DIASPORADICA Workshop Series-Wednesday

Summoning prayer, protest, and peace - in direct reference to Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach’s seminal soundscape Triptych: Prayer / Protest / Peace - as embodied strategies, we will spend three hours exploring slow bodies, vocalization, and echolocative movement as salves for estrangement. We ask: in a field of play, what might we inherit from one another, with enough sensitivity, in place of those missing and disappeared at the bottom of the sea?

About the artist: taisha paggett as in taishaciara mildred mcghee paggett. i am the continuation of Cheryl Yvone McGhee and Arveal Paggett Jr and all my relatives who’ve held me. i respectfully reside on the home and gathering lands of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano, colonially called Riverside, CA. i am a Black, queer, living entity. my background roots itself in dance, politico-somatic presencing, improvisation, and performative installation. words too. i think of dance, choreography, and its methodologies as something to be broken open, utilized, breathed into, and as a lens and lung through which to engage ideas, specifically when contemplating the terrain of racial trauma and the manufacture of fixed identities and positionalities. i dream of being a garden(er). i received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Merce Cunningham Award in 2019 and currently chair the Department of Dance at UC Riverside as an Associate Professor. i'm here to learn new ways to meet myself, my work, the notion of creative process, and what it means to be of service, with rigor, curiosity, and care.

About the artist: Amara Tabor-Smith (she/they) was born in Unceded Ramaytush Ohlone territory/ San Francisco, and currently lives in unceded Huichin muwekmwa Ohlone territory/Oakland, CA. She is a choreographer, performance maker, cultural worker, community caregiver, spiritual warrior and the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. Her interdisciplinary site-responsive and community specific performance making practice utilizes Yoruba Lukumí spiritual technologies to address issues of social and environmental justice, race, gender identity, and belonging in the Afro NOW. amara’s work is rooted in Black, queer, feminist principles that insist on liberation, joy, home fullness and well-being. amara received her MFA in Dance from Hollins University and is currently a teaching artist in residence at Stanford University.

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