CWF-awarded fashion and textile artist Bayo Agbelekale (I.B. Bayo) has been collaborating with the vertical dance company BANDALOOP to craft a large-scale textile installation and set design, fashioning an integrated fabric world within which BANDALOOP’s vertical dance theater piece LOOM will be performed.
The work premiers as part of BANDALOOP’s 30th anniversary Friday April 15 and Saturday April 16 at 8pm on the facade of the Breuner Building, Grand and Broadway in Uptown Oakland. A special family-friendly performance featuring opening set by Alphabet Rockers takes place on Saturday at 5pm. Learn more about attending on their website.
LOOM blends ancestral weaving mythologies, traditional techniques of fabric creation, expressions of the ecological and social impacts of a globalized textile industry, and the influence of technological fibers that connect and divide our digital lives into a dynamic performance. Estrella’s collaborators include 9th generation Nigerian weaver and costume designer IB Bayo, theater artist Chibueze Crouch, composer Ben Juodvalkis, visual creative technologist Osman Koç, and BANDALOOP dancers and riggers. The result of this multi-layered collaboration is an evening of dance theater featuring spoken word, vertical dance, fabric manipulation, film segments, and original music. As vertical dance is a form that relies on state-of-the-science woven nylon climbing ropes, LOOM locates BANDALOOP’s core technical framework in a textile lineage