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Artist Talk Series: Chitra Vairavan In Conversation with Gabrielle Civil
May 22, 2020 @ 6:00 pm - 6:45 pm CDT
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Artist Talk Series: Consent, Awakening, and Reclamation
Conversations between Artists of Color and Indigenous Artists
Gabrielle Civil joins Chitra Vairavan in conversation this month, to discuss liberatory performance practices and her latest performance memoir, Experiments in Joy (2019), celebrating black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more.
About Gabrielle
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit MI. She danced with Wild Beauty at Velocity in Seattle (2020) and has premiered fifty original performance art works, including at Queertopia with Moe Lionel in Minneapolis (2019). Author of the performance memoirs Swallow the Fish (2017) and Experiments in Joy (2019), she teaches critical studies and creative writing at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Artist Resource: https://www.
Book Resource: https://theaccomplices.org/
Projects Resource: http://www.
About Chitra
Chitra Vairavan is a contemporary dancer/choreographer and performance artist of Tamil/South Indian-American descent. Vairavan is immersed in both Tamil culture and progressive brown politics in the U.S. She dances to heal and creates dance to help heal others. Her embodied practice and experimental process is rooted in deep listening, spatial observation, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability and ancestral memory.
Artist Website: www.chitravairavan.com
About this series
Chitra Vairavan, artist in a perpetual healing practice and staff at East Side Freedom Library, will talk to other artists of color and indigenous artists about their labor, experience and visions for the future. The artist series is built on consent, awakening and reclamation, as we speak of stories and experiences in our chosen fields that break norms, boxes and ask us to co-create and collaborate our way forward. What are our new ways forward in this time? What are we co-creating? What are we reimagining? We ask each other where we have been, where we are now and where we are heading.
Each conversation is 45 minutes and unscripted to really listen and be present to each other. Join us on the East Side Freedom Library Facebook Page for the monthly artist talks. For any questions about this programming, please reach out to chitra@eastsidefreedomlibrary.
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Photo Credits
Featured image: Ally Almore
Gabrielle’s photo: Dennie Eagleson
Chitra’s photo: There is an Ocean in Every Name (Collage by artist/poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem of Chitra Vairavan’s 2016 performance piece “Water is Life”)