Thursday, September 21, 11:15 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. (Community Time)
Dance Studio 1, Center for Art and Dance
This 90 minute workshop invites St. Olaf community members to reflect on their place in the world as it relates to privilege and oppression. Inspired by Ken Gonzales-Day’s exhibition Shadowlands, we will reflect upon historical and contemporary violence and collective action. The following questions are asked: How do we end centralizing the impact of white oppression and white fragility? How do we infuse the movements of People of Color and Indigenous people with joy? Throughout the workshop, participants will be led through writing and performance exercises as well as meditation experiences drawing from the Ayruveda tradition.
About the Facilitators
Serita Colette is a healer, teacher, dancer and womanist living and breathing in Minneapolis. She was born in Kerala, India, where she returned at age 24 to study. Since then, she has performed in Jaime Carrera’s Outlet Festival, Angharad Davies “Throb” for Choreographers’ Evening, danced and choreographed for Aby Wolf, Haley Bonar, and her co-collaborator, Sarah White. She has protected Oneida White at Dream of Wild Health, remains active in seed sovereignty campaigns at White Earth and weaves the substance of her work with environmental justice. She has received scholarships from the Gender, Woman and Sexuality Department of Minnesota, Women’s Environmental Institute, and most recently Vincent Yoga to study Tantra in the Boundary Waters. She is an avid student of Meditation, Ayruveda, Sustainability, WOC theory, and has established one of the first people of Color yoga practices in the Twin Cities. She continues to work on the decolonization of yoga, leading her students back to its essential roots with dignity and respect.
Jessica Lopez Lyman, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary performance artist and Xicana feminist scholar interested in how People of Color create alternative spaces to heal and imagine new worlds. Jessica received her Ph.D in Chicana and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her manuscript, tentatively titled Midwest Mujeres: Chicana/Latina Performance explores racialized and gendered geographies of urban Minnesota. Jessica is a 2017 Naked Stages Fellow at the Pillsbury House Theatre where she is creating a multi-media performance piece, Casa de Papel, about her grandfather, an LA barber, and the relationship between displacement and retention. She is a Postdoctoral associate at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies where she will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2019.
Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist who is Minneapolis-born, West-Indian descended, and African-sourced. Her work centers around Black wildness, Afro-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer She has received a Givens Foundation fellowship, Jerome Travel and Study grant, Many Voices Mentorship with the Playwright’s Center, Naked Stages Residency at the Pillsbury House and a 2016 Jerome Film grant to write and direct “Sweetness of the Wild,” an experimental and poetic episodic film series about Blackness, queerness, biking, love and coming of age in Minneapolis, by City Pages. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts production company.