Digital: Deeper Duet: Kai Hazelwood + Sarah Ashkin

This is a refusal. A refusal to allow our traumas to be extracted for capitalistic white supremacist consumption. This is a joyful, messy celebration of how we, as adrienne maree brown puts it, ‘center pleasure as a liberating tactic.’ Join us for a duet, a collaboration, a sharing of different but interwoven practices in how we tend to our intersectional anti-racist creative practices.

ABOUT KAI HAZELWOOD

Kai Hazelwood (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, event producer, and public speaker raising the profile of bi+/queer and BIPOC community issues through art projects, community events, and public speaking. She has appeared in BuzzFeed videos and speaks at community events, high schools and colleges about bi+ and BIPOC community issues. Kai is co-founder and a lead facilitator of Practice Progress, a consultancy addressing structural, professional, and interpersonal white supremacy through body based learning that serves non and for profit businesses, educational institutions, and individuals. She is currently an adjunct professor in dance department at Chapman University teaching Modern technique through an anti-racist framework. Kai is also the founder and artistic director of Good Trouble Makers, a, award winning, practice driven arts collaborative celebrating plural-sexual/bi+ identities and centering BIPOC. Good Trouble Makers are dedicated to making. Making art, making room, making change, making good trouble.

ABOUT SARAH ASHKIN

Sarah Ashkin (she/her) is a co-founder and leader of GROUND SERIES dance and social justice collective. Sarah understands her work as a white choreographer, performer, teacher, producer and curator as a cultural healing practice for place-based justice. Sarah uses dance as tool to confront and dismantle the white supremacy sewn into her body and beyond. Sarah has over a decade of experience teaching social justice driven site-specific dance pedagogy to students of all ages. She is a Lead Facilitator for Practice Progress, providing body-based anti-racist learning workshops to organizations nationwide. Sarah earned a BA in Dance Choreography and Performance and Environmental Studies from Wesleyan University, and a MA in Dance, Politics, and Sociology from the University of Roehampton London. She is part of the 2020 Cohort at the UC Davis PhD program in Performance Studies.

Deeper Duets engage two special guests in lively and provocative conversation about artistic life, artistic practice and the urgent social concerns that drive creative expression.

LEARN MORE ABOUT KAI AND SARAH’S PRACTICES

All Fall 2021 Season events will be held online via Zoom. Gibney’s Box Office can be reached via email. For ticketing inquiries or requests, please email Marketing & Audience Services Manager, Kimiko Tanabe, at boxoffice@gibneydance.org.

Gibney encourages people with disabilities to attend online offerings, and we welcome the opportunity to make this event more accessible. This event features live ASL interpreters and live captioning. If you have any questions or additional access needs, please email us at constanza@gibneydance.org or call us at 212-677-8560 (voice only) at least 24 hours in advance of the event you plan to attend.

Image Description: Collage of two photos.
Left photo: Kai, a light skinned cis Black woman is 3/4 to the camera with one arm raised over her head and the arm nearest the camera outstretched. She is wearing a purple dress and a ghost image of her is looking down in profile, overlaid on the image of her looking at the camera
Right photo: Sarah stands with her arms wrapped around the base of a 6 foot tall dead branch. The branch looks as if it is growing out of her stomach. Sarah and the branch stand on a hill in the High desert of Morongo Valley, CA the unceded territory of the Cahuilla and Serrano people at the Buckwheat Residency 2019.

Photo (left) of Kai Hazelwood by Alex Millar. Photo (right) of Sarah Ashkin by
Coachella Magazine.