The Saturday evening performance of The Spectacular Society is sold out.
A standby line for cancellations and standing room only tickets will form at 7PM and we will begin letting people in, first come first served, starting at 8PM.

“But the most important sense in which the spectacle became the trauma of Japanese Americans consisted in the demand placed on internees to comply with this spectacularization so as to provide ‘proof’ of their loyalty to the United States—a command performance that actually prevented internees from fully processing the material violence enacted against them by the internment policy” — Emily Roxworthy, The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma

Using the U.S. government-sanctioned Japanese internment camps during WWII as a dramaturgical framework, The Spectacular Society interweaves evocative movement, live sound, and unconventional spatialization to explore how ethnicity and identity can be negotiated and performed. This intimate 60-minute performance follows seven dancers through vignettes of calm and chaos as they explore themes of dislocation, witnessing, silence, patriotism, community, and spectacle. Drawing from both historical research and her grandmother’s personal accounts of “camp,” choreographer Marissa Osato employs visceral, intricate, and highly-charged contemporary dance movement to re/present an embodied archive of the past while provoking questions about present societal repetition.

Entity Contemporary Dance & NAVEL present
The Spectacular Society
Director & Choreographer | Marissa Osato
Performers | Karen Chuang, Emily Crouch, Shiori Kamijo, Jason Martin, Grayson McGuire, Vickie Roan
Composer & Sound Designer | Alkis Nicolaides
Musicians | Alkis Nicolaides (guitar), Wesley Park (drums), Sean Riddle (bass)
Costume Designer | Edu Fernandez
Running Time | Approx. 60 minutes

Friday-Saturday, November 22-23, 2019
Doors at 7:30PM, Performance at 8PM
$20-30 sliding scale in advance*
$30 at the door

*A $25 ticket price represents the true cost per attendee to cover production costs and artists fees for The Spectacular Society. If you can, consider giving a little more and purchase a $30 ticket to help make the production accessible to others.

Production support provided by NAVEL, USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, EDGE Performing Arts Center, and CalArts School of Dance. Photo credit: Hao Feng

Trailer

Filmed & Edited by Nico Savignano

Artist Bios

A Los Angeles native, Marissa Osato is a choreographer, director, and educator who creates emotionally-driven, embodied narratives to find cross-cultural universality within shared experiences. Using a hybrid language of contemporary, modern, and urban dance techniques, Marissa’s choreography exhibits a sense of groundedness and abandon, of rhythm and dynamism, of stillness and intimacy. Marissa is the co-founder/co-artistic director of Entity Contemporary Dance, an LA-based dance company that has taught workshops and performed original repertory in the U.S. and Asia. Marissa earned an MFA in Choreography from California Institute of the Arts and a BA in Dance and BA in Literary Journalism from the University of California, Irvine. Marissa has taught and set choreography at over 50 studios and colleges across the U.S., and has held master classes in Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Guam, and South America. In 2019, Marissa was selected for the Joffrey Ballet’s Winning Works choreographic residency and the USC Kaufman New Movement Residency. Marissa is currently an Associate Professor of Dance at Santa Monica College. marissaosato.com

Photograph by Hao Feng