Booking
Wisdom Sharing
Thank you for your interest in booking Great Leap for your next event!
GREAT LEAP, INC
Great Leap creates bridges to a more just world, weaving performing arts, cultural practices, and community engagement to transform our relationships to the Earth and each other.
HISTORY
Founded in 1978 by groundbreaking performing artist Nobuko Miyamoto, Great Leap is rooted in the Asian American community, centered in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities and promotes cross-cultural exchange with local and nationwide audiences and communities. Led by artists and supported by a board of directors, staff, collaborating artists, and volunteers, Great Leap Inc (GL) represents diverse communities in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California. Artists and leaders design all GL projects with community partners and wisdom keepers.
Wisdom
Sharing
Keynotes, Lectures & Panels
Great Leap artists are regularly invited to share their insights, reflections, and inquiries as part of keynote presentations, featured lectures, and serving on panels. Our artists have specific specialities around topics such as: arts and cultural practices as community resilience, movement building, and healing spaces. Artists are available to share wisdom as part of community events, festivals, school events, university events, panel discussions, and more.
For example, Great Leap Founder Nobuko Miyamoto is available to provide deep insights from her 65+ years of arts and activism.
Screenings
Our Wisdom Sharing screenings invite you to sit with stories that move, awaken, and remember. These films carry the voices of artists, activists, and everyday people—each offering a window into histories often untold and futures still in the making. Whether shared in classrooms or community spaces, these screenings open a circle for reflection, connection, and collective imagination.
Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement
Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement is the story of a visionary artist-activist whose groundbreaking work helped change Asian America forever.
Featuring rare archival footage, we follow her journey as a child of Japanese American concentration camps to a dancer in films and on Broadway to the turbulent shifts in American history that birthed the Asian American movement where Miyamoto's voice emerged as one of its most beloved storytellers.
This sweeping documentary reflects her life as a songwriter, theater and movement artist whose work bridges cultures, communities and history making her a legendary figure in Asian America. A co-production of PBS SoCal and Japanese American National Museum's Frank H. Watase Media Arts Center. The documentary is part of the PBS SoCal ARTBOUND series.
A FILM BY TADASHI NAKAMURA AND QUYÊN NGUYEN-LE.
Grassroots Rising
GRASSROOTS RISING, directed by Robert C. Winn, explores the re-emergence of Asian Pacific American labor activism in Los Angeles. Produced in 2005 as a Visual Communications production, GRASSROOTS RISING marks its 20th anniversary in 2025, juxtaposing poetry by spoken word artist Alison De La Cruz with the stories of immigrant workers, slave laborers, and activists alike. Koreatown restaurant workers arbitrarily fired despite being too ill to work, Pilipino home health care workers exploited for their cheap labor, and Thai women held captive in a virtual prison sweatshop share their stories along with supermarket workers picketing for better wages and working conditions. The film profiles how the sharp reality of life for working class immigrants in Los Angeles is being redirected into grassroots activism through innovative organizations such as the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, Garment Worker Center, Pilipino Worker Center, Thai Community Development Center, and the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. The film offers a moving tribute to the working class roots of the Asian American experience, focusing on the resurgence of grassroots political activism among the City of Angels’ Asian, Latino, and other working class families.
From JA to Shohei: The Manzanar Baseball Project
Great Leap Associate Artistic Director Dan Kwong has been leading the restoration of the WWII-era baseball field at Manzanar National Historic Site since 2023. “From JA to Shohei” is a 2-hour multimedia presentation on this triumphant community-based effort that honors the resilience and determination of the Japanese American community in the face of wartime injustice. A combination of live performance, documentary video, and panel discussion/ lecture,“From JA to Shohei” reveals how sport can be a catalyst for community-building, social change, and personal transformation, and reminds us of the unbreakable human spirit. The three components of this program can be modified/adjusted according to the interests and capacity of presenter. (Performance 12 mins; Video 75 mins; Panel/Lecture 30 mins) Requires video projection, large screen, sound system, 2 handheld mics, wireless lavalier mic and tech operator.
D’Lo’s “Performing Girl” Documentary
A look at the early life of D'Lo: a queer, transgender, Tamil Sri Lankan American writer, actor, director, comedian, activist and music producer who grew up in Lancaster, CA.
To book Performances, Participatory Workshops, or Wisdom Sharing, or for any questions regarding booking please contact booking@greatleap.org.
All Booking Offerings
Performances
Nobuko Mini-Concerts
Dan Kwong - Return of The Samurai Centerfielder
FandangObon Festival
Le Ballet Dembaya
Participatory Workshops
FandangObon Workshops
D’Lo - Cry With You - U.N.C.L.E.S Project
Grief Crafting
Collective Songwriting Workshop
Facilitator Training & Spaces
Dance Demo by Le Ballet Dembaya
Wisdom Sharing
Keynotes, Lectures, Panels
Screenings