the UNTENSIVE

The UNtensive is programmed by Kai Hazelwood and Sarah Ashkin of Practice Progress, hosted by innovators in dance, technology, and community stewardship, Arcos Dance, and held by a team of renowned guest artists. The UNtensive offers three intertwining streams each including guest artists, through which participants can craft their own experience throughout the week:

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Embodied Anti-Racist Practice: Anti-Racism is not Theoretical

This series takes place in two race-based affinity zoom spaces. 

BIPOC Communal Rest Circle:
We will cultivate rest, pleasure, and community. Through guided discussion and movement exercises, participants will have their feelings and experiences witnessed in knowing community. Drawing on the wisdom of authors like Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands) and adrienne maree brown (Pleasure Activism), participants will be guided through rest experiences, play with ways to care for their nervous systems, and set mindful boundaries to assert their value and their needs.
 
White Working Group:
This working group works to enliven our awareness of race and racism as it lives in our bodies, relationships, and communities so that we may actively fight white supremacy.  We will use movement, mindfulness, reading from critical race thinkers, and conversation to actively practice anti-racisting. There will be readingings, writings, and home practices given after each session, which can deepen our learning. 
 
Pedagogy For Change:
The stakes are real, let’s change the classroom, the studio, and the academy. Designed for body-based educators of all levels these sessions will look at tangible ways to shift the studio or the syllabus and draw on the experience of all gathered. Single-class drop-ins welcome.
 
Creative Practice:  
No art is neutral. How are we committing to world-building in our creative practices? How can art and artists implicate themselves in the healing we all need now? Using radical care and raucous experimentation we will open our mindbodies to different approaches to creative creation.


Past Guest Artists:
Antoine Hunter
Zahna Simon
Alice Sheppard
Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Irvin Gonzalez
Alfonso Cervera
Bernard Brown
Marjani Forte Saunders
Haruna Lee
Miles Tokunow
Ehren Kee Natay  
Cheyenne Dunbar
Sydney Rogers aka Miss BarbieQ
Andrew Suseno