"March 17, 2021 2:06PM" is performed by SAMMAY (Spiritually Awakened Matriarchal Magick Alchemizing You), a San Francisco-based Filipinx American artist whose work explores intergenerational trauma, embodied healing, and ancestral memory. As a daughter of the Asian diaspora, she invites us to sit in the discomfort of complexity and simultaneously swim in an ocean of nuance - in response to the heightened violence against the Asian community.
This work was commissioned by Seismic Sisters. Visual art on set by Cece Carpio.
About the Artist:
SAMMAY (she/they/siya) is the daughter of Yolanda Peñaflor Dizon; granddaughter of Salvacion Orencillo Peñaflor and Carolina Agdeppa Dizon. Born from a collective dream where the ancestors danced, drummed, and sang around ceremonial fire in the mountain tops of the arkipelago - she is a choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural producer of Bikol, Kapampangan, and Ilokano descent who bridges the traditional and contemporary in centering embodied storytelling as a vehicle for collective healing and liberation. Through multimedia dance theatre, she invokes rituals for remembering and decolonizing - creating to honor the tapestry of indigenous epistemologies embedded in our urban landscapes. Raised on Tongva Land/LA County and a settler on Yelamu/San Francisco, her practice is rooted in the fundamental knowing that dance is the medium that connects the earth and ancestral realm - the passageway to transmute intergenerational trauma across cultural lines and geographical borders. SAMMAY is the Founding Artistic Director of intercultural multidisciplinary arts festival URBAN x INDIGENOUS and Core Member of acclaimed street dance theatre company Embodiment Project. She has been featured by Dance Mission Theater, CounterPulse, Kearny Street Workshop among others and was the first-ever Featured Artist for the United States of Asia America Festival 2018.
To follow their journey through the diaspora: www.sammaydizon.com.