The Last Best Hope
“The Last Best Hope,” a podcast from Oxford University hosted by Alice Kelly, in which Marianne Hirsch and James Young discuss Covid memorialization and the ZCMP
Black America and Covid
Black America and Covid – An Oral History Project with Sonja J. Killebrew In 2022 I started the oral history project: Black America and Covid. I wanted to record the lives of Black Americans living and working during the pandemic. I also wanted to memorialize the lives of Black Americans Read more…
Mapping out
November 20, 2021 Group Workshop with Maria We as a collective attempted to connect through body movement. Like molecules we bumped and diverged, spreading in all directions at different speeds. After a while we were asked to trace ourselves to the past. So we made body maps. Laid them out Read more…
Rehearsal, Repair, and the Possibility of a Different Future
How do we think of “rehearsal” and “repair” together? The two words share the prefix re-, whose original sense in Latin is “back” or “backwards.” Prefixed to verbs of action like “rehearse” and “repair,” it often denotes repetition and restoration (OED). From a temporal perspective, “rehearse” and “repair” seem to Read more…
The “Many-Sided Play” of the Body
I’ve been thinking about a passage from Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed that Diana mentioned in our seminar on November 12, where Boal talks about the differences between “the muscular structure of a typist [and] that of the night watch[person] of a factory. The first performs [their] work seated in Read more…
Blog Posts
Reflecting on the Body in George & Maria’s Workshops
The central focus of George Sanchez and Maria Jose Contreras’ workshops (in October and November respectively) was the body: the body that “keeps the score” of its habits, desires, and accumulated traumas, whether or not that score ever makes its way into verbal expression or outward acknowledgement. The goal of Read more…
Representing Covid through Boal’s Image-Theater
Images of “Covid:” #1. A person lies on a bench with both hands resting on their stomach and eyes half-closed. Another person stands with one of their hands placed on the forehead of the person lying down. The person lying down does not see the person who has a hand Read more…
Reflection: A September Visit to La Morada
This post contains an email that I sent to Diana Taylor, Marianne Hirsch, Lee Xie after visiting La Morada in the South Bronx with my colleague Luis C Rincon Alba on September 7th, 2021. The email was intended as an update on our activities there and a reflection on Read more…
Thoughts on the ZCMP Seminar from Friday, October 8th
Some of my thoughts after listening to the meeting from Friday that I thought I’d share. There was a lot of talk about the language to use and how we approach the Art of the project through Language and Action. I agree that the language we have been using thus Read more…
“Rehearsals for Change” and “Ímpeto Revolucionário”
“The truth of the matter is that the spectator-actor practices a real act even though [they] [do] it in a fictional manner. While [they] rehears[e] throwing a bomb on stage, [they] [are] concretely rehearsing the way a bomb is thrown” (Boal 119, my italics). In our “Rehearsals for Change” workshop Read more…