Praxis Sessions for Virtual Collaboration Land Acknowledgements with Unsettling Dramaturgy on Tuesda
Channel: HowlRound Theatre Commons
Date: 2020-04-01

Unsettling Dramaturgy presents Praxis Sessions for Virtual Collaboration: Land Acknowledgements livestreaming on the global, commons-based, peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Tuesday 31 March 2020 at 2 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC-7) / 4 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC-5) / 5 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC-4).

Unsettling Dramaturgy is excited to launch our Praxis Sessions for Virtual Collaboration. In this 4-part series we will address approaches to, and practices in online convening that centre unsettling, decolonization, indigenization, and disability justice in process design. This series emerges from our year+ of work and research in transnational convening and creative collaboration through virtual mediums. This series has been developed as our response to the turn towards online organizing that has followed the COVID-19 crisis.

The first session in this series centres on the practice of Land Acknowledgements in virtual, cross-geographic collaboration.

FEATURING
This session will feature Unsettling Dramaturgy Creative Collaborators: Claudia Alick, Roo George-Warren, Jessica Schacht, Tara Moses, Andrea Kovich, Carmen Papalia, mia susan amir 

FORMAT

This series will be streamed live through Zoom, link forthcoming.
Following an opening, Unsettling Dramaturgy Creative Collaborators will engage in an exchange on the theme for approximately 60 minutes. We will speak from our respective embodied knowledges and practices, with an orientation towards expanding collective practice as is relevant to local ecologies.
There will be various opportunities throughout the session for participants to publicly and/or anonymously ask questions and provide reflections through a live chat.
Live notes will be taken in a GoogleDoc, link forthcoming.
A recording of the session will be made available after the session.
 

ACCESSIBILITY
This event will be ASL Interpreted and Live Captioned

ABOUT UNSETTLING DRAMATURGY
Unsettling Dramaturgy is an ongoing project bringing together Crip and Indigenous dramaturgs from across so-called Canada and the United States who work in theatre, dance, and experimental performance.

Using digital platforms we gather to build relationships; to explore and document the critical convergences and divergences in our experiences and work; to amplify Crip and Indigenous aesthetics, ethics, practices, and leadership in our local, national and international performance ecologies; to push the conversations from inclusion to centring, from reconciliation to unsettling, decolonization, and Indigenizing.

This project considers the studio, the stage, and the street as porous and interconnected politicized spaces; spaces impacted by and implicated in the current political climate and historical contexts; spaces where urgent critique, and visionary futures can be imagined, practiced, enacted, and then disseminated to/co-created with a wider public.

This project grounds itself as a continuation of the thriving legacies of leadership and innovation that shape Indigenous and Crip dramaturgies, which precede, survive and move beyond settler colonialism. This project brings together artists from communities that have been historically excluded from mainstream performance ecologies, and which have been further siloed into spaces of making that have systematically prevented critical cross-community collaboration. We are dismantling those silos to advance emerging conversations exploring the conflux of leadership and representation in creation and production as relate to Indigenous sovereignty and Deaf, Mad and Disability culture in the arts. We are generating a platform for self-determined encounter and exchange where our local bodies of knowledge can be activated.

It bears importance to share that this project does not aim to collapse Crip and Indigenous dramaturgies and experiences. The exclusions that our communities face emerge from very specific historical, cultural and political contexts. Further, the ableism, sanism, and audism that Deaf, Disabled and MAD artists face emerge from colonial ways of assigning value and human dignity.

We use Crip to include those who identify as Mad, Sick and Disabled, as well as those who are deemed disabled by society and/or medical institutions whether or not they themselves accept that term; for example those for whom d/Deafness is a cultural identity not a medical condition. We use the word crip as a political intervention, to turn attention onto, and to disrupt, as our collaborator Carmen Papalia writes, the disabling conditions that limit a person and/or community’s agency and potential to thrive.
We use the Indigenous with an acknowledgement of the many complex ways that community, family, belonging, polity, and heritage interact with systems of State recognition.

https://howlround.com/happenings/livestreaming-praxis-sessions-virtual-collaboration-land-acknowledgements