Community Workshop:
What This Body Knows
At Jacob's Pillow: Sep 30
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About
Community Workshop: What This Body Knows
Story Circles on Organizing toward Vision in an Age of Resistance | Sept 30, 2017, 10:30am-12:30pm
What does it take to maintain vision, particularly in moments where it feels like there is much to organize against? Through small-group storytelling and movement, we will surface, share and embody our own experiences and activate our visions for thriving. Rooted in a process developed during the Black Arts Movement by theater-maker John O'Neal, New York-based choreographer and organizer Paloma McGregor and collaborator Meghan Abadoo will lead us in a morning of deep listening and reflection that animates our truths. All ages are welcome, regardless of experience or ability. Dancewear is not required. Light refreshments will be provided. | FREE
Read more about the artists below:
Paloma McGregor is a New York-based, Caribbean-born choreographer whose work focuses on centering Black voices through collaborative, process-based art-making and organizing. She has worked with grandparents, children, environmental educators, academics and other artists to create a wide range of work, including a dance through a makeshift fishnet on a Brooklyn rooftop, a structured improvisation for a floating platform in the Bronx River and a devised a multidisciplinary performance work about food justice with three dozen community members and students at UC Berkeley. Paloma does this work as Co-Founder and Director of Angela's Pulse, which creates and produces collaborative performance work dedicated to building community and illuminating bold, new stories. Paloma is currently developing the third major installment of Building A Better Fishtrap, an iterative performance reclamation project she has been focused on since 2011. The project, rooted in her 91-year-old father's vanishing fishing tradition, examines what we take with us, leave behind and return to reclaim. It will premiere on the Bronx River in summer 2018. Paloma is also celebrating the Fifth Anniversary Season of Dancing While Black, a platform she founded that supports dialogue, documentation, process and performance among Black dance artists. Paloma toured internationally for six years as a dancer with Urban Bush Women and two years with Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange; she continues to perform in her own work as well as collaborate on other projects in the realms of performance, visual arts and social practice. Learn more about Paloma & Angela's Pulse.
Meghan Abadoo is choreographer, educator and cultural organizer. Her work explores the gatekeeping roles of dance artists in communities and the capacity for dance events to sustain transformative social movements. Her creative work is informed by more than a decade of experience as a performer with companies such as Gesel Mason Performance Projects, Dance Exchange, Urban Bush Women and David Dorfman Dance. She recently concluded eight months of creative research as a US. Fulbright Fellow with Noyam African Dance Institute in Dodowa, Ghana, and was commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to premiere a new evening-length work for the 2017-2018 Millennium Stage season. She is currently a lead associate artist with the Dance Exchange and a Forty Under 40 awardee by Prince George's County, Maryland, for her leadership and achievement in the arts.