A brown-skinned Matao person looks curiously into the lens of a camera. The background is a grey wall and their image pops out the most. Their face is lined by very neatly cut facial hair and a black beanie with an ancestral symbol on it. Guiya (they) wear a sinahi and a tigem pendant.

Dakota Camacho

Seattle, WA

Dakota Camacho is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working in spaces of Indigenous lifeways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education. Camacho holds a Masters of Arts in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in Gender & Women’s Studies as a First Wave Urban Arts and Hip Hop Scholar. Camacho is a chanter, adjunct instructor, and core researcher for I Fanlalai’an Oral History Project based at the University of Guåhan. Camacho co-founded I Moving Lab, an inter-national, intercultural, inter-tribal, and inter-disciplinary arts collective that creates community and self-funded arts initiatives to engage and bring together rural urban communities, universities, museums, and performing arts institutions. Camacho has worked at festivals, universities, and community organizations as a public speaker, facilitator, composer and performer across Turtle Island (USA/Canada), Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Sweden, and South Africa.

TÁTAOTAO


Dakota Camacho is a Matao•Chamoru multidisciplinary artist and researcher working in spaces of Indigenous life ways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education.

Artist Bio

TÁTAOTAO is a new dance work that creates a sacred space as a portrait of the world we want to live in. This project will involve Matao artists from Låguas and the Diaspora coming together to put their life stories in conversation with their ancestral stories of Creation, migration, and myth. The weaving of these experiences, timelines, and lineages reveal the innate ancestral intelligence Indigenous people activate to navigate the turbulent waters of systemic oppression. Chanted dance evokes a ceremonial consciousness that invites the community into deeper awareness of our interconnectedness with all life. In this moment we invite healing for all as we dance with the life force of Creation.

TÁTAOTAO is built in & with Matao/Indigenous communities in Låguas (Mariånas Islands), Tåno’ dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish Territory/Seattle), & Tongva Territory (Long Beach, CA). The work will be experienced as a body of Matao•Chamoru creative processes, workshops, a multi-media art exhibit, a lukao (community procession), and a multi-disciplinary performance ritual.


Award Year
2022
Status

In Progress