Dates:
- Introducing Christi Jay Wells
Race, Arts & Democracy Fellow, 2021-2022
Virtual
Wednesday, September 29, 2021 | 5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m
Free | Online | Open to the Public
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-
Sounding Bodies, Sounding Histories: Christi Jay Wells and Rashad Shabazz
Virtual
in conversation about Between Beats:
The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance
Thursday, October 21, 2021 | 5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Free | Online | Open to the Public
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How can bodies in motion help us to see and to feel the systems of power and institutional structures—often so omnipresent as to seem invisible—that alternately guide and facilitate or foreclose and restrain our personal, cultural, and political movements?
Democracy, at least as it should be, is a system that recognizes the full human subjecthood of all people and makes space for us to have important conversations about how best to care for ourselves, for our communities, and for each other. In practice, democracies rarely achieve this promise. Ironically, reconciling the cognitive dissonance of having an ostensibly democratic system while also living under oppressive structures (and white supremacy specifically; it is important to name it!) often means averting our gaze from the humanity of the oppressed among us. The arts, at their best, assert and insist upon the truth of human subjecthood—in all its complexity, its joy, and its pain—and demand that we not turn away, in the name of preserving comfort or normalcy, from the work we know deep down we must do.
