October 2018

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October is a month of returns.

We’re back in Chicago after presenting our in-progress work World After This One at BRIC House in Brooklyn last week. We got lots of feedback that we’ll be taking to heart as the piece continues to grow and shift. Thank you to all the staff at BRIC, NIC Kay, Mary Mattingly, House Lives Matter, and everyone who came out and supported the event!

After a little time off, we’re returning this month to Assata’s Daughters for the kickoff of their fall programing, continuing to support teens from the Azubike cohort as they work towards becoming independent facilitators. AD is one of our political homes in Chicago, and we’re looking forward to being back!

We’ll also be returning to facilitate Love & Protect‘s semiannual retreat, and leading an Intro to Voguing workshop on October 24th at our alma mater UIC, for the Latino Cultural Center’s ARTivism series.

Stay posted for other performances and workshops as the fall continues!

BH

September 2018

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We’re finally coming down after a busy summer!

We’ve wrapped up our time with Engage Chicago at Northwestern University, and with Assata’s Daughters’ Azubike summer session. We’re proud of the ways young people in both these programs have pushed our own thinking around what community organizing can look like. We’ll be linking up with AD again soon!

An area of our practice we’re currently expanding is facilitation and circle keeping for grassroots collectives, specifically focused on organizational development and community healing. We led Love & Protect’s semi-annual retreat in the spring, and closed out our summer by facilitating a weekend-long retreat with For the People Artists Collective. In each of these, we addressed things like revising the collectives’ mission and vision statements, drafting working agreements for new members, and developing decision making processes for group consensus. Keep us in mind if outside facilitation is something from which your collective or organization might benefit.

We’re excited about the collaborations we have coming up at BRIC House in Brooklyn at the end of this month! RSVP here to participate in our Intro to Voguing workshop with Michael Roberson of House Lives Matter on September 21st. RSVP here to attend a short viewing of our in-progress solo piece World After This One, alongside new work from NIC Kay, in conjunction with Mary Mattingly’s exhibit What Happens After, on September 26th. If you’re in NY, we hope you can make it!

BH

August 2018

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This past month, we taught two Queer & Trans Resistance to Policing workshops to young people through the Student Voice and Activism Fellowship, and at STOP Chicago. Next weekend (and for the fourth consecutive summer!) we’ll be facilitating several sessions for Chicago Desi Youth Rising’s annual retreat for young South Asian activists, focusing this year on Linking Anti-Blackness with Anti-Immigration and Police and Prison Abolition 101. Chicago’s youth are some of the most critical and powerful in the world, and it’s an honor to share space with them as a facilitator.

Our article “There’s Nothing New About Not Calling 911,” which was printed in the August issue of In These Times magazine, is now available online. We published a second article with Black Youth Project, “Calls to #AbolishICE are counterproductive unless they are also a call to #AbolishPolice,” inspired by leadership from Organized Communities Against Deportations and Mijente. Follow these orgs to learn more about how you can contribute to ending detention and deportation for all immigrants, and abolition in total.

Lastly, we’ll be premiering an excerpt of our new performance piece World After This One in late September at BRIC House in Brooklyn, NY! We’re sharing the evening with our longtime collaborator NIC Kay, who will be performing a new piece of their own. The showing is in conjunction with visual artist Mary Mattingly‘s apt exhibit What Happens After, imagining a post-militarized world. While World After This One is a work in progress, we’re looking forward to sharing what we’ve been building so far.

While at BRIC, we’ll also be teaching a short Intro to Voguing workshop in collaboration with House Lives Matter, an organization dedicated to lifting up leadership inside the ballroom community. We’ll share more info on these NY events as the dates grow closer!

Thank you to all those who became patrons through our patreon page last month! We’re incredibly close to the $200 mark. Feel free to share the page and spread the word!

BH