Jessica Veikune’s brow knits together in concentration as she uses a needle to scoop small beads and pieces of seashells onto a delicate thread in a repeating pattern. Veikune is one of many Indigenous dancers hard at work in preparation for the first annual Cali Native Night and 24th annual Mexica New Year Ceremony.

She points the needle down and repeats the pattern. Shell, shell, blue, gold, brown, white, brown, gold, blue. Veikune, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, will dance in a ceremony for the first time on Friday. 

“I wouldn’t say it’s been hard to learn,” she says of the dances, “we’re just focusing on learning the spiritual aspects of it right now. I just feel really blessed, really thankful.” 

Thanks in particular go to the members of the Miwok tribe, including Toni Espinoza, who have joined them to help revive their dances, as Ohlone rituals were forbidden during colonization and the Mission era.

“I love teaching. It’s an honor for us as well,” Espinoza says. She stresses that while there are traditional elements to follow, there is no right or wrong way for a person to dance or to connect with their culture. 

Aquihua Perez has danced with the Calpulli Tonalehqueh Aztec dance group for the last dozen years. This year, they host the largest Mexica New Year ceremony in California and possibly in all of the U.S. 

More than 1,000 people are expected to gather at Emma Prusch Farm Park to see hundreds of Mexica performers attired in colorful plumage and regalia dance to the intense percussion of large standing drums, like rare birds responding to the earth’s heartbeat. 

“It’s liberating, it’s freedom,” Perez says. “We feel the power of our ancestors, we feel the power of that energy that we call upon as we open our ceremony.”

The Mexica are an indigenous Mexican group who ruled the Aztec empire in the lush valley of central Mexico until Spanish colonization. Cuauhtémoc, the last leader of the Mexica people, counseled them to hide aspects of their culture from Spanish conquistadores for protection, and prophesied that they would one day thrive again.

“For us to actually understand that we are connecting to what Cuauhtémoc was talking about hundreds of years ago is amazing, and that’s why it’s so powerful,” Perez says.

Gerardo Ixteyo Loera is a member of the Calpulli Tonalehqueh leadership council who has participated in San Jose’s Mexica New Year ceremony since it started 24 years ago. He says the ceremony brings young people of Mexica heritage closer to their culture. 

The ceremony’s greatest power, Loera says, lies in “the coming together of our Mexica community in historic East San Jose.” Accompanied by natives from many other Indigenous tribes, Calpulli Tonalehqueh “put down a prayer on behalf of those we come from, for those that have yet to come.”

Indigenous groups will come together for three days to string together generations who have gone ahead, who still touch the earth, or who wait to be born. The gathering is open to the public and free to attend; however, as a sacred rite, the organizers have asked that alcohol and drugs be left at home, even by those observing the cleansing rituals of the celebration.  

Julie Dominguez is both Muwekma Ohlone and Mexica. She and her son Isaiah will both dance in this year’s ceremony. Her brother Joseph Torres was instrumental in reviving the Muwekma Ohlone dances, and her brother Johnny will dance with the tribe this weekend. His toddler son, whose name means “thunder” in Chochenyo, will watch from the audience.

Julie sews feathers from wild turkeys and ocean birds into a headdress beside her cousin, Jessica Veikune, who is still working on her beaded adornments. Shell, shell, blue, gold, brown, white, brown, gold, blue. The two share memories of their great-grandmother Dolores, who grew up in Mission San Jose. Forbidden to practice her culture, she received secret lessons in Chochenyo from her aunts.

“I feel like they knew that we could bring it back,” Dominguez says.  

Mexica New Year
Fri-Sun, Various Times, Free
Emma Prusch Farm Park, San Jose

For painter Céline Lyaudet, ideas and objects hold a basilisk-like power: gaze too long, and the viewer becomes petrified.

The French artist is speaking in particular to the title of her piece Meduse Médusée, which appears in her debut solo exhibition Map to the Path, ending this weekend at Anno Domini. Referring to the snake-haired woman of Greek mythology whose stare turns others to stone, the painting features a woman with animal-like limbs beneath a giant eye. The woman is almost a centaur, though not quite. While the subject is far from a literal depiction of Medusa, the spirit of the myth is present in the painting in what Lyaudet calls “gesture,” or the sense of movement living in a painting.

“For me, the gesture of painting—it’s like magic. I’m thinking of prehistoric cave painting, for example. When you draw a horse, you’re bringing the spirit of the horse to you,” Lyaudet says. The painter cites the late Hilma af Klint as one of her influences, a pioneer of abstract art known for channeling her spiritual beliefs into mystical, geometric works.

Lyaudet began painting two years ago in her hometown of Nantes, with a background as a theater set designer contributing a diverse array of creative fuel. Crossing paths with many musicians in her line of work led the artist to further explore the close relationship she’d always felt between color and sound. Eventually, she learned the involuntary sensory connection that informed this relationship had a name: synesthesia.

“I had felt like that since I was a child, but I didn’t have a word for it until I started painting on music. When I spoke with friends who were musicians they totally understood, because so many were composing in colors. [For me], it’s this very special state like meditation…I am in the color, I am in the music.”

At times, the sounds evoked by certain colors and visuals can be overwhelming, but Lyaudet credits her experience with synesthesia as a force for the intuitive nature of her creative process. Along with the eclectic, psychedelic-tinged playlist she curated to accompany Map to the Path, Lyaudet’s sunset palette and lyrically titled pieces weave their own dream world.

Lyaudet names some recurring characters of her realm: “tree-woman,” “animalistic little demon-spirits.” Wolves, often associated with danger and witchcraft in European folklore, emerge in various forms. In “Moon and the Werewolf,” the moon is an ectoplasmic feminine figure with white tendrils stretching from her body around the slender wolf-man, encircling him with light.

The strange, numinous creatures evoke the mythology-inspired archetypes of early psychoanalyst Carl Jung, particularly the concept of “anima/animus”: the shadow of feminine and masculine energy harbored in each person.

Lyaudet’s spirit- and animal-women came to her toward the beginning of her painting career, which she characterizes as a difficult time of searching for inner unity and rediscovering her sense of female identity. Bringing the figures to life on canvas allowed her to express not only the many different sides of femininity, but also “the animal inside, the male part, vegetal and spiritual, and to find the balance between all those sides.”

Many of these earlier works are small in size, and so Lyaudet painted a wall of the gallery dark blue for grounding and contrast against the pieces’ white space. A branch or sea-vegetable-like outline of pale dashes connects each painting, uniting them like a sort of family tree.

“The hanging [of paintings] is like a living organism,” she says, furthering the sense of cross-sensory connection in the pieces. “I wanted something really organic.”

Anchoring the show is a bright, fiery-colored mural, the painter’s first work of this scale. She made no sketches for the piece, wanting spontaneity to capture “the spirit of the exhibition.” In the center of the painting, Lyaudet incorporated her own handprint, flanked by a spirit flexing graceful fingers to the left and another wolf figure looming on the right.

“It was sort of my way to say ‘that’s me,’ not a literal self-portrait but to allow myself to put me on this wall, to not hide behind my work anymore. An affirmation of myself and my artistic identity.”

Map to the Path
Thu-Sat, 12pm, Free
Anno Domini, San Jose

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 15 months since San Jose’s premier burlesque troupe, the Circus of Sin, called San Jose’s premier dive, the Caravan Lounge, home. This weekend’s dramatic return reunites the troupe’s belly-dancers, drag artists, burlesque performers and assorted ne’er-do-wells with the beloved downtown watering hole they have so often covered in glitter, sweat and bodily joie de vivre. Hosted by Underground Wrestling Alliance impresario Some Guy, the Circus promises a delightfully decadent time complete with adult carnival games. Those who listen closely enough can already hear the sound of PBRs cracking in the distance.

Circus of Sin
Fri, 10pm, Free
The Caravan, San Jose

Common wisdom says we each only live one life, but author V.E. Schwab happily lives two. As the dual-initialed V.E., Schwab pens probing works of adult fantasy like 2013’s Vicious, a dark take on the superhero genre. Simultaneously, as Victoria Schwab, Schwab writes for children and young adult readers in books like the Cassidy Blake series, about the supernaturally talented daughter of ghost hunters. This Wednesday, Kepler’s hosts Schwab (V.E.) for an online reading from Gallant, her newest, an inventive gothic horror about the very edge of the shadows: that crucial point where they inevitably meet light.

V.E. Schwab
Wed, 5pm, Free
Online Event
Photo Courtesy of: Gage Skidmore, CC BY SA-2.0

Rays of South Bay winter sunshine illuminated Backesto Park this past weekend as activists and members of the community gathered to celebrate the last weekend of Black History Month. With singing, dancing, food and art, the event was a clear demonstration of what Kiana Simmons calls “Black joy.”

Simmons and the San Jose-based racial justice nonprofit she co-founded, HERO Tent, host such events regularly. Dubbed “Art in the Park,” they are family-friendly events showcasing business owners, artists and musicians of color along with plenty of sidewalk chalk for the children.

Central to this event, as opposed to those in the past, was the presence of a mural of six faces being painted and serving as backdrop to the performers.

Volunteers with HERO Tent worked together to decide the message portrayed and the people depicted in the mural. Esha Shah, a HERO Tent volunteer, took their ideas and designed the layout.

“We decided we wanted to [depict] Black women and Black women only, and we particularly picked [members of] the Black Panther Party,” Shah says. “It’s inspiring and calling back to the work that these women did.”

“It’s an ode to Black Women organizers,” says Simmons.

The six women depicted are Angela Davis, Afeni Shakur, Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, Fredrika Newton and Kathleen Cleaver. Along with the mural, HERO Tent also produced a pamphlet—or “zine,” as inspired by the Black Panther Party—detailing the legacies of each of these women, many of whom were arrested at one point during their activism. Notably, Assata Shakur was involved in a 1973 shoot out with New Jersey state troopers in which a fellow activist and an officer were both killed. Shakur denied brandishing a weapon, but she was convicted of murder. In 1979, she fled to Cuba, where she was granted asylum and remains a fugitive to this day.

Shah, a young Indian raised in San Jose, felt connected to the Black Panthers after learning about how they inspired the Dalit Panthers, a similar organization founded in 1972 to combat caste discrimation in India. “That’s a central component to organizing,” she says. “Making people feel like they have a community when everyone else is telling them that they don’t.”

Part of the problem, she says, is America’s narrative of competition.

“Historically, communities of color have been pitted against each other and we’ve participated in those structures willingly,” she continued. “It’s important to hear each other’s struggles and be able to understand our own struggles through them and engage in solidarity rather than competition.”

That vision was truly realized as HERO Tent invited anyone in attendance to participate in the creation of the mural. People of many walks of life stood side by side, doing so throughout the day on Sunday.

A “community-based” mural was important to Simmons, who says she believes in making all HERO Tent events and activities accessible.

“I wanted everyone to leave their mark on it so that they are a part of it,” she says. “A lot of youth participated and it was really nice to see that. They even scribbled a little bit,” she recounts, laughing. “But, we’re going to keep it in!”

In addition to members of the community, HERO Tent also commissioned the help of three Black artists to oversee and execute the majority of the painting.

One of those artists, Ellis Stephens, was born and raised on the east side of San Jose. He was excited to work on a mural of “beautiful, powerful Black women.” Having read Assata’s memoir, he says he found her story “amazing,” her ideologies “super powerful to the Black community.”

“I’ve always wanted to put my stamp on something and be part of something that would be everlasting in the community. It means a lot to be out here,” he notes. He hopes his daughter can find inspiration in the mural, especially knowing that her father helped create it.

HERO Tent originally intended for the mural to be painted on a wall at the park, but Simmons says the approach they took, painting on sheets of plywood nailed to a frame, enables them to have a “traveling mural.”

“We want to be able to [take it] to different spaces,” she says, hoping to further the idea of community ownership over the mural. “I think it could be at churches, it could be at other parks, it could be at restaurants, at bars. It could even be at city hall once or twice. Black joy is resilient, it’s powerful, it’s revolutionary and it deserves to be shared.”

Lee Kravetz’s agent begged him not to become a novelist. With his first two books of non-fiction, his career as a reliable psychological journalist was cemented. But after reading the manuscript for Kravetz’s novel The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., his agent said he couldn’t go back to non-fiction.

In their first book, Supersurvivors, Kravetz and co-author David B. Feldman interviewed people who experienced incredible accomplishments following seemingly insurmountable traumas. In his follow-up, Strange Contagion, he examined the physiological, psychological and social factors that combined to cause five Palo Alto high school students to commit suicide over a six-month period in 2009.

This Tuesday, Kravetz joins novelist Meg Waite Clayton (The Wednesday Sisters) to discuss his first novel, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P, in an online event hosted by Menlo Park’s Kepler’s Literary Foundation.

Kravetz has a gentle hand when it comes to heavy subjects and he pairs it with some old-school optimism. Coming out of the pandemic, he sees people changing for the better. He points to catastrophe and the brevity of life as glaring reminders that what society once considered normal is no longer viable.

“There is growth within trauma. Somebody experiences something really scary in life and they don’t just bounce back, they bounce forward and end up changing their lives in really remarkable ways,” he says.

Kravetz’s path to novel writing involved journalism and psychology, and poetry had a big impact as well, but the book didn’t come from a place of bookish research. It came instead from his post-graduate work at a psychiatric hospital in Menlo Park—the very same hospital Ken Kesey worked in when he began to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was there that Kravetz rediscovered Plath’s classic The Bell Jar, a fictional account of her time in psychiatric care at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts.

In the 1950s, Plath attended poetry workshops under Robert Lowell and alongside Anne Sexton, forming a foundation of confessional poets, who catalyzed vulnerable, visceral poetry like no one before them. At 30 years old, Plath took her own life not knowing the impact her work would have on generations to come. Kravetz’s story longs to go back in time and give her hope.

The Last Confessions is a social and temporal triangulation around Sylvia Plath and her journey through depression and expression. Through the confessions of three composite characters, based on Plath’s influences at different times, it reveals a woman of the 1950s living with what we now know to be bipolar disorder, who is also a poet with a sharply focused lens on everything outside of herself.

Kravetz’s views on our collective mental health takes a page out of Plath’s poetic acknowledgment of her own mental state

“100% of us are experiencing a collective trauma right now. Everyone needs to acknowledge what they’re experiencing,” he says. “Having gone through the last two years and to walk away going, ‘Oh! We’re fine!’ is just denying the reality of the fact.”

Still, he remains optimistic, urging more open conversation on the pain brought about in these years of upheaval and isolation.

“We should have a billboard campaign across the entire country, and on every bus and on every TV show: You Need To Seek Help. Everybody Does.”

Like most of us, the pandemic has taken him to some dark places.

“To say that you haven’t or to not really talk about that, whether it’s through poetry or through art, or even through a therapist or to a friend, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.”

But he doesn’t see any reason to give up hope.

“There’s a legitimate scientific formula for hope. As long as you have a goal (the city that you’re moving toward), the agency (the car you’re driving), and the pathway (the road you’re driving on), then you’ve got hope.”

As a novel, The Last Confessions is part ode, part dirge. Moreso, it is a fugue for the dawn of confessional poetry and therapeutic metaphor for our collective madness. Though he’s now writing fiction, Kravetz has no intention of leaving the real world out of his stories; he’s just making sure they all include a little map toward hope.

Lee Kravetz
Tue, 6pm, Free
Kepler’s Books, Online Event

It’s safe to say that the tech industry has a mixed reputation amongst locals. Now it’s time for local comedians to air their grievances. Started by two burnt-out ex-Microsoft workers, Socially Inept is a touring tech-themed comedy show promising to roast the local tech scene on a variety of points. Based out of Seattle, the show has hopped to Austin, San Francisco and Boston, and is now landing in Google’s hometown of Mountain View. Armed with plenty of fodder on the lifestyle of the brogrammer, Socially Inept will finally put our overlords in the hot seat.

Socially Inept
Fri, 8pm, $33
Center for the Performing Arts, Mountain View

Oakland-based Rupy C. Tut makes the micro feel macro in her solo exhibition A Recipe for Brown Skin. Drawing from the Indian miniature painting style Pahari as well as calligraphy for her main influences, Tut uses the traditional techniques of her Punjabi Sikh background to explore issues of identity and displacement. The women of Tut’s paintings—whether young or old, searching through books or gazing into space—hold incredible detail, from the movement of each hair to their astute expressions. Reception includes an artist talk addressing the exhibition’s title as it relates to “missing brown skin tones in traditional miniature work.”

Rupy C. Tut
Sat, 2pm, Free
Triton Museum, Santa Clara

Bedtime Stories is a one-man show, but countless characters come to life over the course of the evening. Fusing the tradition of live radio plays with the ancient art of storytelling, actor Thomas Dudkiewicz of the Dutch performance collective URLAND conjures a darkly mystical world with just his voice and Tomas Loos’ accompanying soundscape. In the digital age, with such weight placed on the visual, the artists of URLAND help their audiences remember the feelings of childhood, when the simple sound of the rain or a tale told under the stars had the power to set one’s imagination alight.

Bedtime Stories
Wed-Sat, 7pm, $50
Frost Amphitheatre, Stanford 

Jookin can be as difficult as the most intricate ballet, where calves are burning and toes are cracking, or it can look as effortless as a crashing wave. It can be just a few people dancing in a park, or it can sell out a concert hall.

Charles Riley began jookin when he was just 12 years old, after moving to Memphis from his childhood home in Chicago. Soon after he began dancing, he took on the name Lil Buck.

“It was a special thing that was happening in Memphis musically,” he says. “And that’s what helped us first bounce. It made us bounce a certain way, and then it made us get buck. It made us get buck and crunk.”

Buck is a direct product of underground rap music from the late 1980s, all of the ’90s and some of the early 2000s that came from the urban and violent streets of Memphis. When his sister brought some moves home and showed them off, Buck was hooked. At the time, she was a senior in high school and he was just a freshman.

“When I was younger, I think I used to move too fast,” Buck says. “I just tried to do everything too fast. My waves were too fast, everything was just too fast because I was so excited.”

Soon, his mother took him out of public school and enrolled him in a private performing arts school, the former Yo! Academy in Memphis. There Buck says he was able to merge his street style of dance with a different skill set. He took up ballet and stuck classical dance right next to the gangsta walk.

“It’s just as much training in the street dancing world that we need as the classical world,” Buck says. “I just want people to see how artful it is in this raw form.”

Memphis has birthed some of the country’s most prominent musicians and artists, like Aretha Franklin and Maurice White, as well as some of rap’s newest superstars, like Moneybagg Yo and Pooh Shiesty. But Memphis is also one of America’s most deadly cities, where gun violence and drugs have tainted the city’s history with blood.

Dancing to this music, people jerk and twist in quick, smooth motions that contort the dancer’s arms, legs, neck, head and torso into a form of explosive art. Think heavy-bass, synthesizers, fast hi-hats and cracking snares.

“This is the natural sound that the style of jookin was birthed from,” Buck says. “A lot of people didn’t like it because of the lyrics and what was being talked about in these songs, but that was just the times growing up in Memphis. … They’re not from that environment, and they don’t know about the struggles and traumas.”

The dance started with the legendary sounds of these artists and that of the illustrious Memphis all-star team Three 6 Mafia, a platinum-selling group who rapped about what it’s like growing up in a mostly-Black city in America’s landlocked South. Three 6 Mafia music is all about making money, dodging bullets and staying fly. In short: it’s about life in Memphis from 1991 to now.

Buck heard DJs like Spanish Fly, Squeaky, Zerk and others in clubs around Memphis playing their own mixes. From there, he started his dancing career moving to the sounds he knew from Memphis.

“My experience is so different because I grew up in the streets, so I understand it. The hood. I understand it. And I understand the approach and beauty of it,” Buck says. “I wanted to be the best mover growing up, not just a street dancer.”

Now at 33 years old, Buck has worked with world-famous superstars such as Michael Jackson, Madonna and Yo-Yo Ma, and been the face of high-dollar ad campaigns for Nike, Jordan, Apple and Lexus. He’s also one of the main choreographers for the new Starz series Blindspotting.

“It might definitely be a culture shock for some people but we’re going to have a lot of fun,” Buck says. “I just want people to come out to the show. Come out and get some culture about you, learn something. It’s going to be one of your most fun learning experiences.”

Lil Buck
Mon, 7:30pm, $32+
Bing Concert Hall, Stanford