Naked Stages
2024 Naked Stages Artists
Sarah M. Greer
Show Description: Heap Cull Gather Sow is a ceremonial journey through grieving, ancestral guidance and heart memory carried by tears and talismans, movement and memory; stories and songs. Sourced from intuition and melody, Heap Cull Gather Sow asks how we hold loss and sorrow from the present and the past and from where we garner the resources to re-imagine and re-member ourselves.
Artist Bio: Sarah M. Greer (www.sarahmgreer.com) is a singing, improvising, and performing artist who works at the intersection of song, sound and story. She has performed in numerous Twin Cities venues, at the Twin Cities and Madison, WI Jazz Festivals, for NPR’s Talking Volumes with Give Get Sistet, opened for Take 6 (also with Give Get Sistet), and has invented music on regional and national stages.
As a recording artist and composer, Sarah rel Combining movement, voice, and digital media, The Field of Three Horizons is based on Bengali cultural beliefs about ghosts. In a community without strong written tradition for common people, bamboo ghosts, fish-obsessed ghosts, and spirits that possess grapefruits have a beautiful specificity that reveals much about the histories of Bengali people through their lives, livelihoods, fears, and unfulfilled desires. Told through fictionalized vignettes of real family stories, the performance plays upon ghost stories to explore themes of queerness, family relationships, language, and loss in a contemporary, diaspora experience.
eased their original and highly improvised debut album What the Music Says Do in 2018 and will release a live album of their improvised work Between: A Journey Through the Middle (2024) this year. Additionally, she is developing an improvised composition sourced from the sounds we make as we express sorrow entitled Giving Voice to Grief.
Sarah holds a Bachelor of Special Studies with a focus in music and a vocal performance degree. She is passionate, nearly evangelical, about the power of our voices to change our world.
Hal Sansone
Show Description: A gay trans man looks for belonging in queer nightlife. He does and doesn’t find it. So, he flirts into the silence and listens for desire. An impossible trans ancestor answers across space and time. Interweaving disco, go-go dancing, and drag, this show asks: what do you do when loneliness and community live side by side? How can pain become a portal to pleasure and possibility? Part autobiography, part fantasy, 100% gay.
Artist Bio: hal sansone (he/him) is a theatre artist, writer, and herbalist-gardener. He has been a company member with Sandbox Theatre since 2019. Most recently with Sandbox, he organized and directed the Minneapolis premiere of the Trans Voices Cabaret, which will occur again this December. Other works with Sandbox include Light My Way, Bone Mother, The Golden Record Project, and Words.Do.Move. He has also worked with various theatre companies in the Twin Cities as an actor, deviser, and teaching artist. As a poet, his micro-chapbook Winter Garlic: Healing Poems for my Root System was published by Ethel in 2023. hal holds a BA in Performance Creation from the University of Minnesota and a certificate in Herbal Studies from Minneapolis Community and Technical College.
Atim Opoka
Show Description: An ancestral journey of remembrance.
Artist Bio: Atim Opoka (They/She) is a Ugandan-American (Acholi) songwriter, vocalist, composer, producer, and teaching artist. Who fuses Afro-pop and alternative beats while embracing the power of transformative storytelling. Atim believes in the power of storytelling. Part of their current practice is decolonizing what is “Good Art”. Challenging the power structures that decide what and whose stories get told. Life is art, and it is all around us. If we listen to nature, the stories will unfold. The power of imagination, and being able to dream. To let your mind wander, and your heart feel. That is how they create their art. Through songs, scenes, music, or with bodies. Allowing yourself to be open to all emotions, and all stories.They are a 2023-24 Monkeybear Puppetry Cohort, 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, TRCSTR 2023 Artist, a 2021 recipient of a Waters Award, as well as an Our Space is Spoken For Fellowship from the Twin Cities Media Alliance. She has had a residency at three-thrity one space with Rosy Simas Danse. She’s inspired to share authentic stories. Amplifying marginalized people taking their power back by telling their stories. She believes that art is a birthright.
“There is value in learning foundations, and building things the traditional way. But there is something refreshing in breaking the rules. Trying new ways to use the tools that you have mastered and received. That is how I approach creating art.” – Atim Opoka
Skye Reddy
Artist Bio: Skye Reddy is a multidisciplinary South Asian artist working in film and live performance. Their screen dance works have been shown at festivals in India and the U.S. and featured in the LA Times. In different capacities, they have previously worked with The Southern Theater, Black Ensemble Productions, Red Eye Theater, Children’s Theatre Company, Asian Media Access, Theater Mu, LimeArts, and on various Twin Cities-based short films. Skye is currently a member of the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN) Spotlight Shorts documentary cohort and was the 2022-23 Production Management Fellow at Children’s Theatre Company. They hold a degree in Theater and Dance from Macalester College.
2023 Naked Stages Artists
Dakota Blakenship
Project: Why Am I Here? is a skating musical performance following a soul as it finds life, dies, and is reborn. Part ritual, Dakota will facilitate transformation, using the audience’s energy to fuel the journey. Spectators will be shown how easy life wears us down, and ways to help ease the burden through love.
Bio: Dakota is a theater maker, roller skater, and fabric artist. They have worked in theaters across the country bringing the vision of costume designers into reality. After relocating to the Twin Cities in 2017, they have made a name for themselves as a calm, skilled, and trustworthy wardrobe worker. Aside from artistic endeavors, Dakota has a bodywork practice. They specialize in somatic therapies aimed at strengthening the mind-body connection, as well as offering spiritual guidance and energetic bodywork.
snem DeSellier
Project: mundane devastation = the low level havoc wreaking us all at different decibels in different hours ((when we say low level we mean commonplace, we mean wide, we mean exalted, we mean context, parallax, trans folds – this is about “grief” when grief is categorically unavoidable and empirically un-equate-able))
We open grief hole : round hole and kaleidoscope through metabolic movements, choreographed language, and tumbling bare vocals. By jumping in the hole, we flirt with and give in to the habits that make blessings out of ghosts and ghosts out of blessings. Informed by cycles of medical waste, cohorts of fresh ancestors, misinterpretations, litter, and the violence of nourishment, snem is figuring out what to do with mundane devastations that feel both ubiquitous and preciously private.
Bio: snem DeSellier is an inter/multi/trans disciplinary artist who wants it all, all the time. they make with the hope that you’ll join in when/if it feels right and that there is always more to come. they make with mad queerness in mind and they make from the middle. snem grew up along the long tidal river and oxbows of western massachusetts, learned group improvisational creative dance in the shadows of mountains tucked between saguaros in southern arizona, and now they build here at the confluence of waters both flowing and collected in southern minnesota. they have presented and/or designed with 20% Theatre Company, Lightning Rod, Body Watani Dance, Red Eye Theater, 9×22 Dance/Lab, International Association for Creative Dance, Playwrights’ Center, and the Five Colleges. they graduated from Hampshire College, are a movement facilitator through Mettler Studios, and currently work in medical simulation/education with MSimulation at UMN.
Yoni Light
Project: A girl finding the Goddess. This piece focuses on Yoni’s experience of black girlhood transitioning to black womanhood. In many ways it’s a coming of age story that goes past the current age of 25. We go back to the start of her presence here on Earth, the magic in her bloodline and the deeper knowledge she possesses that is not solely her own but an ancestral tie.
Bio: Yoni Light is a multi-disciplinary artist from Saint Paul, Minnesota. She has been dancing professionally for the past ten years acquiring her training from multiple programs and schools including TU Dance, SPCPA and Perpich. She was a co-founder of the Hip Hop dance crew called New Black City, a crew dedicated to using dance to create and activate social change. She has been a part of many collectives, some including S.H.E, New Black City and Atlantis 13. These collectives are dedicated to blackness, expression and social change. She has collaborated with multiple artist/shows including Pavielle French, TPT Artist is…Black Light, DejaJoelle; Controlled Burn, SHE Al’twam; Abandoned Outlines and many more. She is local teaching artist that has worked with multiple community programs, schools and studios throughout the Twin Cities. Yoni is also a recipient of multiple grants including; 2020 Time Capsule Micro Grant, 2020 Momentum New Dance Work Grant and 2022 MN State Arts Board Individual Creative Support Grant. Yoni’s work is dedicated to the art of healing and self-expression.
2022 Naked Stages Artists
Tumelo Khupe
Project: Bare with me: So be it, Directed by James Williams, Patricia Brown
An exploration of a tug-of-war that exists, on the journey to the revelation of purpose and self.
Bio: Tumelo Khupe (alias Lady Stain) is a krumper, emerging choreographer, movement artist, and actor based in the Twin Cities. Her choreographic research investigates how the body naturally captures critical moments in life and can communicate human experiences. Furthermore, exploring how the body manifests these experiences through movement. Krump is foundational in her work as it offers endless possibilities for storytelling through its technique and language that is shared amongst its practitioners, providing a shared experience that encourages community building. She makes use of some elements of theater to reveal these moments through improvisation.
She graduated with a B. A in Music Theater with a minor in Dance, May of 2020. Some awards received were the David Wick Leadership Award, David Wick Best Choreography Award, and The Mabel Meta Frey Outstanding Theater Artist Award.
Allison Vincent
Project: Daddy Issues, Directed by Joel Sass
Daddy Issues explores the liminal space between life and death, love and obligation, collection and obsession. Allison becomes her father’s caretaker as she helps him navigate dementia while negotiating their complicated relationship. The demise of her childhood home, which he hoarded possessions into and shut others out of, looms as a metaphor for his crumbling health and memories. Using humor, tragedy, object theater, and physical performance, Daddy Issues asks: How do we bear the weight of the past when we can’t find our own center in the present?
Bio: Allison Vincent (née Witham) is a performer, director, writer, deviser, and teacher known for devised work, physical theatre, and gender-bending performances. She has been honored to collaborate with companies and theaters across the Twin Cities including The History Theater, Jon Ferguson Theater, The Four Humors, Mainly Me, The Illusion, The Guthrie, Frank Theatre, Sod House, Strike Theatre, Transatlantic Love Affair, the University of Minnesota, and Walking Shadow. In addition to performing, Allison is a collaborative artistic director and founding member of Transatlantic Love Affair, a teaching artist at the Guthrie Theater and Loft Literary Center, and has collaborated as a writer on over twenty produced scripts.
Marisol Herling
Project: Del Mar y el Sol, Directed by Taja Will
Giving herself permission to remember and research something that has felt distantly unclear for too long, Marisol attempts to exist in her fullness and struggles in reckoning that her strength and pride go hand-in-hand with feelings of displacement and imposter. This contemporary work explores the facets of Marisol’s identity; her curiosity and longing that exists within the intersections, and is a tether to lineage and geographical placement, the island. She connects her memories with ones ethereal or imagined, experiences of her kin in diaspora, and conjures lush embodiment from the grandeur of native diasporic patriotism, in the form of a queer Latinx Superhero. In this, Marisol invites liberation, joy and acknowledgment of an unapologetic desire to be seen.
Bio: Marisol Herling is a queer, Puerto Rican artist raised in Nebraska. Marisol graduated in 2014 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a B.A. in Dance and a minor in Theater. She was a dancer and teaching artist, working with sloDance, and is a founding member of the dance collective embi. Marisol was a guest faculty instructor for the dance program at UNL and a resident guest teaching artist for University of Nebraska-Kearney. After reloctating to the Twin Cities in 2018, she produced, choreographed, and performed in her show, How-to Be, for the Minnesota Fringe Festival. She has since collaborated with Chris Schlichting, Anat Shinar, Leila Awadallah, and Sequoia Hawk. Marisol was a mover in Taja Will’s project, Blood Language, as well as Jennifer Glaws’s work Touch Code. Marisol was also in the cast of Taja Will’s film, Lineas de Sangre with filmm
2021 Naked Stages Artists
Ashembaga (Ashe) Jaafaru
Ashembaga (Ashe) Jaafaru is an actor, performer, writer, and creative idea-maker. She is involved in theatre, film, and voiceover work in the Twin Cities + beyond. She creates art for liberation and continues to write imaginative stories. Film credits include Buttafly Precinct (Lady) and Keon (Patience) with Catalyst Arts, The Convert (Jekesai) with Frank Theatre, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (Lady in Brown) with KC Repertory Theatre & Penumbra Theatre, A Midsummer Summer Night’s Dream (Hermia) with Black Ensemble Players, School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play (Paulina) with Jungle Theater.
Margaret Ogas
Margaret Ogas is a dancer and choreographer who makes funky, spunky, socially engagesd performances. Using an interdisciplinary approach rooted in dance, her works tell surreal everyday stories through a collage of movement, text and sound. Margaret’s choreography has been presented at the Walker Art Center, the Cedar Cultural Center, The Minnesota Museum of American Art, Bryant Lake Bowl, Center for Performing Arts, and on sidewalks in South Minneapolis. She is a teaching artist at Young Dance and serves on the board of Language Attitude, a group developing culturally relevant, arts-based programs in the fields of education, media, and communications. Margaret grew up in Milwaukee, WI and is a proud midwestern Chicana. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Alys Ayumi Ogura
Alys Ayumi Ogura is a storyteller through her movement, voice, and quirky humor. Her dance training began in Japan, where she learned from the now late Mika Kurosawa, the famed godmother of Japanese contemporary dance. She earned a BA in Theater Studies from Westmar University, and her theater training concluded with her earning the “most outstanding student” award from the school’s Theater and Dance Department. Her choreographies and performances have been curated for the Walker Art Center’s Choreographer’s Evening by Megan Mayer, and BodyCartography Project’s/HIJACK’s Future Interstates. Ogura has worked since 2010 with various talented theater and dance artists in the Twin Cities’ thriving arts community. As a way of giving back to this arts community, Ogura serves as a DanceMN steering-committee member, and she supports MN Artist Coalition efforts.
2020 Naked Stages Artists
Alia Jeraj
Bio: Alia Jeraj (she/hers) is a singer, writer, and educator in the Twin Cities. A classically-trained vocalist, Alia has shifted her focus towards studying the folk and traditional songs of her ancestors. She performs with groups including Nanilo, a vocal trio rooted in traditional harmonies from Eastern Europe, Artemis, a treble vocal ensemble focused on experimentation and improvisation, and Mixed Precipitation, a theatre company that celebrates the harvest season through opera. Her writing appears in publications including Pollen, American Craft, and the Twin Cities Daily Planet. When she’s not working to help teens achieve their educational goals, singing, or writing, you can find Alia biking around the cities, learning to embroider, or sipping iced coffee.
Project: Alia’s project will explore how memories are lost, maintained, and re-learned as people migrate across oceans.
Atlese Robinson
Bio: Atlese Robinson is a writer, performer, director, producer, and the founding artistic director of Ambiance Theatre Company. Hailing from Saint Paul, MN by way of Chicago, IL, Atlese grew up glued to the stories of her elders. As a result, Atlese’s writing style places an emphasis on the natural flow of speech as a means to preserve the integrity of oral history. As a performer, Atlese thrives most in ensemble settings where synergetic connection is the power behind compelling theatre. Her previous credits include ensemble in The Dutchman (Penumbra Theatre Company), The Garden (Ambiance Theatre Company), co-star in Contact by Simone Brookes LeClaire, and ensemble in Rebirth of Rabbit’s Foot (Mixed Blood Minneapolis). Atlese’s previous directing credits include Naked I: Self Defined (20% Theatre Company), The Spectrum of Blackness (Ambiance Theatre Company), and Waiting in Vain (Ambiance Theatre Company). Atlese prides herself on serving in roles from usher to director at theatre companies around the Twin Cities, as no job is too small for a leader. Atlese’s ultimate mission with Ambiance Theatre Company is to support Black dramatic writers through script development, produce new works, and center the need for engaging Black audiences. IG handles: @ambiancetheatre, @lele_robinson93. Facebook: Ambiance Theatre Company
Project: Atlese will be exploring the stages and various kinds of grief as it relates to the Black (American) experience.
C. Michael Menge
Bio: In non-pandemic times, C. Michael Menge (They/them & he/him) is an actor, improvisor, theater-maker, and playful young fool known for their work with the Jungle Theater (Hand to God; Little Women; Redwood), The Boys of the Year (BOTY Presents: Peter Pan and Wendy), Children’s Theatre Company (Snow White), the Black Ensemble Players (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), The Playwrights’ Center, Blackout Improv Comedy, and more. They are currently one of the co-coordinators of both the Black & Funny and Queer & Funny improv festivals at HUGE Improv Theater, and in 2019 were named Best Actor by City Pages.
Project: Michael’s project is shifting as the world shifts, but what we do know: It is a party, a celebration that centers embodied joy, black joy, black trans joy, self-love, and self-exploration as a means of survival and healing.