b. medusa 13 September 2007 9:55:53 am
R.A.M. performs in the Creative Convergence Festival @ the Baltimore Theatre Project, Thursday, October 4th.
Creative Convergence is a festival celebration of Arts and Community that will take place over five days: October 3 -7, 2007 (performances begin @ 8pm except Sunday, 7pm). Coming on the heels of the US Social Forum (www.ussf2007.org), Creative Convergence aims to identify and share the strengths of artists in the DC-Baltimore region as an integral piece of a movement towards sustained social change.
Our vision for Creative Convergence includes a workshop series (including youth-led workshops for young people and adults) and performance series (highlighting the dynamic work of artists whose work intersects with social justice). We encourage all artists whose work focuses on or reflects social issues, community building to attend.
The Convergence has three principal goals:
- To provide space for artists and activists to share their work through performances and workshops.
- Workshops will provide participatory opportunities to engage in demonstrations of processes used in community-based work as well as engage in conversations around various systemic oppressions.
- Network and brainstorm about potential partnerships across the region.
As a regional event, Creative Convergence will provide opportunities for artists, activists, organizers, educators and progressive institutions to connect with other like-minded change agents in the DC/MD/VA/WVA region. Thanks to support from Alternate ROOTS Community Arts Partnership.
Creative Convergence is co-presented by Alternate ROOTS, Baltimore Theatre Project and ClancyWorks Dance Company.
Ticket Prices for Workshops and Performances (Unless Otherwise Noted)
$15 General, $12 Student/Artist, $7 Youth (17 & Under)
Performances
All performances at Baltimore Theatre Project
Wednesday – Oct 3
8:00pm – FREE Performance!
Sponsored by Free Fall Baltimore
Courtney Weber
The Collective
Deletta Gillespie
Thursday – Oct 4
8:00pm
DishiBem Dance Group
Run of the Mill Theater
Black Codes
Radical Artist Movement
Friday – Oct 5
8:00pm
Encounter Risk
The Everlutionary Trust
Air Borne Dance
Marietta Hedges
Stephanie Powell
Saturday – Oct 6
8:00pm
Brave Soul Collective
Quest
ClancyWorks Dance Company
Jennifer Lanier
Reggie Glass
Sunday – Oct 7
7:00pm
Maura M .Garcia
Kuumba Collective
Laura Schandelmeier & Stephen Clapp
Updraft
Special Events
Friday, Oct 5 at 6:00pm
Activist Networking Cocktail Hour
at Baltimore Theatre Project
This networking cocktail hour will provide a space for Activists, Organizers, and Artists to discuss their current projects and potential future partnerships.
Sunday, Oct 7 at 10:00am
Sunday Brunch
at Creative Alliance
This brunch is designed to provide artists and activists in the region with an opportunity to network and discuss community-based art-making in Baltimore. How can cultural workers deal with their own needs as well as forge head in building partnerships that contribute to making long term social change? Through small group discussion and Q and A with Panelists we will be exploring that answer.
Workshops
Thursday, October 4, 2007
1:30pm – FREE – at Goucher College Meyerhoff Arts Center — Dunnock Theatre
Alternate ROOTS:Resources for Social Change – Exploring principles for partnerships between Artists and communities.
Resources for Social Change (RSC) is a training program developed by Alternate ROOTS that teaches ideas and techniques to develop sustained social change through art. This workshop will focus on five principles as a model for artists working with community: Shared Power; Equitable Partnership, Open Dialogue, Individual and Community Transformation, Aesthetic including Beauty and Justice.
4:00pm – FREE – at Goucher College Todd Dance Studio
Kip Lee: Building Inclusive Community through Dance
This workshop is for anyone who teaches dance or wants to develop community dance projects for people of all ages, from young teens through senior adults, people with little or no dance experience, and people with physical disabilities or mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. The workshop is also for anyone who wants to experience inclusive dance and dance-making.
Friday, October 5, 2007
4:00pm – at University of Baltimore
The Collective: Community Building through Improvisation
Our goal is to make the impossible seem possible. This workshop will address the strength of community building to accomplish seemingly impossible goals. Through various trust building exercises and dance demonstrations, the workshop participants will accomplish a community goal of creating a new dance through improvisation. This workshop is geared to the general public, open to all ages and ability levels.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
9:30am – FREE – at Maryland Institute College of Art
Art on Purpose: Speaking of Silence
The “Speaking of Silence” workshop will address the rich and layered meanings of silence. How does silence play a role in our daily lives, in communication, spiritual practices, and our relation to ourselves and our environment. In this workshop, participants will listen to audio recordings taken from an ongoing interview project conducted by Art on Purpose to collect individuals stories. The audio pieces explore observations, descriptions, and experiences of keeping and breaking silence and how it relates to voice and empowerment. Participants of any age will reflect on the audio, view and respond to photographic portraits, engage in discussion around the topic and create their own piece of artwork expressing the significance of silence in their own lives. The workshop itself acts as a space for the participants to listen, observe, and share their own experiences as a tool to create a piece of writing, a drawing, or their own recorded story.
11:30am – FREE – at Maryland Institute College of Art
American Friends Service Committee: Policing US
The workshop is intended to demonstrate the relationship between policing, prisons and political repression in U.S. communities of color. The workshop will provide a historical timeline that draws the connections between slavery and the advent of urban police forces as well as law enforcement initiatives such as the FBI’s infamous Counter-Intelligence Program and its impact on the Black Panther Party.
11:30am – FREE – at University of Baltimore
Ioana Stoica: Mythic Journeys – Engaging the Hero Within
Recognizing that social justice begins with personal transformation, this workshop will draw upon myth as the source and inspiration for that process. Myth reawakens our sensuous experience of the lived world and re-enchants our practical experiences in a way that provides us energy to initiate change in the world around us. The workshop will create a space where individuals can identify, discuss, and embody mythic elements of their own lives and ways in which myth can inspire action and change. The goal is for each participant to identify and embody an inner hero whose power for action – in whatever capacity and on whatever scale – is reinforced by a personal story and a symbol that can serve as a source of strength and meaning in daily life.
2:00pm – FREE – at Maryland Institute College of Art
Maggie Cleland: Empowering Adult Immigrant Communities through Theatre
In this dynamic workshop, participants will investigate the challenges and benefits of theatre-making across socioeconomic, educational, and ethnic boundaries. Maggie Cleland, the Workshop Facilitator, will share lessons learned from The ESL Living Collage Project, an interdisciplinary, collaborative theatre project about the diverse adult immigrant community of the Arlington Education and Employment Program’s Clarendon Education Center (REEP/CEC) in Arlington, Virginia. Through discussion as well as theatre games and activities, participants will explore ways of using theatre for community-building, language learning, and lifeskills development. This workshop is appropriate for older teens and adults of all abilities/needs. No acting experience is necessary.
2:00pm – FREE – at University of Baltimore
Quest: Poetry in Motion
Participants will gain a greater understanding of Physical theatre; the role physical theatre can take in enhancing literacy; and the role physical theatre can play in developing acting and communication skills. This workshop is an example of Quest’s commitment to use visual theatre as a strategy to enhance learning readiness and literacy.
4:30pm – FREE – at Maryland Institute College of Art
Wide Angle Youth Media: Flip It – Exploring & Creating Youth Media
Members of the Mentoring Video Project, who produce the “for youth, by youth” television show BeMore TV, will share their knowledge and teach other young people how to explore and produce media that gives them their own platform to speak out about issues that are important to them. In this workshop, we will open with a participatory exercise, in which we will analyze contemporary media and discuss how youth are represented. Then, we will showcase examples of youth-made videos using material from episodes of BeMore TV. After watching these videos, youth will learn and practice techniques for creating youth-focused media and discuss its importance in advocating for community issues. Though this workshop is intended for the youth, it can be open for people of all ages to join.
4:30pm – FREE – at University of Baltimore
Plunge Cabaret: Power Struggles and the Call for Creativity
We will work with one definition of power as “the ability to make choices,” and, through that lens, explore how the struggle to feel powerful is a central issue in most any social, cultural, or developmental issue facing us today. Using the venue of cabaret-style theater, we will create a learning environment using both performance and interactive workshops to discover how the subjects of power and choice impact our lives and fields of work, study, and art. Not inappropriate for any age/ability, but geared primarily towards artists, activists, and facilitators dealing with a variety of social , cultural, and developmental issues.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
1:30om – FREE – at Red Emma’s
Theatre Action Group: Embracing Discomfort
In this workshop, Theater Action Group (TAG) asks how this festival can serve us as artists and activists to identify, explore and address the contradictions in our work? TAG is open to working with festival participants and leaders to identify and respond to an emerging concern, theme or need that arises during the festival. TAG is also prepared to explore some of the questions that have been relevant to our community-based theater work: What are the tensions experienced as artists and activists? Can one be both? What are the tensions experienced as an insider and/or outsider working in a community as an artist? What is this thing we call “community” anyway? How do we build it? How do we build a community with differences? Why bring art to communities, or build communities through art?
Rather than propose “answers,” TAG will create a framework to explore these questions and potential tensions through physical and collective responsive action. TAG uses a wide range of structures and techniques such as Theater of the Oppressed, ensemble-based practices, improv, poetic movement structures, creative writing, playback, and image theater. This workshop is intended for community organizers, community-based artists, and festival participants. It welcomes people of all ages and needs who wish to explore these questions as well as one’s own creativity, to express one’s hopes and aspirations, and to give voice to one’s passions and stories. Our goal is to create spoken and image-based dialogue around these issues and give folks a direct experience in some of TAG’s evolving community-based performance practice. Theater Action Group (TAG) is a collective of citizen artists in Baltimore empowered with the language of theater to promote dialogue, to encourage social action and to build community via performance, workshop series, and community partnerships.
4:30pm – at Red Emma’s
Brave Soul Collective: Embracing Your Truth
Through the use of group discussion, BSC will conduct their “Brave Soul” gathering with a specific focus on the power (and/or) importance of embracing one’s truth in order to increase self esteem, dispel stereotypes, and reduce the risk factors generally associated with HIV infections. BSC has found that the ability to identify & demonstrate one’s truth openly is extremely beneficial not only to individuals, but to larger groups of people who may not otherwise take the time to understand, acknowledge and accept one another.
Locations:
Baltimore Theatre Project (www.theatreproject.org)
45 West Preston Street, Baltimore, MD 21201
Creative Alliance at The Patterson (www.creativealliance.org)
3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224
(410) 276-1651
Goucher College (www.goucher.edu)
1021 Dulaney Valley Road, Baltimore, MD 21204
The University of Baltimore (www.ubalt.edu)
1420 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21201
Maryland Institute College of Art (www.mica.edu)
1300 Mount Royal Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217
Red Emma’s 2640 (www.redemmas.org/2640)
2640 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, MD 21202
For more information, please call: (540) 558-8744
Or visit the following websites:
http://www.clancyworks.org/creativeconvergence.html
http://www.communityperformance.org
http://www.dancenow.org/convergence.html
![[concert flyer]](http://mnemosyne-blog.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/concert_flyer.jpg)
i already posted this on my event calendar, but i just saw an article about their 3 year struggle on 
