UNDOING: A WORKSHOP / LORENE BOUBOUSHIAN

On Saturday, May 18, SFAI Truth & Reconciliation Artist Lorene Bouboushian hosts Undoing: A Workshop.

What needs to be undone in order to do?

Can a quest for liberation, and a path toward resistance, begin with our flesh and blood, and the energies and histories we contain?

Can a quest for liberation and a path toward resistance be centered in our guts, our bones?

Every single human with the intent to love and learn is welcome. No past movement or vocalizing experience necessary or desired. This is a non-prescriptive environment.

Beginning with accessible work with somatics (influences include Feldenkrais, Qi Gong, Bodytalk, and meditative practices), we will move into a state that opens up new apertures for discovery of what our bodies hold. This is a sensitive state, a state that requires us to be open to what emotions and histories could be unlocked from our insides. We will reflect on the desires and motives that arise in that kind of state, and how they could apply to activist practices outside this room, via writing and discussion.

Bouncing back and forth between these ‘cerebral’ and ‘physical’ modalities will take us out of our normative beings and into a space of possibility. By addressing what arises in our somatic experience, we open ourselves to full-bodied intellectual pursuit of what activism and education can look and feel like.

Finally, we distill and cull our findings into new intentions or observations to take forward into our work outside this room.

In this way, we engage in a rigorous and difficult process of inquiry together with no endpoints but what is experienced. This is not necessarily a ‘redemptive’ process. It could be difficult, boring, fraught; we hold space for all results.

Please plan to stay 2.5 hours, bring writing material, and wear comfortable clothing.

More on the facilitator and workshop: Lorene has taught workshops for about 5 years now, most recently at University of Kentucky-Lexington. The workshops have blended somatic, movement, and voice-based work she has learned as a dancer and vocalist, with more performance art prerogatives involving objects and open-ended situations. Lorene will focus on gathering a group of people with a range of knowledges, interests, abilities, backgrounds (in everything) to create a non-prescriptive environment.

Bibliography informing this work:
Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid
All James Baldwin; particularly The Fire Next Time
Citizen, Claudia Rankine
Les Guerrilerres, Moniq Wittig
The Anatomy Coloring Book
Moving Toward Life, Anna Halprin
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks

Date

May 18, 2019

Time

2:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Location

Santa Fe Art Institute + Google Map
1600 St Michaels Drive, Building #31
Santa Fe, NM 87505 United States