#poc – @mudwerks on Tumblr

mudwerks reblogged

The Mask of Survival: Black Performance in Dance

Choreographer Camille A. Brown and her namesake company, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, use dance theatre to explore culture, race, and identity in today’s urban America. Brown’s ongoing performance “Trilogy” grapples with internal and external perceptions that Americans have based on identity, and the right and need we all have to claim space in society. What does it mean for a person of color to be manipulated by another power, what does it mean for a person to claim their own power, and how do communities and individuals claim power accessing both ancestral and contemporary vocabulary? By melding these questions and concepts together, the trilogy highlights the resilience and creative genius of African Americans.

Keep reading

#the offing #enumerate #camille a. brown #choreographer #dancer #dance #dance theatre #culture #race #identity #poc #black women artists

mudwerks reblogged

theoffingmag

God answers in a woman’s moaning.

@jessxchen, “The Day I Cracked Open Heaven,” The Offing

#micro #micropoetry #the offing #jess x. chen #asian american poet #queer women #poc #woc #poem #quotes

mudwerks reblogged

theoffingmag

dollhospitaljournal

Baldwin’s study of Blackness is one that I return to often, particularly when I consider notions of racial melancholia, trauma, and the great harm it can do to a person’s everyday life. I’ve noticed a denial of the ways race intersects with mental health and history. Inside certain cultural expressions of Blackness, depression is often reduced to craziness. If you grew up in a religious community, it’s a demon that needs to be prayed away. If you are a Black woman, you are reduced to emotional or combative. The same holds true for anxiety, which is viewed as weakness. Our ancestors survived much worse, right? But the reality is that, generations later, we are left with an inheritance of that ‘survival’: ancestral trauma. And we don’t know what to call it. And we don’t know what to do about it. Intersections of depression and race are not something specific to Black folks. These intersections happen in a number of communities, but there is a specific way in which Black folks deal (or don’t deal) with them, and the culminating result is a deep silence. “Mental health is the revolutionary political space for black people,” bell hooks recently said in conversation with New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray. If we name something that burdens us, we give ourselves vital power and allow ourselves to regain some control over it. The act of talking about it is revolutionary; however, the way we discuss mental illness seems far too status quo.

ARICKA FOREMAN, Why Spotlight Minority Mental Health? The Offing (via dollhospitaljournal)

#the offing #aricka foreman #minority mental health #james baldwin #bell hooks #chirlane mccray #blackness #community #mental illness #poc #woc