REPARATIONS365 RECHARGE

A DAY OF HEALING AND MOVEMENT
WITH MINKA BROOKLYN, RAKIA! AND MARGUERITE HEMMINGS
June 24, 2018

JACK partners with healing practitioners from MINKA Brooklyn as well as dance artists RAKIA! and Marguerite Hemmings for a day of healing and movement as part of JACK’s newly-extended series, Reparations365, exploring distributive justice for Black Americans.

JACK launches the day with an invitation for people of color to reserve free one-on-one healing sessions with MINKA practitioners, followed by a group healing session at 3 pm, open to all. At 5 pm, after time for food and conversation, dance collective RAKIA! offers a performative and interactive exploration of the relationship between play and healing, and choreographer Marguerite Hemmings ends the day with a ritual experience centering spirit and connection in movement.

This event is a re-affirmation of JACK's collaboration with our community to explore and take action toward reparations through arts and activism. Throughout Reparations365, it has become clear that centering healing while staying in motion – moving intentionally toward repair, reconciliation, and justice – is paramount to activating reparations.

THE FLOW:

MINKA BROOKLYN
1:00pm - 3:30pm
Healing practitioners from MINKA Brooklyn offer free one-on-one healing services for people of color.
Group sessions:
1:30pm - 2:30pm: Breathwork with Regina
2:30pm to 3:15pm: Ancestral Healing through Art-Making

CREATIVE GATHERING
3:30pm - 5:00pm
In the transition from the healing services to the movement experiences, the room will be open for snacks, drinks, music, and conversation.

PERFORMANCES
5 pm - 8 pm
NOT IT! from RAKIA!
Movers: Rakia Seaborn, Pia Murray & Kendra Ross
Sound: Austin Guerrazzi
RAKIA! shares Not It!, an offshoot of her reparations-related dance piece, myeyesdontcrynomore, which was part of Reparations365 this past fall. In this piece, RAKIA! offers a performative and interactive exploration of the relationship between play and healing.

Marguerite Hemmings & Co.
Featuring: Courtney Cook, Jaimé Dzandu, Katrina Reid & Italy Welton
Marguerite Hemmings, who launched our Reparations365 series last February 2017 with to make ready again, gathers a group of movers and musicians to offer a ritual experience centering spirit and connection in movement.

MORE INFO

MINKA Brooklyn is an inclusive space located in Prospect Lefferts Gardens/Flatbush for healing and therapeutic professionals to host workshops, meetings, lectures, meditations, and classes. MINKA was founded by a group of friends, Rebecca, Ron & Aki

Marguerite Hemmings (Choreographer) specializes in street styles, social dances, hip hop, and dancehall. She currently teaches Experimental Dancehall, a class that looks at the power of African diasporan social dance through a lens of dancehall/reggae culture and music. Marguerite’s choreographic work centers around liberation. She has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Gibney, Dancing While Black, and University Settlement to further her work as an artist/organizer. As for her latest projects, she has been working on a multimedia endeavor called ‘we free’ that explores the millennial generation’s take on liberation. The first installment of 'we free' was shown at Gibney Dance's Double Plus Series, curated by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Since, iterations of 'we free' have been shown at Brooklyn Museum, BRIC Arts Media, and MOCADA.

Rakia Seaborn (Choreographer) A native of Detroit, Seaborn is a choreographer and performer whose work has appeared at Dixon Place, La MaMa, The Tank, AUNTS, The Bessie Schönberg Dance Theatre, JACK and Brooklyn Studios for Dance. She makes dances about women through a literary lens, to rewrite history, redefine the present and offer images of a more just future. Seaborn has worked with Dianne McIntyre, Rashaun Mitchell, Jodi Melnick, Michael Cross Burke, Tyler Ashley, and PMMDC. She is currently a Guest-Artist-In-Residence at Trinity/La MaMa. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2007, earning a Bachelors of Art in Dance with a concentration in Choreography, and in 2014, she gained an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College.

Reparations365 is a series on the topic of reparations for Black Americans, launched by JACK in February 2017 originally for one year, and renewed this past February for another year of programming. Filled with performances, community conversations, panel discussions and interactive workshops, the series is our effort to address head-on the challenge of racial discrimination in our city – not only of the past, but for current injustices in housing, policing, hiring and incarceration. We created this series as a way for residents to come together and insist upon constitutional and social protections that have not been followed by law enforcement, landlords and elected officials, and talk about repairing the injustices that have already been perpetrated. Through the series, participants discover multiple ways to engage with the topic, all with an intention of offering tangible take-ways for participants and a concrete way forward.