Recognizing the planet was running out of time for humans to change their ways, Angelique left Eveoke in 2007 to learn sustainability skills, particularly related to growing one’s own food. In the small rural town of Shingletown, she created Dancefarm, and began teaching rural people how to dance while learning homesteading skills. In 2013, she moved Dancefarm to Cave Junction, Oregon, where she built an acre and a half of life sustaining permaculture gardens and founded RiverStars Performing Arts. RiverStars cultivated youth’s voice and power using dance and theatre to galvanize community in a small, generationally impoverished and isolated rural community. RiverStars was named a “model program” by its primary funder, the Oregon Community Foundation in 2017. In the summer of 2019, Angelique moved Dancefarm to Talent, Oregon, so her daughter could attend a public high school. Her first work in Talent was The (w)HOLE, funded by MAP, about devastating boom and bust economies that have ravaged rural America. She continues to create compassionate social action through dance, theatre and agriculture today.
Gina Angelique (AKA 'Farmer G'), Artistic Director
In 1994, a fiercely feminist choreographer from San Diego, California founded Eveoke Dance Theatre. Gina Angelique was called “a great galvanizer” by the legendary Donald Mckayle, and “a force of nature” by kpbs’ Pat Launer. It took 13 years, and an extraordinary group of artists which Angelique led as Artistic Director to make Eveoke into an iconic social justice dance theatre phenomenon.
Highlights include a bilingual dance theatre education program on the San Ysidro border, Celebrate Dance Festival: the largest dance festival west of the Mississippi, the longest running dance show in the history of San Diego with “Funkalosophy”, and a classic, beloved work reprised three times…”The Soul of a Young Girl...Dances of Anne Frank,” that left “audiences too devastated to applaud.” (Jennifer DePoyen) Eveoke Dance Theatre, under the leadership of Angelique, created 26 original dance theatre works that bent minds, shifted hearts, and indeed, galvanized San Diegans.
Angelique was the only choreographer in the United States to be funded twice by the Dance USA dancemaker grant. Her final work with Eveoke was RISE: The California Earth Project, for which she traveled throughout California interviewing female leaders in the environmental justice movement, turning those interviews into the work’s soundscore. This kind of documentary work, called “docu-dance,” became one of the many contributions Eveoke and Angelique made to the field of dance theatre. She also forged a new idiom, fusing text, butoh, balinese, hip-hop and contemporary forms.