POC Centered Virtual Somatics: April Parcon Resilience Immersion 2020

In NYC we were into a month into self isolation due to Corona Virus, in other places like Spain, they were 2 months in.

How does our POC centered somatic movement practice show up in the virtual space?

The virtual space allowed us to connect with people from all around the country: Florida, California, New Orleans, Ohio, Massachusetts, Maryland and more.

And the world: Uruguay, Canada, the Philippines, Spain, and the Netherlands.

This collective activated a core team of Parcon Resilience(PR) Facilitators for the first time. Our teamwork allowed us to offer a mixture of big group experience, small group intimacy and one on ones as needed. Orientations were offered to those with little movement or Parcon Resilience experience. Each core team member facilitated a 4 person small group to process and explore with during the big group time and the teams of 2 core teams met with racial affinity group in the evenings. Our work was heart felt, collective, and emergent.

During the Big groups: Everyday objects that we often overlook became our intimate friends to inspire us to connect with ourselves and our history differently.

Leading to a bridge for connecting with our virtual tools in new ways that could be nourishing.

RACIAL AFFINITY SPACES

2 POC and 2 white racial affinity groups met in the evening practicing PR embodied ways of checking in, asking questions, and working through conflict to approach and access our being together in fresh and integrative ways. These spaces offered rich and intimate spaces for people to connect to their questions and each other.

Testimony:

“Andrew, to me it wasn't even that bumpy considering how brand new this is for all of us. You are so thoughtful and intentional about setting it up and you really have a knack for asset mapping and trusting the group. Also, the way you facilitate the movement practices is so nutritious for me. Every time I've been with you that way I have felt stimulated, inspired, and happy to be dancing with your prompts.” -Maria Bauman

“I have felt reverberations throughout my day - and in my virtual univ zoom class this evening. lots to reflect upon...” -Karen Schaffman

Special Thanks to the Core Team!

Andrew Suseno, Anne Tangi, Kimberly Tate, Farai Williams, Ryuta Iwashita, Joanna Fitzick, Brianna Johnson, jc Bitonti, Colleen Roche, and Zena Bibler. (their photos will be added!)

This event was co-produced by Livable Futures, a project of Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme, the Ohio State University department of dance and the Parcon Resilience Facilitator Fund.

HISTORY written in May 2020 reflection.

Before Corona Virus lockdowns I was slated to teach Decolonize the What? at Ohio State University thanks to Brianna Johnson, a graduate student there who I met at Fissure (My 2019) at EarthDance, a conference partly facilitated by mayfield brooks looking at the openings due to dissonance within Contact Improvisation that made space for social reflection and the creation of new practice models. i was on the fence about letting the conference go. Part of our preparation for the OSU intensive was monthly calls to integrate somatics into academic disciplines with students across disciplines and artsists. jc Bitoni played an active role in helping me to brainstorm about the possibilities for this group to exist beyond the OSU intensive.They had come down from Canada during the November 2019 Oberlin College because they had head about the work from Vivek Patel who I knew from the Ontario Contact Improvisation Jam that I had attended and taught at from 2017-2019. jc advocated for continuing to do the April Intensive Virtually and seeing if the funders at OSU and Livable Futures, an affiliate organization supporting artists, would still fund us. And they did, and provided additional funding upon our request for me to have a team of facilitators and to document the event.

We formed a Core Team of 9 people. I'm going to give a little history of how I met these amazing folks to highlight how this opportunity galvanized the team in such a beautiful way.

Brianne Johnson 1) Met during Fissure 2019 
Farai Williams: 1) Met during Facilitator Training 2019
Zena Bibler: 1) Met during WCCIJ 2019
Ryuta Iwashita: 1) Met during Fissure 2019 (described above) 2) March 2020 Immersion (Theme: Intersection of Gender and Race)   
Nhu Nguyen: 1) Met during WCCIJ 2019 2) Facilitator Training 2019 and PR admin and infrastructure planning.
Anne Tangi: 1) Met during NYC practice group; 2) PR intersectionality with aging project & Facilitator Training 2019
Kimberly Tate: 1) Met during ParconNYC performances of 2017 @ INSITU and collaborated on Highline Projects and her classes at Parsons 2) Continued through local NYC 2018-9, partner in offering PR at Fissure,WCCIJ 2019, Hindsight 2019, and through the New School. 
Colleen Roche: 1) Met pre-Parcon through ZCO- A mixed abilities dance group, then joined in Parcon labbing at the Wexler Tables, NYC in 2016 2) Continued with local Mixed Abilities PR classes from 2017-2019, and many other adventures including the Facilitator Training of 2019 
Joanna Fitzick: 1) Met pre-Parcon in 2004 when I taught Contact Improvisation in Baltimore, MD then joined Parcon Resilience Immersions starting in 2017 on, including Facilitator Training of 2019 

We organized as a team to support 40 people from around the country and the world to explore anti-racist relationship building in the virtual medium. I can't stress enough how satisfying it was to bring so many PR worlds together for a deeper dive! Ea was going to join from the Philippines, we met in 2016 in a PR protest of Marion Sims in NYC. Pablo was joining from Uruguay, we met during BIPOC Contact Improvisation Jams. Awilda was joining from Puerto Rico, I had the opportunity to offer PR to the CI community a couple years ago. Olaya was joining from Space, I think she was introduced to the work by my posts following some Parcon offerings in Madrid in 2016. Maria was joining from NYC, I had offered the work to her company MBDance and now she was joining the PR community! 

And there were so many new people too! Before the April Intensive, we held Orientations for folks to reorient or gain first exposure to the work so they would be able to move beyond the initial shell shock of it for the intensive. And we provided one on one conversations with anyone who indicated that the needed more orientation about what a POC centered space was. One thing I loved about working in our team was how the practice of Parcon Resilience invites us to draw from our somatics and felt sense of the world to craft how we collectively organize and care for those who we come into relationship.

For the intensive we had Big group meeting from 12-3EST and 4 Racial Affinity groups meeting from 6-7:30pEST.
I facilitated the big group. The themes I focused on were connecting with a sense of intimacy and support with the objects and place that we are in, including the the virtual devices we were using. Small Core groups of 4 broke off during the Big group time to engage more deeply in improvisation, process and reflection. The Racial Affinity groups were a smaller group space for participants to drop in more using PR tools, have more autonomy in the direction of the group and to process our racialized identities within current events. 

We learned a lot. For participants, many expressed awe at how they could have more agency with their space and use of objects and devices. Others found tremendous relief and a sense of connection and being seen within their smaller groups.

There were also hard things that emerged within the "brave space" that we created. Without going into details, about the particular happenings, I learned that for me, to take our anti-racist work into intersectional spaces and integration we need to bust looking at race as a binary: White and POC. In my effort to create a POC centered space, I was identifying myself and POC joining us as a monolith, other-ed by whiteness. I wanted to integrate ways to connect with ancestors, history and animism...but this in itself does not do justice to the voices of those on the margins. I think from this intensive I began to acknowledge that POC is not a monolith, we are a multiplicity. 

I want to dive into deeper embodied understanding of my relationship to Asian American anti-racism, which in itself is an identity of multiplicities and to use it to build connection and relationship to people of the African Diaspora. And as a collective we learned that in order to do this we need to do more work on our own in POC only intensive spaces separate from White folks. And white folks need to do more collective race consciousness around whiteness as a multiplicity of identity building with anti-racist mentors to develop the PR work with guidance so they can take more responsibility for on-ramping white people who want to participate in PR. 

So this leads us to a new phase for Parcon Resilience where we engage in our own deeper dives of our racialized groups to better understand history and politics from a collective embodied place. And then to give much more time to POC only projects to give time for us to explore our relationships within our multiplicity without diversion from white people calling for us to be a monolith. And we will check-in and build occasional projects with our white sisters and brothers as we all build our capacity and resilience to be in an embodied share reality together.