Listen to the Land: The People Can Fly Info Session
You are invited to a ritual of listening to the land followed by a porch talk circle-up to learn more about The People Can Fly: A #DignityInProcess Black Dreaming Exodus. Learn more about this four-year land-responsive folktellin', the ancestral call for a movement centering QTGNC+ Afro-Indigenous medicine folq, and how you can get involved in this liberatory process.
*RSVP REQUIRED (max capacity 20 people):
Please email dignityinprocess@gmail.com or FB message Che Elisabeth with name, email, and whether you will be bringing an additional guest. Thank you!
Some notes about the Land:
+The site is a former sugarcane plantation, on sacred Bulbancha
+Depending on weather, you may want to wear layers and bring rain boots
+Bug spray provided
+Please arrive as chemical and fragrance free as possible to honor our chemically-sensitive community
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The People Can Fly: A #DignityInProcess Black Dreaming Exodus is an interdisciplinary four-year freedom ritual that sets the foundation to reimagine movement organizing as we know it. It is inspired by an African American folktale describing the liberation of enslaved peoples who fly away from a plantation in a vertically spiraling Ring Shout. Afro-futurist sound and movement scores processing around altar installations queer the traditional folktale, The People Could Fly, through a deconstructed investigation of Gulf South cultural technology, the Ring Shout’s core elements as a framework for liberating land, spirit, and collective body. Collaborative organizing across movement intersections create opportunities for dialogue, healing, resource mapping, and creative solution-building between QTGNC+ Black and Indigenous farmers, medicine folq, healers, activists, scientists, and culture bearers throughout Louisiana. Taking place on sites of Afro-Indigenous resistance, trauma, and collective memory, this four-part performance-ritual folktellin’ culminates in a mass, public Ring Shout action on a sacred origin site—calling in a new kind of movement sustained by land-responsive ancestral healing.
*Please note: the sacred sites for each Ritual Layer are intentionally unnamed below, to be revealed during The People Can Fly opening ceremonies in 2020
Ritual Layer 1 (water) explores the Ring Shout element “The Moan” aka “The Shout”- conjuring a Queer Shout House where Precolonial Afro-Indigenous Nonbinary Origin Stories dream a world beyond racist-heteropatriarchal normativity into being.
Ritual Layer 2 (earth) explores Ring Shout element “Shufflin’/ Stompin’/ Steppin’”- a Fannie Lou Hamer inspired dinner series, Take This Hamer, celebrates kitchen-table-organizing through sharing a harvest of folktellings, heirloom seeds, and field rhythms of QTGNC+ Black & Indigenous farmers and root workers. The dinners culminate in a polyrhythmic body-percussion ritual on a plantation offering culturally-grounded tools for healing ancestral trauma related to land-based violence.
Ritual Layer 3 (fire) explores Ring Shout element “The Freedom Call-and-Response”-a collaboration with local Land Trusts and community stakeholders in a neighborhood severely impacted by climate gentrification and environmental racism. A street corner Freedom School investigates marooning spaces and builds local strategies towards collective land ownership.
Ritual Layer 4 (air) explores Ring Shout element “The Counterclockwise Circle”- a mass public Ring Shout art action on sacred origin-site acts as a culminating Rites-of-Passage. QTGNC+ Afro-Indigenous medicine folq lead an intersectional movement of culturally-responsive land stewardship that ignites an Underground Railroad of marooning spaces.
Follow the process at: http://che-art.life/the-people-can-fly
