Restorative Justice

New Brunswick Education Association : under construction

Performance Studies

As part of the Performance Studies Colloquium I hosted a class that drew in students from the Anthropology department, the Performance department and other arts affiliated departments. We explored each others’ experiential understanding of how we move, express and belong in our Body, Touch, Mobilizing, and Place. These are 4 of the 6 Lenses used in Moving Rasa to develop a relational somatics with one’s surroundings.

Thank you to Aramo Olaya for bringing me in for this lovely share.

Community Psychology

How do we set community agreements to be responsive to a multiplicity of cultural expressions in the classroom? What fun! Thank you Tiffney Jimenez and Moshood Olanrewaju of the National Louis University in Chicago Community Psychology doctorate program for inviting me to share Parcon Resilience/Moving Rasa with your Cross Cultural Communication in Global Dynamics Community Psychology doctorate class. We practiced embodied ways of communicating and feeling into community agreements to bring more self connection, culture and relationship to our experience of them. The body matters in processes of decolonization!

Art History

How can we bring our ancestors into our perception of sculpture and Art?

Art Historians connected with our ancestors by calibrating our weight shifting to the sway and flow of the Hudson River water and our sense of settling to the roots of small trees in the curated garden next to the Wexler Tables. Each one of these connections to nature and ancestors coordinates our bodies in particular ways to move and perceive in certain ways. We brought these into our experiences of the rest of the space and the Wexler Table Interactive Sculpture.

Thank you Claire Bishop for having me back to work with another crew of students!

Pictures from the 2021 CUNY exploration of the Wexler Tables by Art Historian students from Claire Bishop’s class.

Latine Art Historians

picture of Moving Rasa presenters’ workshop

How has our experience of gender identity and expression been shaped by our sense of ownership of things and the land? If the land could dance and speak to our "gendered" experience through how it pushes back through us against gravity, what would it say?

These are the questions I explored with the presenters from the 6th Annual Symposium Latin American Art prompted by the overall content of the proposals being presented. In this symposium they shared their research on impactful Art work and happenings that have been decisive acts of resistance and solidarity of the people against the forces of colonization and how gender is experienced.

Thank you to the Institute of Fine Arts @ NYU, Institute of Studies on Latin American Art The John Rewald Endowment at the Graduate Center, and the CUNY department of Art and Archaeology, and Columbia University for having me!

Educators

Equity Alliance Conference

In this workshop we explored how important it is to create the means to receive the truth through practices that develop movement and socio-emotional literacy so that teachers do not pass down their trauma around content material through how they teach and so that students are supported as they bring themselves into the course material whether they are confronting their their oppressor or oppressed, or interwoven lineages.

The Amistad team created an alternative track for history that lifts up African American history before enslavement, the efforts of resistance and celebration of inventors and contributors to society.

We highlighted ways that movement is typically used in schools for stress reduction and calming to expand it to nonverbal expression around our feelings, opinions and inner landscapes around particular topics.

Urban Planning

We sparked curiosity for design by using site-specific improvisation as a means to access alternative perspectives in fun ways for the urban planners. We measured the environment with various body parts, explored ways it could be our needs in non-conventional ways, and discovered ways to harness non-functional relationships with place that are meaningful and emergent.

Awesome job taking the lead Kimberly! I enjoyed co-facilitating with you!

Anthropology

Extended Practice — Comfort, Discomfort and the transformation of perception

"Our brain learns through comparison. Without a solid grounding in comfort and self-care it is difficult to sense when we are uncomfortable or at our edge. Many of us have habituated to significant discomfort in our being at our baseline. The goal of this Audio is to offer a practice for distinguishing comfort and discomfort through the vehicle of somatics in relationships to the environment and others as practiced in Parcon Resilience. Please feel free to pause this audio at the bell prompts for more time with the exploration, or for journaling. Every individual will improvise these instructions differently even in the same context because of differing demographics and personal histories. What is critical for the ethnographer is to make note of differences in their perception that emerge from each study and to reflect on the socio-political-historical implications of habit versus an inner sensing of self through felt relationship.”

Listen to the Audio here!

This project was funded by the University of Huddersfield.

Fine arts

BEFORE picture with the MFA CUNY Fine Arts graduate students in their REAL PUBLIC SCHOOL class. I had the pleasure of being with them for a little over 2 hours on 20th street and East River on a privately owned plot of beach without city rules. They park is groomed to be foraged: golden rod, wild oats and persimmons ready to be picked. 10/10/19 (12:30-2:30pm) @ 20th st and East River, NYC, NY

We explored how visual perception and possibility is shaped by HOW we are inhabiting our bodies and moving in place. To do this we expanded our movement possibilities to stretch our sense of self as an “I” beyond pedestrian behavior in public. Students found themselves engaged with movement that was not self conscious but present to emergent possibility and relationships. Thank you Claire Bishop and Paul Ramirez for inviting me to facilitate a class, I look forward to seeing you all next year!

Testimony:

“My CUNY graduate class on public art and the city had the opportunity to take a workshop with Parcon Resilience in a public park in NYC this semester. The workshop delivered beyond all my expectations. My students were able to understand in an embodied, intellectual, and integrated experience what it means to be a body in public space. In fact, they understood what it meant to be their own individual body in public space. The workshop helped us understand the relationship between the internalized restrictions we impose on our behavior as city dwellers; and the external restrictions that are imposed on us by the built environment. Parcon Resilience will become an integral part of the class from now on.”

*Paul Ramirez Jonas, Associate Professor, Department of Art & Art History
Hunter College of the City University of New York

AFTER picture!

Keynote Speaker at the Creative Aging Conference

Over 1000 seniors came to the Conference for Aging Artfully. I had the honor of being asked by Gale Brewer to be a Keynote Panelist to share about my Su Casa Parcon work with seniors and to speak about my thoughts on Creative Aging. It was so wonderful to be aligned with Gale and my fellow panelist. I am excited to be part of this movement!

Thank you so much Gale Brewer! It was a pleasure to meet you!

When: August 8, 2018

Where Fordham Law Center