Rosy Simas Danse welcomes Pedra Pepa as our next artist in residence in the three thirty one space.

Pedro Pablo is a Caracas born, Minneapolis based queer performance maker. They are the founder/director of Viva la Pepa, generating collective, unapologetic performances crossing multiple mediums; sourcing from the overlapping values of Latinx and Queer cultures: passion, melodrama, decadence & sensuality. An inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Pedro is a teaching artist with the Pillsbury House Theatre and Upstream Arts. They are on an ongoing transnational collaboration with Argentinian choreographer Celia Argüello. Their most current research in the US, Contained, Alive has taken many shapes over the past year and will be performed next July 2021. During the day, Pedro co-creates children and family theater programming, and at night Pedro entertains adults as their draglesque persona Doña Pepa.

Oogie_Push is from the Meskwaki Nation near Tama Iowa. She started dancing Fancy Shawl as soon as she could walk and grew up competing on the Pow-wow Trail. She and her relatives started doing dance performances and sharing Meskwaki culture with students in schools around Iowa. She performed in these dance presentations from 4th grade all the way through undergrad teaching people about Pow-wow and Meskwaki culture plus some Native history. Oogie found herself in undergrad at Haskell Indian Nations University, studying American Indian Studies with an emphasis in Theatre. From there she then graduated from University of Missouri-Kansas City with a MFA in Theatre Design & Technology. She has alway been on a mission to educate people about Native culture and issues through dance and theatre as well as challenge stereotypes about who Native people could be on stage. Since the pandemic, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, and everything else she has spent 2021 incorporating healing elements into all the work she does. She plans to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. She is currently developing a one woman show with Full Circle Theater that she plans to tour next year, if not sooner. She will include song, dance, storytelling, utilizing Meskwaki spirituality, personal experience, and healing techniques she has learned throughout her adult life. She is also helping to devise a slapstick comedy touring show called Arla Mae's Booyah Wagon with Sod House Theatre which will also include song and dance, with talks of including Fancy Shawl dancing.