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 who passed away. In 2020 and 2021 I heard on the news many times that the Black American community was disproportionately affected by Covid-19. I Read more…
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 flat and traced the outline of our present selves while filling the bodies with loss, fears, memories, thoughts and even hope. I traveled through the Read more…
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 have opposite orientations. To “rehearse” means to (repeatedly) perform an action in preparation for a future situation (OED). This is what Boal has in mind Read more…
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 a chair: from the waist down the body becomes, during working hours, a kind of pedestal, while arms and fingers are active. The watch[person], on Read more…
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 these workshops was to explicitly offer that acknowledgement: to make the score visible, legible, and communal, rather than burying it in the rush of “going Read more…
Covid hit us like an electric shock, severing my ability to know what is real, what is true, what I actually know and what I don’t know. I decided then I was going to listen to my instincts more than anything. Listen and follow the developments we all heard on the news but formulate my own views as I saw fit, because after all what did anyone really know. I had no means to fight Read more…
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 on their forehead. At a certain distance, two people stand behind some chairs holding hands and looking in the direction of the person lying down. Read more…
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 the ZIP Code Project’s relationship to the local community. — Dear all, Thanks for checking in– the day atLaMoradawas pretty great. The range of mutual Read more…
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 far might not work for what we are trying to accomplish and also might be taken the wrong way by participants and communities we are Read more…
“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 last Saturday, September 25, Aya and Carina (if I remember correctly) rehearsed “the way a bomb is thrown.” In Aya’s case, the rehearsal included the Read more…
This post contains an email that I shared with Diana Taylor, Marianne Hirsch, and Lee Xie after visiting La Morada in the Bronx with Aya Labanieh on September 7th, 2021. Dear all, As I said in my previous email, the experience today was amazing and fulfilling. We spent many hours peeling beets and carrots and getting to talk with the members of La Morada. We made hand corrections on the date of the call and Read more…