This workshop has been postponed. We'll update this listing with the new date and location as soon as they're confirmed.

Join us for a Tea Time Talk on Belonging with Genevieve Hyacinthe, Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program and Michael Washington, Adjunct 2 Professor, Critical Studies Program.

In 1985, Audre Lorde offered her readers a new definition of poetry, one that went beyond ingenious word craft, and reached for something more expansive. Moving more into the realm of the aesthetic imagination understood broadly, Lorde defined poetry as “illumination," or “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives,” having “direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.”

In this workshop, we invite participants to leave behind any pre-formed and pre-programmed notions of what dance, poetry, and art making is, and give themselves permission, through what founder of Anikaya Dance Theatre, Wendy Jehlen, sees as being in line with the theory of kinesthetic empathy, to re-imagine the limits of what collaborative, collective, and embodied aesthetic invention can be. The seminar instructors, through dance, movement, breath work, and poetry, will lead participants in a sustained reflection on the power art has to break down imagined walls between people and think and see in new ways; or in the words of Lorde, we will invite participants to reflect on the ways in which their aesthetic practice enables them to scrutinize “those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized...giving name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless—about to be birthed, but already felt.”

The Tea Time Talks on Belonging series invites members of the CCA community to talk about creative practices that amplify Belonging through pedagogy and art. Our panelists invite you to engage in thinking about Belonging through various mediums, including conversation, making, movement, and just being. 

Hosted by Shalini Agrawal and moderated by Layla Namak (MArch), Tea Time Talks on Belonging will take place on Thursdays or Wednesdays between 11am and 11:50am. This series is funded by an endowment gift to support The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series at CCA, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism.

Image: 'Audre Lorde dancing'. This photograph of Audre Lorde (in yellow) is taken from the documentary film by Dagmar Schulz 'The Berlin Years' (2012) about Lorde's life in Berlin from 1984-1992.