Agenda

125th & FREEdom

Created, directed and choreographed by Ebony Noelle Golden, 125th & FREEdom is an immersive, audience participatory cultural experience which asks: If Harriet Tubman were alive today how would she free Black people? New Yorkers will become one with Golden’s battle-weary tribe of nomads led by Tubman’s descendant on an epic journey to a land of promised liberation. Composed of 16 movements and featuring a New Orleans-style brass band, the choreopoetic performance took place at 11 sites as pop-up installations across the corridor of 125th Street from the East River to the Hudson River each Saturday in June 2020. 125th& FREEdom sees a victorious, but battle-weary tribe of nomads led by Tubman’s descendant on an epic journey to a land of promised liberation. Fusing song and poetry with choreography based on historic and current Black social dances, the piece will be an immersive, participatory cultural experience that is equal parts ritual performance, processional and protest.

Psalm of the Mismeasured and the Unfit

Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit, a performance installation on the medical industrial complex at the 43rd annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence

Curator, Writer & Producer: Cara Page

Curatorial Asst. & Researcher:  Nicola Glen Douglas

Choreographer/Director and Creative Collaborator: Ebony Noelle Golden

Performers/ensemble: Vesta Walker, Jaime Dzandu, Audrey Hailes, Jehan Roberson, Sara Abdullah

Dancing While Deaf: From a Deaf perspective: Achieving what others perceive as impossible through the Arts!

“Don’t waste my blood sweat”
A Black Deaf human seeks himself in society today witnessing both Black and Deaf & Black Deaf communities be oppressed-“No More Trouble” by Erykah Badu, a tribute to Bob Marley. This is the story of a Black Deaf human seeking himself to hold his community today as he sees, he witnesses and he feels his Black and Deaf communities being oppressed. Looking back as a teenager…He almost died from the cross fire of a Gang related shooting. While in middle of the shooting, he saw the person in the car who was shooting. The shooting must have happened already but he didn’t hear it or understand what he was feeling. Then the same day as Deaf person said he was not Deaf enough because his sign language was TOO BLACK. How does one keep his love for the community going? #PurpleFireCrow is born.

Kiss Louder

Kiss Louder is about loving yourself, a dedication to all those who are Deaf who wasn’t allowed to be Deaf

Choreographer: Antoine Hunter

Dancers: Antoine Hunter, Zahna Simon

In this piece, Abdu Ali explores existence through Baltimore club music and a cosmically afro-futurist video.

A STOP MOTION film reckoning with our past and a SLOW MOTION film envisioning our future. 

Organizers of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, Priyanka Bhatt & Stephanie Guilloud, speak on the recent win for the #ShutDownIrwin Campaign (an ICE Detention Center in South GA known for egregious abuses, including sterilization). Featuring Wendy Dowe, a survivor of abuse at the detention center, telling her powerful story. They will discuss the legacies of eugenics in prisons and detention centers in the Global South, and what we can build for our futures, moderated by Cara Page of Changing Frequencies.

This conversation tells the successful story of the Shut Down Irwin Campaign, spurred on by Nurse Dawn Wooten the whistleblower and the detained immigrants who came forward to expose the egregious violations, including sterilizatoin abuse, happening at the Irwin County Detention Center.  We hear from Wendy Dowe, a survivor of this eugenic abuse, and organizers Stephanie Guilloud and Priyanka Bhatt of Project South who are in coalition with southern organizations on the Shut Down Irwin Campaign, and have been working to abolish Southern detention centers and prisons for decades.

In Future Ancestral Technologies,  an ongoing series based in myth, science fiction, and Indigenous futurism, Luger challenges us to imagine a future where humans restore their bonds with the earth and each other by reclaiming and recontextualizing the technology of his ancestors and placing the past and the future in dialogue.

Jessica Kolopenuk, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, will speak on the relationships between the processes of colonialism, science, and crucial spaces for Indigenous-led interventions in the genomic sciences, decolonial science policy and bioethics.

Featuring Leaders in Healing Justice, embodied practice and organizing and/or cultural work to transform intergenerational trauma;  Erica Woodland, Adaku Utah, & Kai Cheng Thom, and moderated by Francisca P. Coronado.  Healing Eugenic Memory Towards Transformative Futures will uncover the work of memory to heal from historical trauma, and collective grief and dissociation from these eugenic legacies. Exploring questions of: What is the role of healing and memory to disrupt, heal from and dismantle eugenic violence? How can we imagine working with our communities as survivors of transphobia, ableist & white supremacy as an extension of eugenic violence?

From education and policing to healthcare, technologies have the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination. Ruha Benjamin, author of “Race After Technology,” will present on the “New Jim Code,” challenging the ways technologies can heighten racial heirarchies and produce premature death.