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Welcome to Amplify & Ignite 2025

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Emerson College:
  • Academic Affairs
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  • Social Justice Collaborative
  • Department of Performing Arts 
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Sustainability Invitation
Emerson Sustainability is currently preparing for the annual Campus Race to Zero Waste competition that runs from February through the end of March. It’s a friendly competition between universities in North America to reduce waste on campuses and raise awareness about waste-related behaviors. In celebration of Campus Race to Zero Waste, we are participating in the Green Event Certification program and we hope you will join us in this challenge. In advance of your travel to Boston, we encourage you to bring a reusable water bottle and/or hot thermos and utensils to reduce the need for single use products.
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Wayback Project x The Body Book: Presentations Exploring the past, family dynamics and body image through spoken word, performance and storytelling.
Saturday March 22, 2025 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT
Black Box
Session Evaluation
The Body Book
Presenter: Mariam Riaz Paracha

Body Book: A Performance of Stories, Spoken Word & Self-Reflection of a Desi Female Body is a 20-30 minute work-in-progress interactive performance blending personal narrative, poetry, and visual storytelling inspired by my MFA thesis. The project interweaves personal experiences, heartfelt conversations, and collected stories about growing up and living in a body subjected to scrutiny and patriarchal interpretations of religion. It reflects a journey towards reconciling cultural traditions with an evolving world. While some stories are drawn from qualitative research and interviews with women ranging from 18-60, the majority originate from my own life experiences, fostering honesty and vulnerability to bridge the hierarchical gap that can arise when facilitating workshops. The performance pieces explore themes of identity, family, and belonging shaped by the shared, multigenerational dynamics of South Asian cultures. Through spoken word, movement, and projected visuals based on the book's illustrations, it invites audiences into a playful and personal, yet universally resonant exploration. After the performance, participants will engage in writing, drawing prompts and performance exercises that explore their personal narratives through memory, metaphor, and sensory detail. This participatory process creates a space where stories, individual and collective are amplified through dialogue and artistic expression. Aligned with the theme Amplify & Ignite, the performance and workshop exercises highlight how reclaiming personal stories can inspire meaningful social change within communities by amplifying understanding, questioning, empathy, and advocacy through storytelling.

The Way Back Project 
Presenters: Brielle Fowlkes and Joye Prince 

The Way Back Project is a two-woman show comprised of autobiographical narratives as well as some fiction, and is designed to be accompanied by a post-show engagement workshop for audience members. The show chronicles a journey of shared exploration between the two women, as they seek to better understand themselves through remembering, grieving, and reckoning with their family lineages. The goal of this project is to investigate questions about how we, as individual artist-researchers, can tell the stories of our lineages and the stories that have been passed down to us, in a way that illuminates present and historic norms while also enacting a liberatory future through collective world-making. By positioning ourselves as microcosmic subjects of larger societal issues regarding race, womanhood, grief, and intergenerational trauma, we aim to open up dialogue with audiences that allows them to explore their own relationship to these topics. Hoped-for impact:1. For all audience members: Inspire dialogue rooted in ancestral inquiry and perpetuated narratives in order to provoke dialogue and collective dreaming 2. For audience members of color: Stir up a hunger to remember pasts we have chosen to forget as a trauma response, so that we may continue down a liberatory path of healing3. For white audience members: Initiate a process of reckoning with our harmful lineages as well as grieving what we have lost so that we may begin (or continue) down a liberatory path of healing 
Speakers
MR

Mariam Riaz Paracha

Mariam Riaz Paracha is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and storyteller whose work explores the intersections of identity, community, and creative expression. With an MFA in Theater Education from Emerson College, her thesis project Body Book merges essays, poems, and drawings... Read More →
BF

Brielle Fowlkes

Brielle Fowlkes (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and facilitator whose passion is rooted in making transformational, powerful, and honest works that exalt Black and Brown stories and communities. In 2021, Brielle served as the director of a year-long anti-racist theatre initiative... Read More →
JP

Joye Prince

Joye Prince (she/they) is a multi-hyphenate theatre artist and educator living and working in the area known as Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at Emerson College in the subject of Theatre Education and Applied Theatre. She was the 2023/24... Read More →
Saturday March 22, 2025 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT
Black Box
  Performance

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