CNP Artist-in-Residence: Kaneza Schaal
Artist-In-Residence Workshop
October 24-November 11, 2022
CNP welcomes 2021 Alpert Award winner Kaneza Schaal to develop a new work entitled Tomorrow’s Tomorrow at CalArts.
The near future: Tomorrow Nafisa, recently returned from her studies in England, arrives in the city of her birth and familial home in East Central Africa. The city has just been overshadowed by an alien ship, city-size, blocking the sky and changing life for the people of her community and the world. Tomorrow is called upon to answer this question mark in the sky. Tomorrow’s Tomorrow is an investigation of diaspora and the constant flux of people and place that have built the world we live in today.
About the Artists
Kaneza Schaal creates and directs original theater works. Steeped originally in the American avant-garde and experimental performance, she has shaped an expansive practice that invokes many languages – historical, experiential, formal, cultural, and aesthetic – that purposely speak to many different people. Participating in and promoting artistic exchange rooted in diasporic and indigenous thought, she regularly collaborates with international makers working in diverse genres. Her work has been performed in wide ranging contexts, from New York City squats and courtyards in Vietnam, to European opera houses, rural auditoriums in the United Arab Emirates, and outdoor amphitheaters in East Africa.
Schaal thinks of her projects as essays – considerations of a question or idea; each piece becomes an expression of this sustained inquiry. Anchored in extensive research, and drawing from vast source material (…artists Ruth Azawa and Agnes Martin, 4,000-year-old Egyptian funerary texts, late 19th century African American dance pageantry, Muhammed Ali, Duchamp’s readymades…) she has examined mourning rituals, how the state steals dreaming, and re-entering society after prison. Viewing theater as a model for participatory society, Schaal seeks to expand both theatre’s and the United States’ imagination of itself. kanezaschaal.com