Mira Manickam

Multi Media Artist, Author, Environmental Educator

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  • Girl Power/Gaia Rise Up

  • This World is Yours

  • Recruitment Day Documentary

  • Ela Era Assim

  • If You Love to Ride

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Girl Power/Gaia Rise Up

 

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I created this song and video with the Green Guard, a youth environmental hip hop collective I started at United Roots in Spring 2014.  Some of the girls in the Green Guard wanted to create a song based on the idea of girl power, and the fact that our power as young women is linked to the female power of the earth.  This was the stirring result.  Green Guard youth producer Mansa Evans laid down a beat, and the talented Lali Wilde and Ida Keller stretched their voices as rappers.  Green Guard youth videographer shot and edited the video.

Practicing this song with Lali and Ida every week and affirming our “girl power” together was one of my favorite parts of the Green Guard.

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This World is Yours

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This video was inspired by the girl drummers and surfers I met in Bahia, the last stop on my Surfer Grrrls Brazil adventure, during which I travelled up the coast of Brazil, meeting other girl surfers and musicians, surfing my heart out, and creating original raps to celebrate my adventures and inspire other girls and women to live their own. While staying in the incredibly musical neighborhood of Candeal, I heard children making danceable beats by beating on just about anything they could find – tin cans, playground equipment, water bottles, you name it.  One little girl practiced singing and drumming on a tupperware container every day on her front stairs. She is featured in this video.  The live drum beat was recorded from the extraordinary youth orchestra of Didá, who I encountered one evening rehearsing on the streets of the Pelhourinho in Salvador da Bahia. The surfers featured here (besides me!) include Érica Prado, and other inspirational women I met in Bahia and elsewhere in Brazil.  t took me over a year to finally post this video.  My harddrive with much of my Bahia footage crashed and died when I returned from Brazil.  Heartwrenching. Luckily, I still had the footage of the girl drummers, and some surfing footage from my time in Itacare, but it took me a while to piece it all together once I got back to California and had to get back to the grind of daily life. To fill in for the lost footage from Bahia, I did a video shoot at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and collaborated with my wonderful housemate Jenny O’Connell (the beautiful voice), and the talented Jazz Vassar who I met in Salvador and in our 36 hours together had become a dear friend.  It seemed appropriate that after some beautiful footage of Jazz and I going surfing on the beaches of Salvador was lost in the harddrive crash, that Jazz bring her energy back to the video through her capoeira-inspired dancing on our own California home beach.  Another incredibly generous friend Luis Montoya, filmed for us, lending a skilled eye to the camera work.  It turns out that collaboration really does take you to the next level!!  Please share this video with as many girls and woman as you can.  I have also been performing it alive along with other surf and non-surf related raps I’ve written, so shoot me an email at miramanickam@gmail.com if you’re interested in a performance.   Thank you to all who contributed and supported!

To learn more about my Surfer Grrrls Brazil project, check out the website here.

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Recruitment Day Documentary

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Recruitment Day, Co-producer and second camera.

Recruitment Day, which was broadcast internationally on Al Jazeera English’s Witness program, tells the story of young Malay muslim men from the small fishing village of Dato, on the eve of Thailand’s annual military draft.

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Ela Era Assim

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The first original video project of Surfer Grrrls Brazil, a personal adventure and multi-media project to inspire girls in the outdoors.  This rap and video are inspired by my surfing and skating adventures  in the south of Brazil.  I spent three months here, exploring Florianopolis, Paraná, São Paulo, and São Sebastão and meeting inspiring female surfers.  To write this rap, I teamed up with my dear friend Dani Antunes, an amazing human who is also a skater, philosppher, teacher, poet, and mom.  For the beat, we invited a group of our awesome activist musician friends to get together for an afternoon – and our friend Alice joined in with a poem. Special thanks especially to Aloha Maciel, Marina Rezende, Manuella Brasil, Janaina Rezende, Luanna Ribeiro, and Maria Liza Monteleone — who have made many of my first surfing adventures in Brazil much more fun!  Big thanks also to Mike Deni, Zazo Alves, and Alice Besnard – without whom I would have no video documentation of my own surfing/skating/musical adventures.

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If You Love to Ride

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This video is part of a series of original songs and videos I created to document my surf adventures up the coast of Brazil as part of my project Surfer Grrrls Brazil. In Rio, I was taken under the wing of Bocão the ever jovial founder of the local surf school, which has been providing “rehabilitated” surf boards, surf lessons, and a variety of arts and wellness programming to kids in Rocinha for over 15 years. This transformed my experience in the city as I became part of this loving surf school community, full of fun times and colorful characters of all ages. For almost a month, I went surfing with the kids in the afternoon, helped with English classes, and made music with them in the evenings. The kids loved my raps, and we had great times freestyling together. I asked them, and their talented music teacher Delão Allen of Projeto Maré Mansa, to collaborate with me on a song I was writing which was a particular favorite of the kids (they loved singing, “put your hands up!). In Rio, it rained almost every day, and the waves were either terrifyingly huge or frustratingly non-existent. But I learned from the kids and Bocão all the different ways you can have fun by the beach. The video reflects the real Rocinha I discovered – where more people body boarded than surfed, where there were still a lot of social barriers to girls surfing, but a few brave girls got out there and showed their mettle, where the time we spent on land, skateboarding, samba dancing, drumming, and kicking it around the neighborhood was just as meaningful as our time on the waves.

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