*Content Warning
We invite you to attend a short film screening, discussion, and somatic movement workshop aimed at practicing and spreading community-based healing and transformative justice responses to gender and sexual violence. This participatory performance engages with sexual violence as a collective issue in the context of a specific place, but it is open to everyone interested in healing and social justice.
Wear: Come as you are! Movement options will be optional not required!
Where: Third-floor Performance Center at the New Orleans Jazz Museum
When: Saturday, November 19, 2022 at 1:00 PM CST
-
According to the Louisiana Department of Health, 1 in 8 women in Louisiana will be raped in their lifetime. 1 in 5 women will experience sexual violence on a college campus. However, college sexual violence statistics assume undergraduate students as the survivors and do not include campus workers (which would likely substantially grow the numbers). Recently, at Louisiana State University, both undergraduate students and a custodial worker accused a football player of rape. Instances like this should be a reminder that sexualized violence originating from higher education systems and campuses is an issue for everybody, on and off campus, not just enrolled students or alumni, but campus neighbors, campus workers, and family near and far.
Implementing sustainable transformative justice practices requires ongoing community learning, dialogues, and critical analysis. That is why we invite everyone to attend a workshop that reflects on institutionalized sexual violence, specifically within higher education systems in Louisiana, a state made through the violence of slavery, settler colonialism, and environmental injustices. We ask attendees to think collectively about what strategies are useful for addressing sexual violence situated in these contexts. We center an abolition praxis of performance, community aid, and transformative justice in the absence of meaningful institutional interventions and the presence of institutional sabotage, repression, and collusion with alleged rapists. Transformative justice responses hold not only rapists accountable but also the society that produces them, demonstrating that the police and military actually contribute to the problems of gender and sexual violence. By addressing the root causes of gender and sexual violence, we will focus on reducing harm and emphasizing collective healing, dismissing campus interventions steeped in carceral logics.
The workshop will feature video performance art, dialogue, and movement to address these issues. First, audiences will view Misty Saribal’s video performance art piece, Is Rape A Campus Ritual? An Abolitionist Critique of Institution(s) that Harbor and Protect Rapists. Then, Johanna Middleton will facilitate a somatic-based dialogue as a way of processing the video and strategizing ways to address sexual violence on campuses. Hon. Dr. Bonny McDonald will close out the critical dialog segment with an image theatre ritual, followed by renowned New Orleans healer Ryuta Iwashita's healing community ritual aimed at tapping into embodiment and connection and sending participants off with a sense of well-being and calm.
Film: (6 minutes): Is Rape a Campus Ritual? An Abolitionist Critique of Institution(s) that Harbor and Protect Rapists
This short film follows student and campus workers organizing in solidarity to protest title nine violations and mishandlings at Louisiana State University. Using found material and montage, the film highlights how sexual and gender violence is racialized and connected with capitalism, especially in the sporting industrial complex within higher education, and ongoing exploitations of land and labor
BIOS:
Photo Courtesy of Ryuta Iwashita
Ryuta Iwashita
Ryuta Iwashita (they/them) currently lives and improvises in Bulbancha (New Orleans) in the USA as a movement/performance/visual artist and educator after living in Japan for 25 years. Their artistic lexicons are rooted in social justice, somatics, child education, and ancestral and healing work including 祖体 (SOTAI) of which Ryuta is its conceiver. Their work and teaching have been accepted by internationally renowned organizations such as Isa Arts Center (JAPAN), Washi + Performing Arts Artist-in-residency (JAPAN), Contact Improv Dance Chengdu (CHINA), Jacob’s Pillow (MA), Tulane University (LA), New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center (LA), re:FRAME Festival (LA), Alternate ROOTS (GA), Seattle Festival of Dance Improv (WA), Yellow Fish Durational Performance Festival (WA), Look Out Arts Quarry Artist-in-residency (WA), and Earthdance Creative Living (MA).
Photo Courtesy of Johanna Middleton
Johanna Middleton (she/her) is an award-winning artist-educator-scholar with a passion for telling stories and organizing spaces for others to tell their own stories - particularly those that ask questions at the intersections of race and gender. She is currently the co-host of Gray Area Stories, a podcast about the healing journeys of survivors of sexual violence and she recently staged the participatory performance, Resilient Body: a Ritual to Unlearn Rape Culture, devised in partnership with Louisiana State University student organizations committed to ending gendered violence. Her research focuses on the process of witnessing and sharing personal narratives as an embodied, pedagogical, and emergent technology for social intervention. She is a first-year Ph.D. student at Northwestern University in Performance Studies. She received her BA in Theatre at Northwestern and her MA in Communication Studies (Performance Studies focus) at LSU.
Photo Courtesy of Misty Saribal
Misty Saribal (she/hers) is a multimedia performance artist, writer, educator, and activist who explores roles for performance and digital storytelling in wider discourse about prison abolition and liberatory world-building. She presently co-facilitates a study group about abolitionist responses to gender and sexual violence attended by campus organizers across Turtle Island. Her scholarship challenges higher education ties to policing and prisons and supports transformative justice responses to racial, gender, economic, and sexual violence. Misty is a doctoral candidate at Louisiana State University.
Photo Courtesy of Hon. Dr. Bonny McDonald
Hon. Dr. Bonny McDonald
Hon. Dr. Bonny McDonald (she/her) is a feminist, environmental justice, and radical performance pedagogy scholar and activist, whose trauma-informed performance projects deal with issues from family loss due to environmental toxins in Cancer alley, to families impacted by immigration crises and experiencing the violence of state-forced separation. Bonny’s award-winning performance and installation project ‘Sacred Waste’ is legendary in East Baton Rouge K-12 schools, and has created community recycling and clean-up projects across school districts, at Fringe festivals, and even Mardi Gras parades. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from LSU and is currently an assistant professor in the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Southern University Baton Rouge.