BlaQ Benedictions – OYSTERKNIFE Community Workshops

Leading up to the premier of mouf//full this Feburary, OYSTERKNIFE presents…

BlaQ Benedictions

Join OYSTERKNIFE’s mentors & friends in a series of free workshops for the community. Each workshop will explore themes such as spell-casting, prophecy, movement, personal storytelling, and revolutionary performance through the lens of each artist’s personal practice.

Each workshop is free and open to the public but will be capped at 15-20 attendees. Material in this workshop may appear in the final show, with permission of participants.

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January 7 • 12pm to 2 pm with Amara Tabor-Smith

How We Get Over [Through]: Movement For This Moment

at CounterPulse • 80 Turk St

>> Free RSVP <<

A movement meditation/ divination/ writing/ storytelling practice for collective liberation stewarded by amara tabor-smith. There will be dancing; there will be moments of restful pause; we will talk with each other; our ancestors might visit; there might be laughter, rage, grief, and emotional or spiritual discomfort; there will be breath. It might feel too long, it might feel too short, we will run out of time, it will only be a beginning. Bring a journal, a pillow and blanket, water, any small objects that are comforting or grounding for you. DJ Blu Moon will accompany our process.

This workshop is for BIPOC only.

About Amara Tabor Smith

Born in San Francisco, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land, and based in Oakland, amara tabor-smith is a choreographer/performance maker and the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. She describes her dance and performance making practice as Conjure Art. Her interdisciplinary site-specific and community responsive performance experiences utilize Yoruba Lukumí spiritual technologies to address issues of social and environmental justice, race, gender identity, and belonging. Her work is rooted in Black, queer, Afro futurist/surrealist, womanist principles, that insist on liberation, joy, home fullness and well-being.

https://www.deepwatersdance.com/

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January 14 • 11am to 2pm with Rhodessa Jones

Truth Telling and Practicing Revolution

at CounterPulse • 80 Turk St during Artists Against Genocide

>> Free RSVP <<

The workshop utilizes autobiographical history as a vehicle for performance. Using movement, text,vocalizations, theatre games, memory exercises, autobiographical musings and storytelling we will create theatre mined for our real-life experiences. The workshop will focus on content rather than what is considered ” traditional form”.

About Rodessa Jones

Performer, teacher, director Rhodessa Jones is Co-Artistic Director of the critically acclaimed, performance company Cultural Odyssey. Jones founded and directs The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, an award-winning performance workshop committed to the personal and social transformation of women, now in its 23rd year. As recipient of the US Artist Fellowship, Jones expanded her work in corrections and for educational institutions internationally. She conducted the Medea Project in South African prisons, working with incarcerated women and trained correctional personnel and local artists. In 2012, the U.S. Department of State, Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau named her as Arts Envoy for the U.S. Embassy.

themedeaproject.weebly.com

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January 21 • 2pm to 5pm with Marvin K. White

Prophetic Pens: Sermonics and Free Writing as Tools for Liberation

at CounterPulse • 80 Turk St

>> FREE RSVP <<

“Prophetic Pens: Sermonics and Free Writing as Tools for Liberation” offers a unique space for participants to explore their inner worlds, articulate their visions, and express their spiritual and humanist insights through the written and spoken word. It’s a journey towards finding one’s prophetic voice, emboldened by the power of free writing and the communal experience of sharing and listening.

About Marvin K White

Marvin K. White is the Minister of Celebration at Glide Memorial Church. Marvin is a writer, artist, preacher, and public theologian. He earned an MDiv. from Pacific School of Religion, in Berkeley, CA. He is a well sought out preacher, teacher and facilitator. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Our Name Be Witness; Status; and the two Lambda Literary Award-nominated collections last rights and nothin’ ugly fly. He has edited and contributed to literary and art journals and publications, locally and nationally. His poetry has been adapted for stage and screen, and he has performed original work at many theaters. As a former member of the critically acclaimed theater troupe, PomoAfroHomos, he performed nationally and internationally. Beginning with being a Teaching Artist for WritersCorps, he has continued to lead creative arts and writing workshops for a range of audiences. Marvin holds a fellowship in the national African-American poetry organization, Cave Canem; and founded and sat on the board of two BIPOC LGBTQ organizations: Fire & Ink, and B/GLAM, two national black LGBT writer’s organizations. In 2019, he was named one of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, “100”. He was awarded a Kennedy Center, “Citizen Artist Fellowship” (’20-’21). Marvin is articulating a vision of social, prophetic and creative justice.

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January 28 • 2pm to 4:30 pm with brontë velez

black rapture

at GRACE CATHEDRAL • 1100 California Street

>> FREE RSVP <<

zora neale hurston’s short story high john de conquer will be our point of departure to explore the rapture, those eschatological stories where god takes you elsewhere/elsewhen at the end of the world. how can we create sanctuary to be carried away in a time that demands our dissociation? what does the phenomenology of black laughter, humor and absurdity have to do with things of the flesh and the fugitive? how can black spiritual traditions of coming back to and departing from the body as a ritual practice buoy us in climate collapse? what does black trance and dance have to do with it all? we will spend time with reading, performance, discourse and ritual storytelling together.

About brontë velez

brontë’s(they/elle) work and rest is guided by the cosmology and promise of sabbath for black people and the land. as a black-latine transdisciplinary artist, trickster, educator, jíbare and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, death doulaship, and the levity of absurdity.

weavingearth.org

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>> Get Tickets for mouf//full <<

Header photo of OYSTERKNIFE (Gabriele Christian and Chibueze Crouch) by Adrian Arias