DeNNiSOmeRa

b. Year of the Snake/US ImmigratioNationality Act

Biography
Artist Statement

Practicing pokin'wordsplayw/pinch/punch of performancEa®thistor/y on and off the page, in and out of his mindbody, DeNNiSOmeRa is a writerliPOethink®, nEOnotsoPOst.©o.lOnial FOet/schola®©tivisavista, FOst.©o.lOnial FOetal.

Born in Baguio City, Benguet Province, Luzon Island on the archipelago known in the second language of its colonization as the Philippines, Dennis emigrated in his mother's lap to the US when he was eleven months old. He grew up His growth wa s tunted in the intolerance/ignorance of Sacramento, CA, the larger US misrepresentations and omissions of Asian/Pilipino-American from literature, history, media, and authority/leadershiPositions. Eventually he was borne by the ink and movement of the pen on page then toncescreened through keyboard, the act of writing performing his ontology through and in spite of WEstern eUrocentric olonialimperial assimilationist, objectifying, appropriative logics.

After graduating from UCSanta Cruz, then migrating to San FranciscOakland where he worked with youth for several years, he returned to the Philippines (and Southeast Asia) for the firstime since his i'mmigration. At an aRts festival in his birthplace, he participated in poetry and video workshops. After nine months in the Philippines and three traveling in Southeast Asia, he returned to the US, where he continued to grow his writing & performancEa® th r ough workshops, open mics and performance opportunities back in the SF Bay Area via June Jordan's Poetry for the People at UCBerkeley, Glide Memorial Church and the Mission Cultural Center in SF, the Ohana Open Mic in Oakland, Kearny Street Workshop in SF and a PilipinoAM theater based in SF, SOMA's Bindlestiff Studios.

Following a year at California College of Arts and Crafts, he found Mills College in Oakland to be the place where his thoroughandling of language were most at home. Through Mills, he not only refined a praxis of experimentaLANGUAGE writing to represent his thoughts poetically in the M.F.A.––but also during performance collaborations w/experimental musicians and dancers in/out of his mindbody––he continUed to further the process and perFORMance of language beyond the page: sowing seeds for his present pursuit of a Ph.D. in Performance Studies at UCDavis. Dennis' writing has been published online and off in poetry journals Tinfish, Chain, Cricket Online Review, Bay Poetics, POMPOM, 2nd Avenue Poetry, Deep Oakland. His morecent wordsplaying has been focused just off screen in a film narration performance called movietelling(Lew)/Katsuben (a silent film era Japanese form(oreso the Korean Pyonsa who subverted Japanese propaganda films in their colonial era there), performing his mov[i.e.]telling work nationally in NYC, Miami, Oakland SF.

My current aRtisticreati've work is a poeticritical illumination of the colonialimperial/patriarchal inscription on the mindbody through poeticritical archi“text”uralandscapes–––primarily revisioning in the form of mov[i.e.]telling/Katsuben: a Japanese form of film narration from the silent film era; he better identifies with the Korean film narrators called Pyonsa who subverted Japanese colonial propaganda films in their colonial era there.

Through a nEOnotsOpoOst©olOnialense, my critical work and research attends to persistent assimilative logics, objectificational representation practices and intellectual appropriations in settler hegemonicolonial culture perpetuating continued epistemicolonial violences––stemming from WEstern civilization'self-constitution as the repression and projection of its disowned savage/barbarian/heathen on all Others and continUed consolidation through persistent un/conscioUS EUrasing t/races of Others and the EUrasure of thesEUrasures–––and the critical/theoretical and comparative gestures in hybridiasporic poetics by intellectuals and writers of the "missing passage", specifically around the tropes of utterance, speech, the tongue, languagetc. as constant and continued DEcolonizingeMpoweresponses to, aswellasymptoms of a continuing white WEsterneUrocentric hegemonicolonial state.