KIMIKO TANABE + NORA ALAMI

RUNTIME: About 55 minutes with no intermission.
Portions of this performance contains the use of water based haze and strobing lights.

Warm Greetings from one long day in the desert

Warm Greetings from one long day in the desert is a dance duet by Japanese American artist Kimiko Tanabe and Moroccan American artist Nora Alami. Warm Greetings dives into the “desert” within the american imaginary exploring what desires lay inside it, beyond it, under it, and after it.

Blending dance, visual design, and performance, Warm Greetings from one long day in the desert transforms the theater into a surreal desert landscape. It invites audiences to reconsider the “Orient” as a shifting construction within the contemporary American imagination. The work brings histories and mass-media fantasies like Dune, Oppenheimer, and Looney Tunes into collision with lived realities. Here, the desert is a site for reckoning with how Arab and Asian bodies have been imagined and performed in American culture.

Warm Greetings keywords:
Orientalism
Desire
Impossible
Desert
Sand

ruin(s) / vulnerability
nuclear / neon
adorn / death

Key References:
“Meeting Asian/Arab American Studies: Thinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S.”, Sunaina Maira, Magid Shihade
Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Gayatri Gopinath
Orientalism, Edward Said
“Survival is Your Business”: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America,” Joseph Masco

Created by Nora Alami and Kimiko Tanabe

Performed by Kimiko Tanabe and Nora Alami

Majesty Royale-Jackson (Sound Designer)

Forest Entsminger (Scenic Designer)

Anna Wotring (Triskelion Production Manager)

Connor Sale (Lighting Designer and Resident Lighting Designer at Triskelion Arts)

Thank you Anna, Connor, Rachel, Miriam, Sabrina, Majesty, and Forest for your creative collaboration, generosity of spirit, and extraordinary magic-making. Thank you to the 2024 MANCC Forward Dialogues Artist Lab facilitators and cohort for nurturing the seeds of Warm Greetings.
This project is supported by the Triskelion Arts Fellowship and Brooklyn Arts Council.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nora Alami and Kimiko Tanabe have known each other since childhood, growing up together in Manitou Springs, Colorado. They have shared landscapes, communities, and creative contexts - from Colorado College to dance festivals to New York City’s experimental dance scene. Their longstanding friendship has evolved through years of witnessing and supporting each other’s solo practices as dramaturgical friends, eventually becoming an intentional artistic collaboration in 2024.

Kimiko Tanabe (she/they) is a fourth generation Japanese-American experimental dance artist. Her research moves through the social, cultural, and political landscape of post-internment Japanese-America. She draws inspiration from Japanese folkloric ghost tales of yūrei and yokai to tease at the seams of perceived reality, making space for the logic of spirits, dreams, and the afterlife to emerge. She is currently a 2026–27 Fresh Tracks Artist, 2025–26 Trisk Fellow along with Nora Alami, and a 2026 Chocolate Factory Artist in Residence. She has been a MANCC Forward Dialogues Artist in Residence (2024), Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art Recipient (2024), New Dance Alliance Artist in Residence (2024), Colorado College Crown Family Professorship for Innovation in the Arts Artist in Residence (2023), BAX Space Grant Recipient (2022), and Gallim Moving Artist Resident (2022).

Nora Alami is a Moroccan experimental dance artist born in Colorado. Dance is her tool for conducting research, building community, and organizing politically.

Her choreography has been presented through UNDOXX, New York Arab Festival, Danspace Project’s DraftWork series, Triskelion Arts, Center for Performance Research, and Movement Research at Judson Church.

She is a 2026 Trisk Fellow with Kimiko Tanabe, 2026 ImPulsTanz ATLAS Artist, 2025 danceWEB Scholar, 2024 MANCC Forward Dialogues Artist, and 2023-2024 CUNY Dance Initiative Artist. She has been supported by residencies at New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks, JACK, BRIClab: Performing Arts, The Petronio Center, Houston Metropolitan Dance Center, and Triskelion. She is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies and Mellon Fellow in Middle East North Africa Studies at Northwestern.

Majesty Royale-Jackson (Sound Designer) (they/them) is a Black Seminole performance maker, sound artist, and installationist based in Durham, NC. Their work uses sound as both archive and engine, sampling Black musical lineages, field recordings, and vocal experimentation to create immersive sonic environments that move between theater, gallery, and public space. Majesty’s interdisciplinary background informs a practice grounded in remixing, improvisation, call and response, and other Black queer technologies that transform memory toward a space for living.
Their research-based approach has been supported through residencies at New York Live Arts, Cité Internationale des Arts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. Majesty has developed sound-driven performance works presented at The Painted Bride Art Center, See Chicago Dance, and Hayti Heritage Center.

Forest Entsminger (Scenic Designer) Credits include Dad Don’t Read This (Greenwich House Theater, St Luke’s); Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen (Torn Page);Time Passes (Target Margin, IRT, Mabou Mines); Meow! (Loading Dock); Faust (Heartbeat Opera); Cankersore Paradise,The Threepenny Opera (Lenfest Center); Two Girls, The Monkeypox Gospel (Ars Nova); Sweet Bird of Youth (Barn at Lee, TWF); Meaghan Robichaud is the Greatest Show on Earth, I want to hold onto something beautiful and empty, u are the dream, Horsefacts.gov/, Babies on the Street, Goldhaven, Sleeping Car Porters (The Brick); The Salvagers (Yale Rep). M.F.A. - Yale School of Drama. bentscenic.com

Anna Wotring (Triskelion Production Manager) is a community-minded dance artist, lighting designer, and production stage manager, dedicated to the practice of collaborative leadership. As the Director of Production at Triskelion Arts, Wotring shapes programming that makes production design accessible to movement artists. Her work ensures that Trisk serves as a creative home, allowing artists to materialize their production vision and find imaginative pathways around and through tangible possibility. Wotring holds a B.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serves as a lecturer in lighting design within the graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Connor Sale (Lighting Designer) is a New York based Lighting Designer and the Resident Lighting Designer at Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn. Recent collaborations include projects with Dominica Greene, Julia Antinozzi, Nicole von Arx, Stuart B Meyers, Erick Montes, Hilary Brown-Istrefi, Zoe Rabinowitz, Nocturnal Medicine, among many others. His work has been seen throughout New York and Chicago, including at: Triskelion Arts, La MaMa, PAGEANT, Gibney Dance, Performance Space New York, The Brick, HERE Arts, SMUSH Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Victory Gardens, Edge Theatre, The Chopin, among others.

He’s interested in using the temporary nature of light to make people more active in space.

He tours internationally with Akram Khan's Gigenis and the production of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring that Sadler's Wells and École des Sables are producing. Previously, he was the Lighting Design Intern on the 2019 Broadway transfer of The Sound Inside; a Venue Technician at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival; and a Production Intern in 2018 at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.

We respectfully acknowledge that the work of Triskelion Arts is situated on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape peoples. We pay our respects to their land, water, and ancestors, past, present, and future. This acknowledgment demonstrates a commitment to the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and to learning to be better stewards of this land.