Tales from the Table
Tales From The Table emerges as a multi-faceted, collaborative art project that employs the profound vernacular of culinary traditions as a conduit to explore, venerate, and articulate the intricate narratives uniting diasporic communities of color. This project transcends gustatory celebration; it is an embodied inquiry into how food is a repository of cultural memory, a site of ritualistic communion, and a vector for ancestral continuity and emergent identities.
Originating from communal engagements and intimate dialogues, the project invited participating artists to contribute personal and mythological food-related stories; significant comestibles imbued with personal or cultural weight, and resonant deities or spiritual archetypes. These individual offerings became the raw material prima, transmuted through a collaborative choreographic and improvisational process into a polyphonic performance. The work unfolds through evolving sections—from introspective solo "summonings" that set a ceremonial tone to dynamic group embodiments exploring themes of invented gods, collective grief, inherited mythologies, and the enduring pursuit of joy and resilience. The intentional use of elements such as mirrors seeks to create visual "magic," transforming the performance space into an altar, a sanctuary, and a reflective surface for both performers and audience, implicating all in the shared labor of memory and meaning-making.
Beyond the immediate sensory engagement with food as subject and symbol—navigating the dialectic between literal and metaphorical representation—"Tales From The Table" interrogates the complex nexuses of food sovereignty, cultural memory, and identity formation within diasporic contexts. It critically addresses the pervasive impacts of gentrification, racial antagonism, and cultural attrition, proposing art-making as a potent form of resistance and reclamation. The conceptual framework is enriched by intellectual currents that champion the reassertion of suppressed matrilineal knowledge (as explored by Estés and Sjoo), the understanding of poetry and art not as luxury but as vital sustenance (Lorde), and the radical notion of reclaiming care as an insurrectionary act (Crimethinc). These theoretical underpinnings inform the performance's aspiration to foster a collective consciousness attuned to social exigencies, transforming everyday practices and spaces into platforms for potent storytelling.
The performative structure, with its interplay of solo expressions and ensemble movements, mirrors the dynamic between individual experience and collective identity. Vocalizations, field recordings of culinary preparations, and the dynamic spatial transformations—shifting from altar to sanctuary, mouth to stomach, spine to earth—aim to immerse the audience in a multi-sensory experience that evokes the deep, often unspoken, connections between nourishment, spirituality, and belonging.
Tales From The Table seeks to cultivate an enduring legacy of engagement that transcends the project's temporal bounds, nurturing spirits that continue the conversation. Ultimately, this endeavor is a journey towards collective healing, solidarity, and the luminous affirmation of diasporic pasts, presents, and prospective futures, inviting viewers to contemplate the profound ways in which we are all shaped, sustained, and connected by the stories we inherit and the tables at which we gather.
This project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC), and is fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Aika Takeshima(she/her), originally from Japan, is a dance artist with a 10+ year career, a DEI practitioner, and a co-founder of the sarAika movement collective with Sara Pizzi. She specializes in contemporary dance, with strong floor work and dynamic and fluid movements made possible by effectively using joints and utilizing different skills from various dance styles. Her ultimate goal is to help people find more freedom and possibilities in themselves through her arts and DEI knowledge.
ayo ohs (A.O./they/she) is a socially engaged artist and director, working in sound, performing and healing arts. ayo has developed workshops in vision and Healing Justice for community-based non-profits including the Audre Lorde Project, MINKA Brooklyn, and Movement Research’s Artist of Color Council, and has presented, collaborated, and performed at venues such as BAM, The Public Theater, MOMA, the Venice Biennale, and other international and national tours. ayo’s current project, The Silent Unseen, includes an audio tour at Flushing Meadows Park and the Queens Museum, tracing histories of Asian immigration with an anti-racist framework. ayoohs.com
J Alex Ray (b. 1997 in Chicago, IL) is a New York-based visual and performance artist and pole dancer. Their work consists of experimental movement and self-portraiture revolving around themes of personal evolution and growth. Their visual storytelling harmonizes improvised dance and endurance challenges interacting with material and live deconstruction.
Jeevika Bhat (she/her) is a Manhattan based dancer and choreographer who explores the confluence of her cultures through a contemporary Indian medium. Her background is in Odissi, an East Indian classical dance form known for its nuanced storytelling and graceful fluidity. Academically, she is a graduate of UC San Diego, where she earned a BS in Mathematics with minors in Linguistics and Dance, and UC Irvine, where she earned an MFA in Dance.
Katherine Toukhy draws upon movement, land elements, and her intersectional reality to create multidisciplinary work. She is also a certified meditation instructor who practices bringing people together through somatic movement workshops that weave in political transformation. Toukhy uses these processes to shake off colonial narratives and assert presence, informed by her experiences as a Coptic Egyptian American-born woman. She resides in Lenapehoking/NYC and has exhibited and led workshops nationally and internationally.
Co-directors
Fei Li is an interdisciplinary artist born in Minnan, China, and based in Brooklyn. Li's recent project was granted the 2025 New York State Council on the Arts Grant Award, 2024 & 2023 Brooklyn Arts Fund and LP's Create and Reconnect Grant. She is also the awardee of numerous funded artist's residencies, fellowships, and grants, including the 2023 Create Change Fellowship of Laundromat project, the Milton and Sally Michel Avery Residency for a Visual Artist at Yaddo, Jon Imber Painting Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center; City Artist Corps Grant and Queens Arts Fund New Works Grant. She founded Accented Projects for collaboration, experimentation, and community building.
Nova Scott-James is film writer/director , Innovation Doula, and artist from Harlem, NYC. Her childhood experiences of being flooded with the sounds and culture of jazz has impacted her creative aesthetic greatly as her work honors improvisation, altered states of consciousness, ritual and collaboration. Her film work spans documentary , narrative, and hybrid cinema and often incorporates some elements of performance art. Her films have played at the Camden International Film Festival, Flux Factory, Gallery 427, ARoS Kunstmuseum in Denmark and the New York African Film Festival at Film @ Lincoln Center among other festivals and galleries. She is currently finishing a feature length film, Wild Darlings Sing The Blues (And It's A Song of Freedom), a hybrid documentary following a black/queer healing arts collective as they embark on a pilgrimage to a former slave plantation in the American South. Nova has been the recipient of a number of residency and grant awards including but not limited to The Sundance Documentary Lab, The Sundance Uprise Grant, The Jerome Foundation, The Queens Council of the Arts Grant, New York Foundation for The Arts Women's Fund. As an intuitive channel Nova sources from her own embodied spiritual practice and taps into innovation and creative genius to tell stories of awakening.
SPECIAL THANKS TO
Sugar Vendil (she/they) is a composer, pianist, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist who is forging new creative pathways as a second generation Filipinx American. A mother, partner, and notebook fiend, she lives in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn. After a decade performing as a pianist, Vendil's practice evolved into composing acoustic and electronic music and making performance that integrates sound and movement. Her work is deeply rooted in her sense of physicality and love of improvisation. “Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia,” a memoir of a Filipinx American childhood, in development with her ensemble, isogram, will premiere in 2026. It is supported by MAP Fund, NPN, New Music USA, NEFA, and NYSCA. Vendil loves to collaborate. Her “Simple Tasks 2” is on Jennifer Koh’s GRAMMY-award winning album “Alone Together.” She scored Jih-E Peng’s “May We Know Our Own Strength” and “GATHER,” short films based on Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s installations of the same name, and has premiered works by Darius Jones, Gabrielle Herbst, and other fellow composers. She dances in Emily Johnson/Catalyst’s “Being Future Being” and Adrienne Westwood’s “[ ]” and makes music with treya lam in choreographer Marie Lloyd Paspe’s “Stone Belly.” Her album, “May We Know Our Own Strength” is out on Gold Bolus Recordings.
djassi DaCosta Johnson (stylized djassi daCosta johnson) is a dancer, choreographer, photographer, filmmaker, anthropologist, writer, activist, designer and Doula. She is a classically trained modern dancer who studied at Harlem School of Arts, Ballet Hispanico, Clark Center and was a fellowship student at Alvin Ailey. djassi has apprenticed, worked and toured with international companies including MOMIX, Dance Brazil, Earl Mosley, Bill T. Jones, Hernando Cortez, Forces of Nature, Ron Brown’s Evidence and Urban Bush Women among others. She lived abroad working as a dancer and choreographer in Brazil and, then in Italy for 8 years working on TV and film. djassi’s choreography has been displayed in fashion shows, music videos, international festivals and film, including for ESSENCE, Nike, PNB Nation, Pandora Jewelry, and New York Fashion Week for Isamar Designs and Studio189. djassi performs in collaboration with visual artists and jazz musicians on live and video projects and has created works with Eddie Peak, Lia Chavez, Gloria Gaynor, Alice Walker and most recently performed for, and with Joan Jonas for her Mirror Piece I & II at the MOMA in June 2024.
djassi holds an BA in Anthropology from Barnard, an MFA in Dance, New Media and Technology from NYU Tisch and is an Assistant Professor of Dance. She started the first Bachelor of Arts Dance concentration program at the University of the Virgin Islands in 2022 and choreographed the dance portion of the Opening Dedication Ceremony for the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2023. djassi writes in English and Italian about dance, art, culture, women’s issues and highlights artists of color for KINFOLK, {DIYdancer}, Harvard Design Magazine, VIBE, TRACE, Playbill, Dance Teacher and Dance Magazine. In 2023-24 djassi was an Artist-In-Residence at Barnard College’s Movement Lab, where she presented her multi-media exhibition and talk, ‘Fungal Earth”, based on her research and explorations around the intelligence of mycelium, Blackness and the path towards survival for Mother Earth and the human race. djassi helped implement the modern dance program at Brooklyn Ballet in 2014 and is currently a judge and master Horton teacher for YAGP and Joffrey Ballet. djassi debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2024, performing the role of “Iconic Indigenous Mary in John Adam’s groundbreaking and critically acclaimed opera “El Niño”. She currently resides in Brooklyn, on unceded Lenape territory with her 13 year old daughter.
