography work has been featured in gallery exhibitions and acquisitions in Portland and Seattle. She is a 1st Place category winner and two-time Grand Prize Finalist of the Pas De Deux Dance Photography Contests. She is also a proud recipient of multiple project grants from the Regional Arts and Cultural Council.
Jingzi enjoys world travel, hiking, paddle boarding, and tango dancing.
LINDA K. JOHNSON has been a professional dance-based, interdisciplinary artist for 40 years. She is based in Portland, Oregon. Over her four decades of creative practice, Johnson has taught, performed, created, curated, and produced extensively, influencing and forwarding the development of infrastructure (studios and dance programs), funding (support), and conceptual networks (information and training) for colleagues and students. An Oregon native, her concerns as an artist are social and environmental and address our collective relationship to site, place, and community. Since creating her first site-based, large-scale interdisciplinary performance in 1992 – Finding the Forest, Johnson has gone on to author over 17 major dance/movement installation works – most recently Mycelium Dreams (2022) and Polka Dots/Pioneer Square (2020) – which have utilized Portland’s forests, urban intersections, waterways, derelict lots, neighborhoods, green spaces, parks, as well as formal spaces, as staging grounds for presentation. A recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 1999, Johnson’s work has been consistently funded and commissioned by public, private, and individual sources and has received a critical review in many venues, including Dance Magazine, Landscape Architecture, NPR/Living on Earth, and Metropolis Magazine. She has been awarded residencies at the Rauschenberg Artist Residency/Captiva, Yaddo, Caldera, Bldg5, Spring Creek Project, N.E.W. Expressive Works, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology to further the development of her work.
Johnson’s making and teaching are informed by her interest in improvisation, somatic practices, architecture, horticulture, visual art, sustainability, and beauty. A sought-after teacher by both professional movement artists and serious hobbyists, she has taught for extended periods as full/part-time faculty or as a guest artist at Mills College (2009-2011), Lewis and Clark College (1992-96), University of Oregon (2005-06), Reed College (2003-04), Pacic Northwest College of Art (2011-12), Portland State University (2014-current), Jefferson High School (1985-89), Oregon Ballet Theatre (2000-05), Conduit (1995-2000, 2011-15), and the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics (1996-99). She is honored to be a custodian in perpetuity of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal postmodern work, Trio A, and has performed extensively as a soloist in works of her own, as well as works by Bebe Miller (Rain), Kristy Edmunds, and Stephanie Skura, among others. In 1995, she co-founded Conduit with Mary Oslund and served as the Director of Education and Outreach at Oregon Ballet Theatre from 2000-05.
In recent years, the scale of Johnson’s creative work has taken an expansive leap. In 2007-2008, she was the author, director, and curator of the South Waterfront Artist-in-Residence Program, a project that engaged an entire city neighborhood in its most incipient stages. Simultaneously, she collaborated with writer Randy Gragg and Ron Blessinger/Third Angle New Music Ensemble to create the groundbreaking project, The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, which was presented as part of PICA’s TBA:08 (http://m.pica.org/event/third-angle-new-music-ensemble/). This project involved more than 40 dancers and over 100 musicians. In 2011, she was honored to be one of four featured artists in Dance: before, after, during, a first-of-its-kind exhibition curated by Terri Hopkins at the Marylhurst
Art Gym, which took as its subject the visual materials dance artists create/use while in the process of composing their work. She is currently an adjunct faculty member in Dance at Portland State University and recently completed setting the first-ever mixed-ability translation of Trio A on the AXIS Dance Company in Oakland, CA. She is thrilled to be one of 12 featured artists in the recently published book by Kris Timken – The New Explorers, which features an introduction by art historian and writer Lucy Lippard and addresses landscape, feminism, and hybrid performance practice.
Her resume as a performer includes long tenures in the works of Mary Oslund, Linda Austin, Bonnie Merrill, Jann Dryer, Karen Nelson, and Keith V. Goodman.
Johnson is the mother of a thriving 18-year-old daughter and is a teacher of Contemporary Alexander Technique, having studied under master teacher Robyn Avalon and the International Alexander Alliance.
This performance is an Echo Theater Co-Production.
To create space for collaboration, empowerment, and the joyful celebration of the community using movement and ensemble theater traditions, imaginative play, and aerial arts to help people of all abilities discover their potential, encourage perseverance and embrace their humanity.
The ETC School encourages physical confidence, freedom, and grace in a creative, non-competitive atmosphere. Students of all ages and abilities develop strength, balance, flexibility, and creativity while working with others to explore the intersection of circus, movement, and storytelling. We support a faculty of teaching artists, who cultivate their students’ abilities, model through performance, and are lifelong learners. Our faculty and youth performance groups create unique, professional performances aimed at bridging generational and cultural gaps while celebrating the collective potential of all people.
Get in touch
jamunadasi@me.com
Jamuna Chiarini 