Practice Progress in partnership with ARCOS Dance and Garden
Asynchronous Sessions with Guest Artists 2021–24:
Colonialism and site-specific dancemaking
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.
Miles Tokunow (all pronouns)
This moving meditation will lead participants through a guided experience on a site of your choosing. Key Questions: What is underneath your feet? What is the anti/colonial underbelly of place and how does it invite you move? How might you move otherwise? You will need a journal, a water bottle, clothing that protects your body and feet, and a way to play and listen to the playlist.
Grounding artivism
Sydney Rogers (Miss Barbie-Q) (she/her)
Sydney Rogers, widely known by her drag persona Miss Barbie-Q, is a multi-talented drag artist and fearless advocate whose career spans over two decades of defying boundaries in art and activism. She has lit up stages from underground clubs to world-renowned museums, infusing every performance with unapologetic energy and a message of empowerment. Offstage, Sydney amplifies her impact as a consultant and community leader—training major organizations in LGBTQ+ inclusion and holding high-profile leadership roles to drive systemic change. Her bold voice and dynamic presence have cemented her status as a trailblazing icon—one who inspires audiences and institutions alike to embrace authenticity and create lasting change.
Journey with Miss Barbie-Q to weave together the power of performance, activism, and self-discovery. This session invites you to ground yourself in your own radical potential, moving through the echoes of past struggles and present resilience, all while holding space for the transformative power of creative expression.
A writing ritual // waking desire & the cosmic within
Haruna Lee (they/them)
Haruna Lee is an award-winning non binary Taiwanese-Japanese-American theater maker, screenwriter, educator, and community steward whose work is rooted in liberation and healing. Their plays are often portals into personal and collective stories navigating transcultural experiences and memories, and the conflicts that arise when dealing with the simultaneity, contradictions and pluralities of self. Through their teaching, they promote arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater through ethical and process-based collaborations, while inviting the fullness of marginalized bodies and the complexity of that lived experience to their practice.
This session is a series of writing exercises to awaken feelings of desire, creativity, and the cosmic that lives within each of us. Together, they serve as an invitation to get to know yourself on a deeper level.
What would this body be if I let it dream?
Rajni Shah (they/them)
Rajni Shah’s practice is focused on listening and gathering as creative and political acts. In 2021, they published their first monograph, Experiments in Listening, as a book and series of free print-at-home zines (available at rajnishah.com). They are currently Researcher and Head-Heart of the THIRD programme at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, University of the Arts Amsterdam (AHK). They write songs, and hold space for grief.
The title of this session is a quote from UK-based artist and healer Omikemi. Rajni invites participants to spend time in deep listening, tuning in to witness and offer gratitude to what might already be within. You are encouraged to be exactly as you are. The pace will be slow.
Read or listen to Rajni in slow conversation with Omikemi and encounter the quote in its original setting here.
Love letters at the end of the world
Keegan James Sarmiento Kloer (he/him)
Keegan James Sarmiento Kloer stands firmly with the Palestinian people as they resist apartheid, land theft, and genocide, and in their struggle for national liberation and self determination. Keegan is a farmer @farmofsong, a student of history and change @redantcollective, a communist, a musician, and a proud Burqueño. He is giddy and honored to work, dance, and play with Miles Tokunow once again. He loves soccer, flowers, Albuquerque, glimmers, pulling turnips from the ground, and the smell of winter.
Miles Tokunow (all pronouns)
Miles Tokunow is a multimedia storyteller. He is an artist, organizer, and educator. He is a dancer, musician, writer, zine maker and film editor. He is a proud member of the Ground Series Dance and Social Justice Collective. Miles’ art practice is about exploring, searching (yearning) for new meanings and stories by deconstructing the ones that already exist, informed by his life as a transracial adoptee. He often explores the Black radical tradition through movement and theory. He is an Afro-Futurist and interrogates the historical, spiritual and tangible relationship of body to land. Miles believes in magic, laughter, constellations, socialism and beauty in small things. Miles also is the executive director of the Santa Fe Dreamers Project and knows immigration justice to be a critical creative practice.
This session explores the way we relate; make and remake meaning; lose and gain language; and love at the end of the world. Keegan and Miles have produced a listening experience, part meditation, part score that encourages diving into the aforementioned themes in any space you choose. This offering is our love letter to you for the end of the world.
PRACTICE PROGRESS
