Wednesday, September 23, 2009


SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH - @ THE THIRD ANNUAL CHA CHA

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL NIGHT, BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE!

Lots of old and new faces packed the Revival Stone Lounge...what a wonderful, giving vibe... We're speechless, so we'll let the photos do the talking.

THANK-YOU!


Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Cha Cha 2009 Event Details






Cha Cha 2009 in partnership with the Allende Arts Festival is excited to be running its third installment. Here are the details:

Saturday, September 19th @ 8:00pm
$10 (no one turned away for lack of funds)
The Revival - Stone Lounge
783 College Street (at Shaw)

Theme: mi cuerpo, mi casa - "my body is my home"

Featuring artists:

brescia birdthroat bloodbeard
Victoria Mata
Naila Keleta Mae
janet romero leiva
Karleen Pendelton-Jimenez
Dianah Smith

With emerging artists from the mentorship program:
Teresa Cheng
Gabriela Etcheverry

Come and celebrate the diversity of women's voices in Toronto on sexuality and homeland!

Curated and femceed by:
La Loba - mónica rosas

Event Coordinator:
Angela Britto

Photography art by Kelly A Schnurr

After party with D.J JOLA spinning R & B, Hip Hop & Soca beats!

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Cha Cha and the TRCC






Cha Cha 2009 is proud to have the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre as a community partner. Please be sure to support them and the important work that they do by checking out their website: http://www.trccmwar.ca/

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Cha Cha 2009 Curatorial Statement - mi cuerpo/ mi casa

my body is my home

All humans need food, water and shelter to survive.

Shelter in its best form is called a home. A home not only meets the needs of basic survival but it provides a place where things can flourish.

Our body is our first home.

It is the container of life we have each been given to survive and to flourish.

Our relationship to our body and the ability to give and share it with others is not only a healthy normal part of being human, but it can be healing and holy act.

For many women, our home has at some point been threatened or taken away from us.

We struggle to overcome a painful legacy of sexual domination, sexual colonization and the continued everyday existence of sexism.

It is time to reclaim our home.

Our body and its myriad of functions and activities root us to ground and the present moment. Our notions of sexuality informs our identity as humans, it helps us touch the ground, but also allows us to fly, to reach transcendental sates, create meaningful connections with others. Understanding the importance of what we give when we share our body with others and ourselves is paramount to building a healthy society.

Therefore, we must honour and be true to our first and primary home - our body.
CHA CHA, is an opportunity for “spring cleaning” – a time to heal, a time to challenge existing norms and most importantly to celebrate our resilience and the power we have over our bodies.

When we flourish, we provide homes for others.

mónica rosas
Literary Arts Director
Allende Arts Festival

Cha Cha and the Toronto Women's Bookstore

We are proud and grateful to have the Toronto Women's Bookstore as a generous sponsor for Cha Cha 2009. They do wonderful work for the diverse groups of women in Toronto. Please visit their website at: http://www.womensbookstore.com/


Mentorship program winners

The cha cha chicas are proud to announce the artists in its 2009 mentorship program! We thank all you wonderful writers and artists out there who responded to our open call for submissions. The pieces were inspiring and the decision was close but one had to be made. The artists joining the cha cha roster through the mentorship program are:

Teresa Cheng














Teresa is a queer Chinese/Taiwanese daughter, sister and friend. She has spent half of her life in Taiwan and the other half in Canada. She is the creator of zines Dykes & Their Hair and Upskirt: Dirty (Un)feminist Secrets. She has been published in the Asian Arts Freedom School Anthology. She also blogs for Shameless Magazine and 8asians.com.

Gabriela Etcheverry









Gabriela Etcheverry is a Chilean-Canadian writer and literary critic. She has a PhD from Laval University and two Master’s degrees from Carleton University, where she taught for many years. In 2007 she published the novel Latitudes, in which she blends her personal experiences with those of others, weaving through poetry, short fiction, and other modes the threads of time that tie the child to the adult, the province to the city and, finally, the South and the North. One of the twelve children of a dedicated treasure hunter, Gabriela draws on the tales and legends of the city of her childhood, Coquimbo (Chile), for her novel Guayacán: tesoro y lujuria (forthcoming in 2009). Currently, she is working on a new novel, Where Are You? set in Gravenhurst, her husband’s hometown in Canada.

Teresa and Gabriela will be working with the wonderful Dianah Smith and Yaya Yao who will be their mentors throughout this summer. Please come out on September 19th to see them perform their workshopped pieces.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Cha Cha 2009 Artist Lineup

Hello my cha cha chicas!

We are excited to announce the amazing women and talented artists who will be a part of Cha Cha 2009.

Naila Keleta Mae

(Photo credit: Naila Keleta Mae & Charles Johnston)


Naila Keleta Mae is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and scholar who makes words come alive. Her work is charismatic, versatile and thoughtfully provocative and she has worked in Brazil, Canada, France, South Africa and the U.S.A. She has worked primarily in literature, theatre and music for more than two decades mainly as an accomplished spoken word artist, playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and recording artist and in June, she launched bloom, her third full-length album. Naila Keleta Mae is also on Faculty at Goddard College in the U.S. and a PhD Candidate at York University.

Over the years, Naila Keleta Mae has learned that occupying a visibly black, female, heterosexualized, middle-classed, multilingual, able body in contemporary Canada is profoundly informative and challenging. Within this context, interdisciplinary art, pedagogy and scholarship has emerged for her as an imaginative and radical mode of survival, expression and mobility in which institutionalized cultures of domination can be disrupted as new performances of the world are imagined and co-constituted. http://www.nailakeletamae.com/


Karleen Pendleton Jimenez



Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is a writer and assistant professor in theSchool of Education at Trent University. Her recent publications include the personal essay, "Little White Children: Notes from a Chicana Dyke Dad," and the co-edited collection (with Isabel Killoran) "Unleashing the unpopular": Talking about sexual orientation andgender diversity in education. Most recently she wrote the screenplayfor the award-winning animation short 'Tomboy,' based on her children's book "Are You a Boy or a Girl?". As she writes this, she is mostly creating a baby.


Victoria Mata & brescia birdthroat bloodbeard


Victoria Mata


















Canadian born and Venezuelan raised, Victoria Mata is trained in African Dancing, Modern and Folkloric Dance. Victoria's dance career was firstinspired after a few workshops with Garth Fagan's Dance Company in RochesterNY, but most of her training is self taught and sporadic training wheneverpossible. Her strength is in her creativity and passion for corporalmovement. Her style is a fusion of modern dance, African, folkloric andfree styling. For the past five years she has focused on choreographies that interpret history and real-life situations. Her work has been shown inToronto's Ffida, International Dance Festival 2003, The International Youth Conference, Venezuela 2005 and a number cultural and peace festivals inToronto and New York. Victoria has been a member and performer of thestudent-run Only Human Dance Collective at the University of Toronto since2002 and has recently founded the MataDanZe Collective. Victoria hopes thather passion for communication through the art of corporal movement willinspire other dancers and non-dancers to use dance as a tool to overcomelife blockages and understand history.


brescia birdthroat bloodbeard


toronto-born artist and songbird.

if you have butterflies in your stomach

invite them into your heartif it gets caught in your throat

ask a bird to sing its song

if the bird forgets its tune

listen to a pebble instead






Dianah Smith












Dianah Smith is Jamaican-born, Ottawa-raised writer, teacher and arts educator. She has been published in Siren, Flirt, and Shameless magazines and the anthology, She’s Shameless: Women write about growing up, rocking out, and fighting back (Tightrope Books). Dianah is the recipient of several grants including an emerging writer’s grant from the Toronto Arts Council and a Writing Mentorship grant from the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) – she was mentored by Jamaican poet and short story writer, Olive Senior. Dianah teaches Autobiographical Writing courses for indigenous women, two-spirited folks, women of colour and trans folks of colour; and teaches creative writing workshops in schools through the OAC’s Artists in Education Program.
In 2006-2007, Dianah curated When the Rainbow Isn’t Enough a monthly reading series sponsored by the Toronto Women’s Bookstore featuring queer and trans emerging writers of colour and two-spirited emerging writers. In 2005, Dianah founded ‘A’ is for Orange a group for queer caribbean writers that aims to strengthen and build community by celebrating under-represented voices, sharing resources, and mentoring emerging writers. Dianah curates readings by ‘A’ is for Orange in partnership with various organizations in Toronto.





janet romero leiva


janet romero-leiva is a queer working class latina artist who travelled north through the america's at the age of 7 and has since been trying to figure out her place between south and north, between spanish and english, between borders and displacement - her work speaks to her experience of moving through multiple and often overlapping identities and the challenges encountered at various places throughtout time, she loves cart- wheeling and smoothies and can often be found reading children's books at the toronto women's bookstore




We look forward to seeing their work at this year's cha cha!