Amplify & Ignite: Creative Practice in and With Communities

Black women and femmes who exist on dis bitter earth do not except that we must be the caretakers of the world and of ourselves without the communal support of our village. We deserve to do more than just survive. "In Danger Species/Baby Girl, How Does Your Garden Grow?", follows Patrica Hill Collins invocation to start with the self andour interpersonal identities. Rootedin Kemi Adeymedi's lean theory, the digital interactive theatrical performance included me embodying a sunflower and giving my audience the role of "community gardener" to "water me" when they think I need it, to see if I would be cared for if I were a sunflower and not an Afro-Indigenous woman. This performance uses my angularity to the ground to signal wilting and co-performative witnessing my D. Soyini Madison, inviting the audience to perform with me in their role of "community gardener". This project asks what care looks like and if there is an urgency behind that caretaking responsibility. I wanted to take this on because I must go through the world outside of being a sunflower. And when in the wrong company, I must protect myself from wilting.

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