It has been a very exciting month for us at Great Leap! Our MOTTAINAI! EcoVid has been wildly successful on Youtube and we are preparing for another video. More information about this video to come! Riding this momentum, we have organized a series of exciting events in the next few months, including the upcoming Flash-Lunch, to raise awareness about the wasteful habit of using disposable chopsticks.
Great Leap, in collaboration with A Feast From The East, will organize a Sunday lunch with reusable chopsticks! The purpose of this event is to show how we as a community can make small changes in our consumption habits that help conserve our precious natural resources.
FEAST FROM THE EAST...known for their Chinese Chicken Salad and world famous Sesame Chicken Wings...is a leader in MOTTAINAI. No styrofoam, no wood waribashi (bamboo chopsticks only). And now they will be going a step further by selling B.Y.O. CHOPSTIX and a cloth take-out bag with MOTTAINAI on it!!
Support GREAT LEAP and FEAST FROM THE EAST with this fun happening on Sunday, August 28 at 12pm. Bring your own reusable chopstix or buy our B.Y.O. Chopstix right there for $10 and receive 10% off your entire meal! Tell your friends and let's spread this B.Y.O. CHOPSTIX campaign. Bring your sticks and your ideas. Let's help stop the wasting of our forests and better our air. Together we can make a difference ...one meal at a time.
Introducing....MOTTAINAI, our latest environmentally conscious, fun music video from Great Leap, Inc. featuring music by Nobuko, directed & edited by Dan Kwong! All over California (and some other states!) communities are dancing to this song at Obon festivals/ceremonies this summer -- be a part of the movement!
Every year, Great Leap hosts an opportunity for our fans, family and friends to participate in an activity to support our community, raise much needed funds for Great Leap and spend a lovely day together. This year we are proud to announce that we will be participating in the Los Angeles Chinatown Firecracker Run on February 12 & 13, 2011. Partnering with the Firecracker Run allows everyone to participate – whether you’re a walker, runner, biker or a kid!
Great Leap has appointed Team Captains, and we ask that you consider joining a team and get your body moving, get inspired by nature, enjoy the outdoors for a good cause!
Nobuko Miyamoto – Walkers
Corazon Rios – Runners
Mike Yanagita – Bikers
Maiya Osumi – Kiddie Run
There are many ways to support the Leapin’ Leapers for the Arts:
Sign up for any of the Firecracker events through Great Leap!
The Firecracker Run will generously donate $7.00 back to Great Leap from each application we directly submit. Applications must be turned in Directly from Team Great Leap. Please register to the email address below
Join the Leapin’ Leapers and help raise funds to support out work
Get friends and family to support your participation by raising funds for Great Leap!
Spread the word about the 2011 Firecracker Run events!
This year we need your help more than ever. In these tough economic times, grants are lean, pockets are shallow and in many cases the Arts have been hit the hardest. This is our only annual public fundraising event, and we need all the support we can get!
B.Y.O. CHOPSTIX was a selected Short Film/Video for Electric Lodge's Green Screen Film Festival & Salon!
If you missed the opportunity to see Great Leap's latest music video on the big screen during Collaboratory VIII: Order to Go, or would like to see it again, this festival will be your next chance!
B.Y.O. CHOPSTIX will be shown on Saturday, October 30 at 5pm! in the Shorts: Call to Action! section!
Tickets are $5-12 dollars and can be purchased by clicking here.
The Green Screen Film Festival & Salon will take place on October 28-31, 2010 at The Electric Lodge
1416 Electric Ave
Venice, CA 90291
Great Leap is proud to present our latest music video, B.Y.O.Chopstix!
Written and starring Nobuko, this funny yet pointed music video hopes to encourage people to "bring your own" chopsticks when eating out to help the 100 billion pairs of wood chopsticks that are thrown away every year!
We also hope you can join us as we celebrate the release of this video on September 11, 2010 at the Collaboratory VIII: Order to Go performance! For more information and to purchase tickets for this performance, please click here!
Great Leap has partnered with Blacklava to provide portable hashi so you can be a part of the Bring Your Own Chopstix movement!
Help eliminate the need of 30 million birch and poplar trees from being cut down annually to make the over 100 billion single-use chopsticks to take up space in landfills!
These chopsticks are small and compact, and are $11.00 (not including shipping).
Come join us as five emerging artists explore the environmental impact of single-use food containers and utensils in the culmination of Great Leap's artist mentorship program!
SATURDAY, September 11, 2010
7pm
Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook
6300 Hetzler Road, Culver City, CA 90232
Tickets $15 (plus $1 ticket processing fee)
Featuring the work by Janet Dandridge, June Kaewsith, Zumi Mizokami, Ayuko Sato and Shannon Shue.
PLUS the premiere screening of Great Leap's environmental music video, B.Y.O.Chopstix!
Hosted by Amy Hill!
Music by Nobuko Miyamoto and Friends!
Directed by Dan Kwong
Co-Directed by Young-Ae Park
This performance is made possible in part by the California Arts Council, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Culver City Performing Grants Program with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment, Cecilia Nakamura Arts Fund, and the Duane Ebata Memorial Fund. Sponsored by California State Parks Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook.
Here is an article written by 95 year old Detroit activist/philosopher Grace Lee Boggs, who is a longtime and dear friend and mentor to Great Leap.
LIVING FOR CHANGE
By Grace Lee Boggs
“I Dream a Garden”
Come into the circle - - circle of life
Come into the dream of a paradise
What was once a ruin can be reborn
Just like the sun after a storm.
With our hands - - with our hearts
With this land – we can make a new start.
Everything we need is beneath our feet
There’s a new way to live –
with our roots planted so deep
Every step is a blessing
Every song is a prayer
Every seed is a healing
That the world will share
In the early evening of June 25, 2010, the fifth day of the 2nd United States Social Forum, a generationally and ethnically very diverse group of USSF activists sang “I Dream a Garden” and danced the Harvest Dance, combining Native American, African American and Asian American steps, on the lawn of Genesis Lutheran Church,
Genesis Church is on the corner of Mack and E. Grand Blvd, a few hundred feet north of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. We danced there because Gerald Hairston, the Gardening Angel who sparked the urban agricultural movement in Detroit, was a member of Genesis, he was also a member of the class of 1964, the last graduating class of Eastern High School which occupied this corner before it was renamed King High School and moved a few miles southeast to Lafayette and Mt. Elliot.
“I Dream a Garden” was written and choreographed by Nobuko Miyamoto, an Asian American community artist who as a child was interned during World War II even though she was a Sansei whose ancestors had lived in this country for three generations.
Nobuko danced on Broadway, in the original Flower Drum Song, in 1959 and in films such as The King and I (1955) and West Side Story (1961).
In 1978 she founded Great Leap as an Asian-American arts organization. Today Great Leap is a thriving, multicultural performing arts group that gives voice to the experience of contemporary Asian-Americans as well as African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other groups. Great Leap’s multicultural performances reach tens of thousands of children and youths in the public schools in southern California and the U.S.A
In 1992, responding to tensions between Los Angeles’s African-American and Asian-American communities, Nobuko Miyamoto took what she had learned with Great Leap to shape a healing multicultural touring show that includes Latinos and African-Americans and is called “A Slice of Rice, Frijoles, and Greens.” Great Leap ’s theme song and ongoing residency program, “To All Relations,” brings together people from diverse backgrounds to explore and tell their own stories, thereby creating an alternative narrative for the world’s future. “I believe there is no better way than the arts to open the cultural, racial, and economic chasms which abound,” she says. “We have a powerful, creative tool to educate, entertain, and transform our world.”
Ten years ago I invited Nobuko to Detroit where she worked with Detroit Summer youth and was inspired by Gerald Hairston’s Gardening Angels dreams. After Gerald’s death in 2001, she wrote and choreographed “I Dream a Garden” and we performed it on the Genesis lawn in 2002.
This year Renee Wallace and Jeannine Hatcher of Genesis HOPE invited Nobuko and landscape architect Ashley Kyber, who was also a friend of Gerald’s, to return to Detroit during the 2nd USSF to re-create “I Dream a Garden” because they believe Gerald’s Gardening Angels legacy can expand and enrich community organizing on the east side of Detroit.
______
My USSF Conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein can be read at
www.archive.org/details/GraceLeeBoggsImmanuelWallersteinDialogue
Great Leap is proud to present the latest round of COLLABORATORY, our free, eight week mentorship program for emerging artists who are based in Los Angeles. There are 12 openings for the Summer 2010 session.
Collaboratory VIII ORDER TO GO deals with the most specific theme: the Environmental Impact of Take-out Food Containers & Utensils
For more information and to download the Collaboratory application, click here!
Great Leap has always used art to answer pressing social needs in it’s 31 year history. First we created expressions of the long-silenced Asian American experience. When the racial divides of the LA Uprising happened in ‘92, we created “A Slice of Rice, Frijoles and Greens” so Asian, Latino and African American artists could tell their own stories on stage together (and still touring). After 9/11 we wove together Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish artists and communities on the stage and in workshops. Now, an encompassing need is upon us, permeating across all cultures….the environment, our earth, the mother of us all.
How do we express this in a way that engages, informs, enlightens…and gives some solutions beyond gloom and doom. This is our first offering: B.Y.O. CHOPSTIX! It’s a music video on YouTube about throwaway chopsticks….you know, those cute wooden sticks we use once for Asian food, then “throw away, throw away, throw away.” A hundred billion are used around the world yearly. Can you imagine how many trees? How much CO2?
We want to start a conversation. What about a movement? Well, at least we can all B.Y.O CHOPSTIX. We want to show how our small acts can make a big difference. So join us on this journey.
