Baat Cheet with Artist Ann Dyer

Utilizing the special exhibition "Yoga: The Art of Transformation" as a point of departure, this short, dynamic talk, or Baat Cheet, focuses on California's unique role in the adoption, evolution, and popularization of yoga today.

This event was programmed in collaboration with the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the India Community Center.
Ann Dyer turned her creative energies to the study and sharing of yoga and music almost twenty years ago, after spending years as a celebrated jazz vocalist. Last year she formed the Vak Project, a creative initiative of presentation and performance, committed to awakening the public's experience of sound and voice. Her most recent venture was a yearlong project commissioned by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which gave birth to her seventy-member Vak Choir of "everyday" voices and culminated in the performance of a theatrical work, Vak: Song of Becoming. Ann's recent TED talk, Why Sing? Why Now?, illustrates the connections between sounds in ancient Indian texts and contemporary life. Ann is director of Mountain Yoga in Oakland. www.songofbecoming.org