CONSTELLATE

To join luster; to unite (several shining bodies) in one illumination.

EVENT DESCRIPTIONS AND BIOS

Asif Majid: Ethnopoetic Explorations: Listening, Performing, and Feeling Together

The technique of ethnopoetry is at home in a number of disciplines, including anthropology, theatre, and linguistics. It envisions what geographer Stuart Aitken calls “an emotive mapping of stories that describe connections of people to other people and to places” (2015: 104). When combined with performance, careful ethnopoetry has the potential to chronicle the emotional register of relationships, speaking with and to those who experience them. This workshop intersects ethnopoetry and performance, offering attendees an opportunity to experiment with both techniques. After a series of theatre warm-ups, participants will undertake dyad discussions based on open-ended, exploratory prompt questions. Participants will record one another in conversation before retreating to select, curate, and perform part of their dyad partner’s words. Participants will ideally leave the workshop having experienced two emotional complexities: embodying someone else’s story and having someone else perform theirs.

All participants need their own writing/typing materials and recording device (a smartphone will suffice), and participants should be comfortable being audio recorded by a peer.

Bio: Asif Majid is a scholar-artist-educator who works at the intersection of racialized sociopolitical identities, multimedia, marginality, and new performance. He has a PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance from The University of Manchester, an MA in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University, and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Global Peace Building and Conflict Management) from UMBC. Performance credits include work with the Kennedy Center (US) and the Royal Exchange Theatre (UK). Currently, Asif is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow with the San Francisco Arts Commission. He is online at www.asifmajid.com.

Marc Arthur: Transforming Stigma: A Workshop on Self Focus and Transformation

Based on online performance workshops with a community health center in Detroit to reduce HIV stigma, this workshop will invite participants to begin thinking about the knowledge, attitudes, and subjective norms that manifest in stigma in a variety of contexts. Using medatiative and theatrical practices that focus on the self, this workshop will address implicit biases, behaviors, and mannerisms that often inadvertently stigmatize, and we will work on transforming those into modes of empowerment.

Bio: Marc Arthur (he/him/his) is a theatre and performance artist based in Ypsilanti, Michigan. His work incorporates methods from dance, painting, and socially engaged art. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Arts-based Social Justice Research and Practice at the University of Michigan where he is studying community-based theatre approaches for decreasing stigma and oppression.

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren: Hearing Along Edges: Community Performances for the Other Than Human

What does it mean to “hear” an Earth that speaks in immensely different scales and styles of expressivities? We will start small. How does a rock speak? What does it mean to listen, in this context, and how do we immediately encounter the limits of translatability? 

Together, we will investigate the possibilities of different kinds of hearing, seeing, and awareness through a series of mappings that explore Community Performances for the Other Than Human. After brief introductions, we will create a set of Sensory Awareness Maps that will then be expanded in The Community Performance for the Other Than Human Maps. 

Our medium itself, as always, sets the stage for “normative” hearing practices that are typically connected with a “normative” image of sound. Zoom assumes a “normative” speaking-hearing apparatus, while Zoom-With-Captioning shifts the “hearing” modality to an auditory-visual one. How can we explore/expand forms of hearing differently that are available to us through Zoom and what bearing does that have on creating community performance work around the other than human? 

Since I am hard-of-hearing, this workshop is in part a certain type of imaginary one. It relies on the collective exploration of a set of partially not-quite-possible exercises about hearing the (in)animate, as well as the collective translation processes across our spaces of hearing differently. 

Please bring paper, drawing materials, and an object that intrigues you. Feel free to collect your own vibrational reference points in response to the above proposed structure. We will, together, create an imaginal-physical space that moves. How does a rock express itself?

Bio: An Indian-American and hard-of-hearing artist, educator, and Performance Studies scholar, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Ph.D., Director, Folded Paper Dance and Theatre (Hong Kong/Seattle), creates work that links heritage, performance and ecology across geographical locations. Her current project, Sounding Bodies: Intermedia in Hong Kong (a Hong Kong Arts Development Council Project Grant, 2020-2021), explores everyday life across urban and natural spaces as well as processes of hearing and seeing differently across diverse local communities. At the Water’s Edge (Maryland Institute College of Art, 2019) on climate change is being expanded into a set of traveling workshops and portable performances in Hong Kong and India.  A Fulbright-Nehru Scholar (2017-2018, Kerala), she is also developing her research on Traveling Exchanges into a series of articles and performance projects as well as writing about Theatre and Disability in India; Ensembles of innovation; and “The Komagata Maru Incident: Afro-Asian Futurisms.”