Nefertiti Charlene Altan
Artist Statement
I dance and sing to commune with spirits and bring light to our souls.
I unearth contradictions at the crossroads of risk between my lived body and place, sound, garment, text, ritual, a culmination of memories, experience, choices both my own and of my lineages. Whether in stillness or restlessness, I center an attunement to the materiality of specific sites, their history and communities, connecting deeply with all who witness, both seen and unseen. This is a primary motivation in creating site-responsive dance theater, installation and screendance works, as well as somatic-based movement methods rooted in Black and Indigenous memory, cosmologies, resistance, diaspora, feminisms, identities and futurist dreams.
Bio
Nefertiti is the afro-indígena daughter of Guatemaltecos that migrated to unceded Ramaytush Ohlone territory (San Francisco Bay Area), a queer descendant of Maya, Xinka, Pipil, Central and West African peoples, currently residing and working between the San Francisco Bay Area and unceded Tupinambá territory (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil). Working towards embodied liberation through dance-based storytelling that centers Black and Indigenous memories, resistance, feminisms and futurist dreams, she has collaborated as a performer, choreographer, director, producer, educator, activist and language interpreter with cultural workers from Africa, the Americas and Europe in more than 20 site-immersive experimental dance, theater, sound and film works in Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Germany and the US. She is currently an adjunct professor at Saint Mary's College of California and a co-director of the multidisciplinary project TERRESTRIAL with Makini and Anderson Feliciano, weaving together performance, choreography and speculative futurist thought with equity-based models of collaboration.
She began dancing in the living room to her father's latin music band K-R-I-B [kah-ree-beh], and has continued to study and teach Latin-American and Caribbean folk dance and music with an emphasis in Northeast Brazilian forms. She has also taught experimental dance theater, percussion, choreography, improvisation and somatic movement methods in community and academic contexts for dancers and non-dancers of all ages and experience levels centering play and experimentation from a Freirean popular education framework.
Bridging the body with language and social justice, she has over 20 years of experience working with community organizations as a facilitator, community organizer and language interpreter for social justice organizations in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Brazil and the US, most recently as an associate with E/J solutions, a Bay Area-based consulting collective that supports development and implementation of environmentally just, sustainable, and socially equitable policies.
She has a Master of Fine Arts in dance from Saint Mary’s College of California, a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology and community studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a technical degree in dance from the Bahia State Cultural Foundation (FUNCEB) in Salvador, Brazil.
Photo by Nedahness Greene
Nefertiti has performed and directed ensemble works presented at New York Live Arts, the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers (FLACC), FIAC International Festival in Scenic Arts, IC Encontro de Artes International Performing Arts Festival, Vivadança International Dance Festival, ZonaMundi Festival Circuit of Sound and Images, North & Northeast Feminists Network Congress on women and gender relations, the Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; FIT International Theatre Festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Teatro Para el Fin del Mundo Theatre Festivals in Tampico, Mexico and Montevideo, Uruguay; the International Ethnic Dance Festival and Cuba Caribe Festival in San Francisco, California; Adelante! Iberoamerican Theatre Festival in Heidelberg, Germany. She has held artistic residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Goethe Institute Los Angeles and the Black Performance Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. She has collaborated with renowned performing arts and visual artists Isaac Julien, Ishmael-Houston Jones, Germaine Ingram, Mary Hazboun, Cece Carpio, Mestra Monica Millet, Mestra Joana Cavalcante, Marcelo Evelin, Giovanni Luquini, Mimi Cherono Ng'Ok, Paco Gomes, Nirlyn Seijas and Adam Kinner. Click on the portfolio tab for more on these works.
Nefertiti was a co-founder, curator, producer and performing artist with Deslimites Mediações Artísticas, an independent feminist performing arts collective in Salvador, Bahia formed in 2015. Aside from creating and showcasing 15 group and solo projects, the collective produced more than 80 days of performances, panels, screenings and workshops, provided a performance platform for more than 70 women and queer artists presenting more than 30 site-immersive works, reaching more than 1500 people as audience members and workshop participants by co-founding and managing events and programs for the intergenerational feminist cultural space Casa Rosada, from 2018 until 2021.
Nefertiti has studied, practiced and taught diverse Afro-diasporic dance and percussion forms since childhood, from dancing cumbias, salsas and merengues with her late fathers Latin music band, to learning rhythm tap and jazz at the neighbrohood dance studio, to Afro-Haitian dance with Valeria Watson's Alaafia Dance Ensemble and Juan de Dios Soto's Afro-Peruvian Jaranon y Bochinche Ensemble in San Francisco, to her eight-year residence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil studying and performing with esteemed masters of Afro-indigenous Brazilian dance and music forms including but not limited to Capoeira Angola, Samba de Roda, Samba de Caboclo, Afoxé, Orixa symbology, Silvestre Brazilian Modern Technique, Blocos Afro, Pagode, Afro-Brazilian contemporary, Xote, Frevo, Maracatu Baque Virado, Cavalo Marinho and Samba de Coco and Bumba Meu Boi.
Nefertiti first began her community activism work in 2006 with the Autonomous Chapter of the Watsonville Brown Berets, a community defense force acting for the liberation and amelioration of the barrios, or working-class communities of color, through programs, events, and direct actions addressing police harassment, affordable housing, farmworker and immigrant rights, counter-military recruitment and gang violence. She went on to become a co-founder of Alianza Latinoamericana de los Derechos de Inmigrantes in 2007 in San Francisco, a know-your-rights and alert network for undocumented people; a coordinator of solidarity initiatives with indigenous U'wa women in Colombia with the Mujer U'wa Defense Project until 2011; and a binational liaison supporting Bolivarian grassroots organizers in Venezuela and social movements in Honduras with the School of the Americas Watch. She was a bilingual health educator with Health Initiatives for Youth and later, a lead trainer in facilitation and political education at the national organizing training center The School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) until 2012, training over 600 working-class organizers and leaders of color across the US in English and Spanish. During her eight-year residency in Brazil, she cultivated her skill in language translation and interpretation between English, Portuguese and Spanish, working with the US Social Forum, Amnesty International, the Goethe-Institute, Grassroots International, Grassroots Global Justice, Indigenous Environmental Network, E/J Solutions and academics in the areas of public health & health sciences, sociology, anthropology, performing arts and literature.