Nana Chinara: Community Action Artist In Residence
Gibney Community Action is thrilled to welcome Nana Chinara as it’s 2019-20 Artist in Residence! Nana will lead a series of workshops through her Healing the Black Body Collective and engage with the Gibney community and staff throughout the year.
“The Community Action Residency is the perfect blend to support my needs in community building and cultural organizing right now,” Chinara says. “The opportunity to perform for domestic violence awareness month at Cracks of Light, the ability to offer a pleasure workshop to Gibney staff of color, and hosting the newest Chinara Rituals programming, Healing the Black Body Collective, at Gibney. I am most excited to take up space with Black queer and trans high school girls who are plunging into the world of self-devised and directed performance!”
Nana Chinara creates. She’s Black, Queer, and a gleaming glitterbeam. She dreams up worlds in her body, and offers them to the stage. A performance ritualist, healing artist, youth educator, and loquacious lover, her craft calls upon exploring sweet intimacy with the self through self-research and self-reflection. Her artistry is the lens through which she conducts community research on inner wisdom, violence against young black femmes, traumatic partnerships, and multidimensional love. Her first and foremost intention as an artist is to use her healing tools to exist inside of her body and at the realm of her ancestors, indulging in being witnessed. Nana is the founder and Artistic Director of Chinara Rituals, which creates, builds, and practices healing and liberation in Black Queer Communities through performance.
HEALING THE BLACK BODY COLLECTIVEHealing the Black Body Collective is a performance-based afterschool program for Black queer and trans girls ages of 14-18. Collective Artists devise, direct, and perform their own collective piece, define healing and liberation for themselves; receive Black Feminist Leadership Training; and more. All participants receive a $375 stipend and MetroCards for participation.
Meetings take place at Gibney 280 Broadway on Mondays from December 2019 – May 2020. Auditions are Saturday, November 23rd at 2:00 pm and Monday, November 25th at 4:00 pm. No performance experience required! Interested young folks should sign up for auditions at https://www.chinararituals.
Pleasure in the Body: Expanding Beyond Self Care is a writing, reflecting, building, and movement-based workshop that centers on moving from a place of pleasure and joy, and releasing all that does not serve us. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic, this space is the process of finding liberated movement and defying forces that oppress Black, Indigenous, People of color. We will look at desires, pleasures, and the fears that prevent us from indulging. We manifest tools for releasing our fears, and embody our pleasures unapologetically, by inviting them to live in and on our bodies. Participants will be led in a movement and writing based practice, alongside self research practices as a basis for movement composition and choreography. We will create and share movement that serves us in sanctifying our bodies. Nana will offer this workshop to Gibney staff of color during her residency.