LIBERATORY WORKSHOPS & TRAININGS

All workshops & trainings are interactive, multidisciplinary, and utilize Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Praxis as the applied framework. To inquire about bringing ChE to your school, community, or organization click here

#DIGNITYINPROCESS: Ofún

A circle gathering of Black Lives Matter organizers, arts administrators, healing arts practitioners, and Wisdom Keepers in a merging of art with activism. This series asks, how can the arts and social justice campaigns work collaboratively to enrich our communities? #DignityInProcess: Ofun incorporates somatic ancestral practices, multi-generational storytelling, and creative strategic planning to manifest empowering models of Black leadership in arts administration, activism, and beyond!

BREAKING THE MOLD: Embodying Race & Gender Justice

These art and movement integrated trainings utilize guerilla theatre, visual mapping, and embodied storytelling to cultivate a deeper understanding of LGBTQ topics that include SOGIE (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Expression), intersections of race and gender identity, unpacking binarism, decolonized gender frameworks, and participating in #QTBlackLivesMatter. Breaking the Mold workshops are available for youth and adults. This workshop series asks, how can we break free from limiting paradigms and embrace the complexity of our whole selves and community?

MIXED IN THE MOVEMENT: Multiracial Identity in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter

A workshop series exploring mixed race identity in the time of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Participants embody an Afro-Indigenous framework for activism to decolonize our social justice practices. This workshop series celebrates Creole, Afro-Diasporic, multi-racial, intersectional identity evolution through ancestral reverence. Participants dive into an immersive experience incorporating collaborative storytelling, creative writing, and movement to unpack identity politics. Mixed in the Movement asks, how do we embody a movement of liberation that celebrates the dignity of our whole selves?

HEALING ACTION: Healing Acculturation & Impacts of Oppression

Healing Actions gather intentional circles that create a safe space to grieve, process, and move from fear to action. Together participants connect to ancestral wisdom, inciting the names of freedom fighters who have come before us. This is a space to ground in the truth that we are not alone on our journey of healing the wounds of systemic oppression. Healing Actions support communities in returning to our power to transform and create a new world through accessing the resiliency building tools of our ancestors.

ART (in)ACTION: Art, Activism, and Mindfulness

This workshop explores the intersections of creative practice and mindfulness in building social justice movements and direct actions. Art (in)Action provides opportunities for activists, artists, wellness practitioners, and culture bearers to network, collaborate, and share skills across disciplines--utilizing art as a vehicle for social and political transformation. Participants learn from historical and current movements embracing art, street theatre, and nonviolent inaction as tools of resistance. Participants learn organizing strategies rooted in Afro-Indigenous values of sustainability and ancestral healing. Through ritual, theatre, collective artmaking, and meditation, we collaboratively vision creative alternatives to replace a failing system. This workshop explores the power of the imagination in embodying liberation in the midst of oppressive circumstances.

BLACK MODERN: Healing through Afrocentric Movement

Explore the history of movement and music as it evolves through the African Diaspora. How has the migration of Black peoples shaped and influenced traditional cultural movement and Western Contemporary dance forms? How does the everyday life of the diverse peoples across the Diaspora shape the way we move on and off the dance floor? Black Modern explores the movement created by and through Black bodies as it spans across genres and cultural dance forms. Expect to sweat, shake, and groove to high energy routines fusing soul, Afro-House, hip hop, Afro-Modern, and traditional dances of the African Diaspora!

MASTER CLASS with ChE

Ecstatic voices rise, feet stomping, hands clapping to rhythms made by breath and body. Our people have shuffled, danced, and sung their way in circles of multigenerational, intertribal healing for ancestral time immemorial. Root yourself in the medicine of the ring shout in this Master Class with artist/ activist ChE! Together we conjure the egun through ritual, embodied storytelling, and Black Modern dance. This Master’s Class is an immersion into Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Practice*, a framework for art activism and social innovation piloted through ChE’s current platform, #DignityInProcess. This nationally touring body of work responds to the Black Lives Matter movement merging ancestral healing, art as direct action, and intersectional identity evolution within the Queer/ Afro-Indigenous Diaspora.