Hard Work:
Katherine Hubbard and
Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith

Back on Back
Katherine Hubbard
7:30 PM

Back on Back is a performance lecture that considers the body in motion, the necessity of distraction, and the potential of conjunctives all in relation to the organizing priority of the brain. Katherine Hubbard uses video to mark a visual correlation for ‘vision for action,’ a mode of perception that is differentiated from ‘vision for perception’ in how the brain processes its surroundings. Katherine facilitates the recognition of and, ultimately, the temporary release from haunting by stripping grammar from language and structuring narrative through movement.

Mirror/Echo/Tilt
Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith
9:00 PM

What does it mean to enact and to activate? How do we measure our collective complicity in systemic violence, trauma, and the legacy of constructed racial representations?

In Mirror/Echo/Tilt, Shaun Leonardo, Melanie Crean and Sable Elyse Smith ask members of the audience to participate in physical reenactments that locate a series of current social and political events within their bodies through gesture, voice, and proximity. Utilizing testimony, news reports, and memory, participants will recreate intensely contested moments of police violence through shifting perspective. The piece will be conducted in memory of Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Jamar Clark, Laquan McDonald, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Ramarley Graham, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin…and countless others.

This is a collaborative project between artists, educators, and individuals affected by the criminal justice system. The project investigates the range of factors contributing to cycles of police confrontation and incarceration. They question how images of people caught in those cycles are constructed through the media. Working toward a series of videos, performances, and a toolkit that reframes personal narratives of imprisonment, we insert counter-narratives told through first-person voice into the dominant media discourse, which commonly alienates and criminalizes black and brown bodies. By working with new forms of participatory engagement, we also aim to facilitate the sharing of perspective needed for polarized groups to discuss and enact change in seemingly impenetrable systems of justice.