ABOUT US
Our Team
Programs Associate; Founding Member: General Circle, Hiring Circle; Artistic Core Member of EP; Core Movement Educator for youth and adults
Rama Hall is a professional dancer based out of the Bay Area, California. He’s been studying street dance styles for the last 13 years. His main style is House Dance, but he also studies Freestyle Hip Hop, Popping, Locking, Breaking, and other street dance styles, as well as various African Styles, and Capoeira.
Rama spent several months a year, for 12 years, in NYC training with the pioneers and leaders there of these dances.
Rama was a full time student at a street dance school in Sweden, Åsa Folkhogskola, for two different years, 2012/13, and 2017/18, also being able to explore Europe during that time getting inspiration and experience from the leaders of street dance there.
For 13 years Rama has been a core member of the Bay Area dance theater company Embodiment Project, performing for sold out audiences in the Bay and other areas in the country.
Rama’s also been a member of Anne Bluethenthal’s performance collective, Skywatchers, from 2011 to 2019, working with residents of the Tenderloin in San Francisco. In 2015 also working with residents of El Salvador to tell their untold stories from civil war in the ‘80s.
Outside of dance, Rama has grown up practicing meditation his whole life, and spent 10 years up until the pandemic at Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco, working with a program that offers the students there Transcendental Meditation as an outlet to their stress, and for the student’s self development.
One of Rama’s greatest passions is teaching dance to adults, young adults, and youth, in the Bay and abroad. He’s taught a weekly adult House Dance class at Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco for 8 years, as well as a weekly outdoor class at Lake Merritt Oakland for 2 years during the pandemic. He also was a core teacher for ODC studios youth company “Seeds” in San Francisco for 1 year, and a lead support for another year. In addition to Seeds, Rama has taught several other youth courses, and currently teaches for Destiny Arts Youth Outreach program based out of Oakland.
Rama has also made a name for himself in the battle/competitive scene in the US and Europe winning many competitions in places such as the Bay Area, NYC, DC, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, and London. One of Rama’s biggest highlights is competing at the Juste Debout Finals in Paris in 2018 in front of 16,000 people, and recently placing top 4 in House Dance Forever in Amsterdam.
For 1 year during the pandemic Rama was a co-organizer for the weekly free community party “Days Like This” at the Lake Merritt Pergola in Oakland. Each week inviting a different DJ to connect with the people and creating a welcoming space for everyone to release thru music and dance. Rama continues to work with Days Like This in 2022 hosting a House Dance class connected to the event.
In 2022 Rama became part of the inaugural all black cohort of the Hip Hop Artist Residency & Training program, a 3 month residency and performance with Zaccho Dance Theatre and PUSH Dance Company in San Francisco.
Rama also manages a cohort of dancers hired for the Suncébeat House Festival in Croatia for 3 years, this year he managed 25 dancers from all over Europe.
Rama is deeply rooted in community, and supports the Bay Area, as well as the international dance community in many ways. Rama is a worldwide dance culture bearer, educator, and practitioner of street dance. Each year in the summer Rama travels to different parts of the world to gain inspiration in dance, connect with people, be inspired by different cultures, and brings his experience back to teach his students in the Bay Area, and to build with Embodiment Project for most of the year.
In Dec 2021 Rama began to expand his role in Embodiment Project, and after 13 is more excited and motivated than ever for the growth and opportunities he has developing in the company.
Organizational Partner; Restorative Justice Mentor
Richard Cruz has been with The Ahimsa Collective since 2018. He is native and his relations are through his mother (Georgia): Assiniboine Sioux, Nakota and Arapaho.
He also has an american college education and has earned certifications as a substance abuse treatment counselor and communications technician. He currently holds a position as the co-executive director.
He believes in celebrating our differences, new experiences and healing our communities and history.
He lives in the Bay Area of California.
Creative Collaborator
d. Sabela grimes, a 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, is a choreographer, writer, composer and educator whose interdisciplinary performance work and pedagogical approach reveal a vested interest in the physical and meta-physical efficacies of Afro-Diasporic cultural practices.
Described by the Los Angeles Times as “the Los Angeles dance world’s best-kept secret” and as “one of a mere handful of artists who make up the vanguard of hip-hop fusion,” Grimes is considered one of the most imaginative and innovative artists in his field.
His AfroFuturistic dance theater projects – like World War WhatEver, 40 Acres & A Microchip, BulletProof Deli and ELECTROGYNOUS – consider invisibilized histories and grapple with constructed notions of masculinity and manhood while conceiving a womynist consciousness. He created and continues to cultivate a movement system called Funkamentals that focuses on the methodical dance training and community building elements evident in Black vernacular and Street dance forms.
Previously, Sabela co-authored and performed as a principal dancer in Rennie Harris Puremovement’s award-winning Rome & Jewels. He received a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Master of Fine Arts in dance and choreography from University of California, Los Angeles.
Artistic Collaborator
SAMMAY Peñaflor Dizon (she/they/siya) is the daughter of Yolanda Peñaflor Dizon, granddaughter of Salvacion Orencillo Peñaflor and Carolina Agdeppa Dizon. Raised up in a migrant multigenerational environment in Carson, California, SAMMAY is a Filipinx American choreographer, interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer of Bikol, Kapampangan, and Ilokano descent.
Through ritual performance, they explore the diasporic body as a site of re-membering, resisting, and reclaiming for collective healing and liberation. Their practice is rooted in the fundamental knowing that dance bridges the earth and ancestral realm. The sacred cipher becomes a passageway to transmute intergenerational trauma across cultural lines and geographical borders. Rooted in their inherent responsibility to the Divine, SAMMAY creates opportunities for intercultural and intergenerational exchange - igniting possibilities for decolonizing from a diasporic lens and embodying radical futures. By centering ancestral reverence in her work, she highlights the ongoing conversation between the material and the spiritual. Their work lives at the intersection of intergenerational healing, re-indigenization, and social justice - and is a direct call and response with their ancestors.
SAMMAY seeks to honor the tapestry of indigenous epistemologies embedded in our urban landscapes through facilitating BIPOC-centered spaces for holistic healing and embodiment. She is founding director of intercultural arts festival Urban x Indigenous, Daluyan: Embodied Storytelling Workshop, and SAMMAY Productions in SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District. She has served as a teaching artist and community liaison for the San Francisco Ballet Dance in Schools and Communities Program; chair of Dance for the Balay Kreative Advisory Board; and core member of Embodiment Project in San Francisco / Yelamu on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory.
In 2018, SAMMAY was the inaugural Featured Artist for the United States of Asian America Festival presented by Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center. She has been a guest artist through the USF Performing Arts and Social Justice Department, UCSB Multicultural Center, and Harvard University Department of Theater, Dance, and Media among others. She has been featured through Bindlestiff Studio, CounterPulse, Dance Mission Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Yerba Buena Gardens Festival among others. Their work has received support from California Arts Council, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Rainin Foundation, and San Francisco Arts Commission among others. In 2022, SAMMAY was commissioned by ODC Theater for the inaugural State of Play Festival and premiered their third evening-length work, ritual for thrivation no. 2.
SAMMAY is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in choreographic inquiry at UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
