Practice Progress in partnership with ARCOS Dance and Garden
Five years into the pandemic, and five years since the 2020 Uprising for Black Lives, the UNtensive marks five years of resistance.
This year’s 3 day virtual gathering for artists and educators is organized around the theme of Making T I M E; an invitation to refuse urgent reactivity, and turn towards the brilliance of ancestors and contemporaries whose resistance work has already mapped the course.
* * *Offered in the midst of defunding DEI by a violent federal administration, UNtensive organizers are unshaken. The 5th Annual Practice Progress UNtensive takes place June 20–22, in partnership with ARCOS Dance and Garden.This year’s UNtensive is organized around the theme of Making T I M E, which is an invitation to refuse urgent reactivity and turn towards the brilliance of ancestors and contemporaries whose resistance work has already mapped the course.
We’ve BEEN here, moving bodies into anti-racist practice, finding creativity in the virtual world to gather safely, slowing down, and dreaming collectively towards a healing future. We already have everything we need to meet this moment.
This year’s UNtensive will meet within the online meeting platform GatherTown, in a beautiful digital playground designed and created by UNtensive partner Garden, a virtual community center for BIPOC folks practicing pandemic safety. We continue to double down on virtual gathering. We see institutions demanding a return to in-person “normal,” but the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disproportionately harm the most marginalized, and the accessibility called for by generations of Disabled people still matters.
Each day of the UNtensive is broken into two parts. The first half of the day includes the UNtensive mainstay, Embodied Anti-Racisting, which takes place in race-based affinity groups. Kai Hazelwood facilitates the BIPOC Circle, a radical creative gathering for purging, dreaming, and care. Sarah Ashkin facilitates the White Working Group, which uses nervous system practice to disrupt our embodied white supremacy.
The second half of the day celebrates the contributions of renowned guest artists who have guided the UNtensive over the last five years. Participants can explore audio, video and written materials from these artists embedded throughout the virtual space. UNtensive participants are invited to engage with the content however they choose, while Making T I M E together.
We’ve BEEN here, moving bodies into anti-racist practice, finding creativity in the virtual world to gather safely, slowing down, and dreaming collectively towards a healing future. We already have everything we need to meet this moment.
This year’s UNtensive will meet within the online meeting platform GatherTown, in a beautiful digital playground designed and created by UNtensive partner Garden, a virtual community center for BIPOC folks practicing pandemic safety. We continue to double down on virtual gathering. We see institutions demanding a return to in-person “normal,” but the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disproportionately harm the most marginalized, and the accessibility called for by generations of Disabled people still matters.
Each day of the UNtensive is broken into two parts. The first half of the day includes the UNtensive mainstay, Embodied Anti-Racisting, which takes place in race-based affinity groups. Kai Hazelwood facilitates the BIPOC Circle, a radical creative gathering for purging, dreaming, and care. Sarah Ashkin facilitates the White Working Group, which uses nervous system practice to disrupt our embodied white supremacy.
The second half of the day celebrates the contributions of renowned guest artists who have guided the UNtensive over the last five years. Participants can explore audio, video and written materials from these artists embedded throughout the virtual space. UNtensive participants are invited to engage with the content however they choose, while Making T I M E together.
This series uses creative embodied practice to build transformative anti-racist skills and takes place in two race-based affinity zoom spaces. Registration is required for the full 3-day workshop.
Sessions + facilitator information:
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Inspired by the perpetual transformation of snakes and creatures who shed their skin, Shedding Playgroup is an adventure for your inner child. Shedding reminds us to lower the stakes, to play rather than try to control how to develop techniques for liberation, inspired by our Snakecestors. Shedding Playgroup weaves curiosity and play, rest, pleasure, and community into learning how to survive an apocalypse, be it personal, societal, or global.
Drawing on the wisdom of authors like Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands) and adrienne marie brown (Pleasure Activism), participants will be guided through rest experiences, play with ways to care for their nervous systems, and slow dancing with snakes: a lesson in slowing down from our Snakecestors.
White Working Group: “Time is Not Even, Space is not Empty”
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Sessions + facilitator information:
BIPOC Communal Rest Circle: Shedding Playgroup
Kai Hazelwood (she/her)
Kai Hazelwood is a multi award winning transdisciplinary Disabled, Black, and queer artist. She has guest lectured and facilitated at universities and art institutions across the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Kai is also the founder of Good Trouble Makers, a practice driven arts collaborative celebrating queer identities and centering disabled and chronically ill QTBIPOC. Kai and Good Trouble Makers’ collaborations have been covered by 21 media outlets including The Advocate, and have been supported by The City of Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department, California Institute of Contemporary Arts, Pieter Performance Space, The California Arts Council and DAS Graduate School.
Kai co-founded and is a lead facilitator of Practice Progress, a consultancy addressing structural, professional, and interpersonal white supremacy through body based learning institutions, and individuals including MASSMoCA, Gibney Dance, Ohio State Dance Department, University of Texas, Austin Dance Department, and CalArts.
Her first published piece titled: I’m Breaking Up With Dance, I Can’t Heal In The Same Relationship That Hurt Me was published in Issue 5 of Imagining: A Journal published by Gibney Dance and edited by Eva Yaa Asantewaa. Kai’s upcoming piece: On Grief At The End of The World is for a special issue of Performance Philosophy.
Kai is also the founder of Good Trouble Makers, a practice driven arts collaborative celebrating queer identities and centering disabled and chronically ill QTBIPOC. Kai and Good Trouble Makers’ collaborations have been covered by 21 media outlets including The Advocate, and have been supported by The City of Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department, California Institute of Contemporary Arts, Pieter Performance Space, The California Arts Council and DAS Graduate School.
Kai co-founded and is a lead facilitator of Practice Progress, a consultancy addressing structural, professional, and interpersonal white supremacy through body based learning institutions, and individuals including MASSMoCA, Gibney Dance, Ohio State Dance Department, University of Texas, Austin Dance Department, and CalArts.
Her first published piece titled: I’m Breaking Up With Dance, I Can’t Heal In The Same Relationship That Hurt Me was published in Issue 5 of Imagining: A Journal published by Gibney Dance and edited by Eva Yaa Asantewaa. Kai’s upcoming piece: On Grief At The End of The World is for a special issue of Performance Philosophy.
Inspired by the perpetual transformation of snakes and creatures who shed their skin, Shedding Playgroup is an adventure for your inner child. Shedding reminds us to lower the stakes, to play rather than try to control how to develop techniques for liberation, inspired by our Snakecestors. Shedding Playgroup weaves curiosity and play, rest, pleasure, and community into learning how to survive an apocalypse, be it personal, societal, or global.
Drawing on the wisdom of authors like Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands) and adrienne marie brown (Pleasure Activism), participants will be guided through rest experiences, play with ways to care for their nervous systems, and slow dancing with snakes: a lesson in slowing down from our Snakecestors.
White Working Group: “Time is Not Even, Space is not Empty”
Sarah Ashkin (she/her)
Sarah Ashkin’s (she/her) work tarries at the intersection of critical whiteness studies, site specific performance, and reparations pedagogies. She is the co-director of GROUND SERIES dance and social justice collective and a co-founder of Practice Progress, a body-based anti-racism facilitation platform. As a dedicated dance maker, educator, and organizer, Sarah uses dance as a multipurpose tool to dismantle and build our world for the better. Sarah holds a Masters in Dance, Politics and Sociology from the University of Roehampton, London and is a current doctoral student in Performance Studies at University of California, Davis.
This year’s White Working Group will be inspired by Eiko and Koma’s artistic and political prompt “Time is not even, Space is not Empty”. We will work with slowness and doing “less”, in order to feel into the possibilities of anti-racisting time. We will wonder: How does our relationship to time support us in building our capacity to sense white supremacy “more?” How is white accountability a time-based practice? We will use movement, mindfulness, ritual, drawing, reading, and conversation to actively and creatively practice anti-racisting together.
Installed throughout the UNtensive GatherTown world, you will find videos, recordings, readings, playlists created over the last four years by UNtensive artists. This time is meant to be your time, to make T I M E to follow your nose, your curiosities, listen to your needs, the past, the future. It is also a wonderful time to meet up with other UNtensivers in the GatherTown spaces designed by the Garden, and talk about your experiences with the artist content, share recipes and feelings, gossip, and rest together.
Kai and Sarah welcome us to gather together to reflect on: what are you discovering about time, self, community, embodied anti-oppression practice?
Registration
Registration includes required attendance at all three gatherings of Embodied Anti-Racisting (offered in race-based affinity spaces), and full access to the UNtensive virtual world of videos, libraries, playlists, and community, offered in the second half of each day.
When we spend money, it is always an opportunity to practice our values. We invite you to do so when paying for the UNtensive! Please select the payment tier that best aligns with your financial and structural reality:
Solidarity: $500 full Commit your resources to materially support the UNtensive, and to increase accessibility to the experience by funding those in need of supported and pay-what-you-can registration.
Sustaining: $350 full Invest in the experience an amount that reflects the minimum cost per participant to the partner organizations offering the UNtensive.
Supported: Pay-What-You-Can We are offering a limited number of pay-what-you-can registrations, because you are of value and we want you to join us whether you can afford to contribute financially or not. There is no application. If you’re asking for one of these, we trust and believe that you need it, and we will distribute them on a first-come, first-served basis.
NOTE: Some things to consider when choosing an option: Are you or are you not housing secure? Are you or are you not Disabled? Are you or are you not a citizen or have another status regarding immigration? Do you or do you not benefit from intergenerational wealth? Do you or do you not walk through the world with white privilege?
After completing the application, including indicating your registration option and payment tier and method, you will receive a payment request at the email address that you list, in order to finalize your space in the UNtensive.
Please complete and submit the form below to register for the UNtensive:
Registration
Registration includes required attendance at all three gatherings of Embodied Anti-Racisting (offered in race-based affinity spaces), and full access to the UNtensive virtual world of videos, libraries, playlists, and community, offered in the second half of each day.
When we spend money, it is always an opportunity to practice our values. We invite you to do so when paying for the UNtensive! Please select the payment tier that best aligns with your financial and structural reality:
Solidarity: $500 full Commit your resources to materially support the UNtensive, and to increase accessibility to the experience by funding those in need of supported and pay-what-you-can registration.
Sustaining: $350 full Invest in the experience an amount that reflects the minimum cost per participant to the partner organizations offering the UNtensive.
Supported: Pay-What-You-Can We are offering a limited number of pay-what-you-can registrations, because you are of value and we want you to join us whether you can afford to contribute financially or not. There is no application. If you’re asking for one of these, we trust and believe that you need it, and we will distribute them on a first-come, first-served basis.
NOTE: Some things to consider when choosing an option: Are you or are you not housing secure? Are you or are you not Disabled? Are you or are you not a citizen or have another status regarding immigration? Do you or do you not benefit from intergenerational wealth? Do you or do you not walk through the world with white privilege?
After completing the application, including indicating your registration option and payment tier and method, you will receive a payment request at the email address that you list, in order to finalize your space in the UNtensive.
Application
Please complete and submit the form below to register for the UNtensive:
PRACTICE PROGRESS
