Waking The Oracle Creative Activation Team:
Core music/storytelling/dance/community healing facilitation team
Maria Arriola
Maria Arriola is a composer, performer, and improviser who is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Music Composition at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her works explore presence, sincerity within surrealism, and gazing and listening in such a way that something might reveal itself to you.
Michael Duffy
Michael Duffy is a composer, performer, and multidisciplinary artist living in Minneapolis.
Eric Mayson
Composer, collaborator, and multi-instrumentalist Eric Mayson has an insatiable curiosity that pulls him in many directions. He works with theatres and dance companies, bands and orchestras, loves playing Dungeons and/or Dragons, and reading history. In 2019 he began training for a new career in aviation and is currently working as a flight instructor at Mankato Regional Airport.
Matt Rahaim
Matt is a composer, improviser, and vocalist, grounded in the Gwalior lineage of Hindustani music. His work includes analog synthesis, voice, raga music, event scores, and electroacoustic compositions for new instruments. Recent compositions have been featured at the Wakpa Triennial, Drone Not Drones, and The Great Beyond festival. His current project, Improvising Relationality, experiments with ways of being both together and apart, in empathic intimacy and vulnerable alterity, exploring the relational play of mutual dependence and mutual freedom.
Lauren Reed
Lauren Reed (she/her) is a Black-American dancer, creative, and scholar born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is a recent graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine with degrees in Dance (B.A.) and Africana Studies (B.A.). She completed her thesis entitled “Rest & Resistance: Dance as Protest, Pearl Primus, and Black Women Claiming Our Deserved Rest”. She is currently based in St. Paul, Mni Sota and works as an independent artist.
Brandon Sisneros
Brandon received a B.A. in Radio/TV/Film from Cal State Fullerton before moving to MPLS. He has been working in and around Open Eye Theatre since 2008 and as Technical Director since 2016, constructing sets and props, rigging special effects, running sound and lights, and stage managing. He has built sets for the Learning Fairy 1 & 2, Nothing is Something, The Red Shoes (2017 & 2021), The Beldenville Troll, Constance in the Darkness, The Longest Night, and Bug Girl and Order of Wolf on The Bakken Museum's rooftop. He has provided technical support for Toy Theater After Dark, Fusebox, Sweet Songs and Flying Objects, and many other rentals and guest artists. Outside of Open Eye, he has worked with Mixed Blood Theatre Company, The Ritz Theater, New Native Theatre, Circus Juventas, BareBones Puppets Performers, Full Moon Puppet Show, and Southside Battletrain Projects. In addition to theatre, he enjoys the outdoors, seasonal harvests, and gardening.
Chance York
Chance York is known as a yoga and mindfulness instructor, rapper, and host of the TPT/PBS award winning series, "Outside Chance." He is a facilitator for the Mindful Mondays program at the University of Minnesota's Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing and leads workshops for the Bakken Center's community partners and organizations. He serves as the director of Peace In Practice, and he’s currently attending Brown University’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher Training.
Waking The Oracle Artists
Alvina Bruggerman
Aliva Bruggerman has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, with a post-baccalaureate certificate in Complementary Therapies and Integrative Healing Practices. She has participated in a variety of yoga/meditation practices and has taught yoga/meditation in numerous settings. Most recently, Alvina has taught meditation to teens/pre-teens in the Juvenile Justice Center and Common Ground meditation center, as well as to adults in a non-profit yoga studio. Alvina has led stress reduction sessions in college settings, and served one year as president of the University of Minnesota Mindfulness Club while attending graduate school. Her passion for teaching extends to college students whom she teaches as an adjunct lecturer in Holistic Health Studies and Psychology. Alvina explores justice work through an employee resource group focusing on leadership opportunities for BIPOC employees at M Health Fairview.
Maja Radovanlija
Maja Radovanlija was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), in 1975. She studied classical guitar for almost 20 years in Eastern Europe, Vienna and Bloomington, IN. Along the way, Maja collaborated with musicians in a variety of genres and became interested in improvised music through Balkan traditional music, jazz, intuitive free improv, and experimental music. Some of the projects and ensembles Maja works with on regular bases are Szilard Mezéi ensemble, Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, Ensemble Studio6, MM Guitar duo, Linda Chatterton-MRadovanlija guitar/flute duo, and Satu Jiwa improvised music collective.
Violeta
Violeta was born in Puerto Rico and was found in a trash can with her siblings. She made it to DC around the start of COVID and ended up devoting her substantial healing powers to the many humans in need around her. Many people identify her as a dog but fawns and cats also come to mind when encountering her. She really enjoys riding around on a bicycle.
Lyla & Autumn York
Lyla and Autumn York are Minneapolis-born dancers and choreographers. They are passionate about music and movement though several modalities including Afrobeats, cheerleading, show choir, and ballet.
Beth Workman
Beth Workman is author of ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND, ENDLESSNESS IS NO DESOLATION, and The Figures: A Litter, among others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Minnesota.