Artists
Tiffany + Christine
Tiffany Barbarash is the Assistant Director and a featured dancer with the Nguyen Dance Company and a dancer with Group A, both based in Oakland, CA. She has performed across the United States as a member of Motion Mania Dance Theatre (Gaithersburg, MD), Visionary Entertainment Inc. (Beltsville, MD), Minus Company (New York, NY), Xpressions Contemporary Dance Company (Pittsburgh, PA), Dance Romanesque (San Francisco, CA) and Run For Your Life… It’s a Dance Company (San Francisco, CA). She has had the honor of working with a variety of choreographers including Lou Antonini, Tyrone Baker, Gail Gilbert, Jane Franklin, Natasha Trifan, Terence Greene, Kyle Abraham, and Michelle Van Doeren. A certified personal trainer, Tiffany has shared her love her dance with the community as an instructor and guest artist for a number of organizations, including the Broadway Bound Children’s Theatre Company, Association for VietArts, and “Ding Sum” Community Theater Troupe, which brings the performing arts to underserved audiences.
Christine Wong Yap is a multidisciplinary visual artist. As an award-winning community artist invited to lead 17 mural projects around the country, Christine has named a “Local Hero” by both the KQED Youth Media Corps and the San Francisco Bay Guardian in its Best of the Bay Awards. She has an extensive exhibition history in galleries across the US, including Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, Asian Arts Initiative in Philadephia PA, and A.I.R. and Limner Galleries in New York, and has been selected as an Artist Mentor by the California Arts Council. Her past work includes figurative paintings, woodcut prints and community murals. Currently, she is engaged in exploring meaning and meaninglessness through abstraction and language. She is interested in both physical/sensory and intellectual relationships to art. She holds a BFA from California College of Arts (CCA), where is a current MFA candidate.
(http://www.christinewongyap.com)
On their pairing:
We admit it. Tiffany and Christine felt foreign together – on the surface. But when we looked past that initial feeling of difference, closed our eyes and felt beneath the surface, they flowed together. Christine is an award-winning community activist, who realizes “… our closest relationships lend us a sense of meaning, yet much of our daily existence is spent on meaningless tasks of survival.” To her, “language is the basis of communication, yet it is highly flawed, often inadequate, and is always potentially problematic.” As a dancer and choreographer, Tiffany transcends language, but even this discipline has its owns challenges. Recently in Vietnam to teach dance, she found that modern and social dance was sometimes more of a foreign concept than the English language. Together, Christine and Tiffany’s pairing combines to speak a language beyond sex roles, cultures, and language --- while exploring all three.