Never Send A Plate Back Empty: Food, Memory & Care
By Raju Rage
Friday 27th November - 6-8pm GMT/UK
FREE Book here
Image credit: Raju Rage
Cycles of Release, Cycles of Joy
By Functional Rituals / Dance Is a Weapon Collective
Sunday 29th November - 3-4:30pm GMT/UK time
FREE Book here
Image credit: June Yuen Ting
movement, energy, sound, and soil
By An(dré)a P. Ferdinand
Weds 2nd December 6-7:30 GMT/UK time
FREE Book here
Image credit: Andréa P. Ferdinand
gathering in the ritual knowledge of remembering //
fi wi de black earth future //
closing ceremony
By Ada M. Patterson, Amarnah Osajivbe-Amuludun, Ãssia, Cyan Cian, Danielle DZA Osajivbe-Williams, Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson, Ma'at and Nicky Chue
Saturday 5th December 7pm - 9:45 GMT/ UK time
FREE Book here
Image credit: Kes Gill-Martin
Raju Rage is proactive about using art, education and activism to forge creative survival. Based in London and working beyond, they explore the spaces and relationships between dis/connected bodies, theory and practice, text and the body and aesthetics and the political substance. Their current interests are around sustainability, economies, care, and resistance. They are a member of Collective Creativity arts collective, A Peoples Art Collective, Another Roadmap and a creative educator and independent scholar with an interest in radical pedagogy. Raju has a theirstory in activism, self and collective organised queer/ transgender/ people of colour movements and creative projects in London and beyond from which their politics and works draw on and from.
Following on from Recipes For Resistance and some of the themes of the exhibition and publication, Raju Rage will host this creative workshop to explore our food memories and how they connect to self and community care. The workshop will take the form of personal research, collective reading, conversation and writing activity and centers memory, migration, diaspora, intergenerationality and care.
Collective reading (during session):
Sticky Traces – Priya Jay
My Nose, Our Grandmother, Our Beef - Vijeta Kumar
The workshop encourages migrants, people from the diaspora and black and people of colour of all ages to participate.
Pre session exercise: listen to the audio ‘Never Send A Plate Back Empty’ (audio 30mins) + source a personal family recipe.
Functional Rituals / Dance Is a Weapon is a London-based movement collective for and by people of colour.
Our aims are threefold:
To develop a framework of practice that fosters a movement community beyond traditional dance institutions and contexts
To investigate through dance, the social, political and historical conditions of our practice, as well as the meanings and stakes of building a movement for and by people of colour
And lastly, to explore collective movement practice as a tool for community organising toward social transformation.
Since October 2019, we have organised free practice sessions twice a month, with rotating, volunteer facilitators.
Utilising a triadic approach that integrates shared movement materials, guided improvisation and discussions on current socio-political issues, we see our movement practices and artistic expressions as inextricable from our lived and historical experiences against and beyond colonialism, heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism.
Session Description:
Join us for a collective movement practice for and by BIPOC!
For this workshop that doubles as one of our bi-monthly practice sessions for the Functional Rituals / Dance Is a Weapon collective, interdisciplinary artist Renée Bellamy and filmmaker/creative Nicky
Chue will be our facilitators.
Renée will lead movement and reflection exercises that take steps towards conjuring joy, hope and
possibility. Nicky will be sharing a writing exercise around the upcoming full moon and its themes of release and sealing of intention.
Responsive and open to BIPOC of all ages with an interest in exploring these themes through movement and writing.
Session prep: please bring water and notebook/ paper
Dre Ferdinand is a community-based wellness practitioner and a licensed social worker. She is committed to helping communities recover from systemic and intergenerational trauma and move towards self-sufficiency. Within her work, she strives to understand the intersections of food, wellness, and social justice, particularly their relationship to ancestral knowledge and practices. Her practice entails working with healing modalities that connect to four components of life - movement, energy, sound, and soil.
A moment in time to welcome and explore our relationship to nature. Dré will guide a sensory experiential journey of finding nature within and around.
With a welcome focus on exploring soil-healing-body-connection, you will need a cup of soil, a cup of water, and the courage to move your body.
This session is welcome to anyone wanting to participate in this kind of exploration. With participation encouraged by anyone with self-defined experiences of marginalised and minoritised identities/bodies to join.
Session prep: Please bring a cup of soil and a cup of water.
An online creative circle, sharing and gathering space for Black people with marginalised genders. Actively creating generative healing, imagining and energetic space for and by Black trans, non-binary, cis, women, femmes, gender non-conforming, transmasc people*. Holding these creative-spiritual queered contributions and experiences to be in Liberatory portal time. Recognising the beautiful insights, activations and survivals that our visions, dreams and art bring forth in transforming this world.
This gathering space will form the closing ceremony of this curated-community programme.
exploring//returning to...
portals. resistance. futures.
This gathering will be collectively guided by curator-conjurer Lateisha with artist-healers Amarnah, Danielle, Ada, Nicky, ãssia, cyan cian and Ma’at.
A call to invite us into creative pathways of inter-earth connection across international time-zones and ancestral time-frames.
A collaborative exploration into the elements, multi-species life and diasporic multi-dimensions relationships.
A call to be with each other for transformative regenerative justice: rest and healing, pleasure and abundance, life force sustainability and intersectional nurturing as a deep embodied knowing…. in our belonging.
We will guide you-our bodies to unearth, share and witness creative collective care - art and energetic practices as visions and tools towards inhabiting OUR decolonised Future(s).
We will welcome you-our joy, grief, silence and laughter.
…..The freedom space…..
The format will consist of :
-
meditative energetic practice
-
film screenings
-
readings, poetry, incantation
-
embodiment, movement ritual
-
Conversation, reflection, roundtable
-
Sound, singing and sonic baths
The feeling of the space will be vibey, responsive and open - with emphasis placed on the nurturing of each other's power, community - ancestral support, encouraging sharing of practice of healing and interconnection in this supported container. FUN!
*Including, but not limited to these ways of being. In regards to terms and framings of self-definition - we want to acknowledge, hold and give voice, to the multiple ways of unconstructed ungendered realities that exist. That you may identify/feel OUTSIDE of the white supremacist construct of gender and may speak to African-heritage indigenous diasporic perspectives, traditions and spiritual formations of gender identity. You are welcomed!