FREE THE ARTS JAM:
Music, Poetry and Dance as Healing
We invite people with lived experiences and their peers to come together to create music, dance, and poetry in collaboration with Free the Arts Festival and The Institute for the Development of Human Arts:
Feb 24th, 2018
7:00pm-9:00pm
East Village Access
242 East 2nd st. NY, NY
In this jam we will warm up our bodies and voices, use our voices in song and use our bodies to move and dance freely, and capture our inner experience with poetry, drawing, and coloring. Our process is unique in centering mutuality, peer support and skill sharing from an eye to eye perspective. We use arts as a tool for healing, liberation, individual and collective freedom. Any documentation is towards recording and building a process of Creating The People’s DSM (Different States of Mind-Matter), a community based project to make a creative alternative to the oppressive Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that imprisons, erases and gives stigma to Neurodivergent, especially Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans People of Color with trauma and lived experiences of mental health; the goal of the project is to create new language, ideology, and practices around inner experience, internalized oppression, mental and whole soul health.
As a mixed race, mixed gender, mixed disability space, we center the emotional needs of Black Indigenous, Disabled, Trans, People of Color by encouraging any intersection of white, cisgender, and male people to listen more, speak less, and hold space for silence and others’ processing styles. We will also ask everyone for any accessibility needs, as well as for People of Color to voice any emotional accessibility needs / any needs as a person of color in the space.
Hosted by: Nikomeh Anderson - A Black and Mixed Race, Trans and Gender Expansive, Neurodivergent, Trauma Survivor, Creative Producer and Collaborator with Free The Arts Festival, Multidisciplinary Theatre Maker, Advocate, Educator, Facilitator, and Cultural Activist who draws the connection to the greater societal picture.