BRAIN CAFE WITH EVERETT
The Brain Café is a public forum that brings together artists, scholars, experts, and community members to share their knowledge and experiences in an open dialogue with the audience.
This Brain Café will ask questions about the roles that race and class play in shaping one’s interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in America. The evening will begin with a performance by spoken word poet Christopher Johnson, hip hop dancer Sokeo Ros, and musician Rosenhrantz Riemer. Christopher has direct experience with the prison system and his poetry will touch upon some of those experiences.
David Ellison, a public defender in Fall River, will share his experiences working within the justice system. He provides legal representation and advocacy to indigent clients who are charged with criminal offenses within the final jurisdiction of the District Court of Massachusetts. He has a unique perspective on the justice system and its shortfalls from his position on the front lines, working to provide low-income defendants the best legal aid he possibly can.
The evening will also include a presentation from Steven Dy a youth organizer from Prysm (Providence Youth Student Movement). Prysm is a community organization that challenges and supports Southeast Asian youth to become leaders, organizers, and critical thinkers by offering educational workshops, leadership opportunities, mentorship, and oversight of youth-led community organizing projects. Steven Dy worked extensively on a campaign to end racial profiling in Providence.
The Brain Café will conclude with an open conversation with the audience about the issues that were brought up during the presentations.
This Brain Café will ask questions about the roles that race and class play in shaping one’s interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in America. The evening will begin with a performance by spoken word poet Christopher Johnson, hip hop dancer Sokeo Ros, and musician Rosenhrantz Riemer. Christopher has direct experience with the prison system and his poetry will touch upon some of those experiences.
David Ellison, a public defender in Fall River, will share his experiences working within the justice system. He provides legal representation and advocacy to indigent clients who are charged with criminal offenses within the final jurisdiction of the District Court of Massachusetts. He has a unique perspective on the justice system and its shortfalls from his position on the front lines, working to provide low-income defendants the best legal aid he possibly can.
The evening will also include a presentation from Steven Dy a youth organizer from Prysm (Providence Youth Student Movement). Prysm is a community organization that challenges and supports Southeast Asian youth to become leaders, organizers, and critical thinkers by offering educational workshops, leadership opportunities, mentorship, and oversight of youth-led community organizing projects. Steven Dy worked extensively on a campaign to end racial profiling in Providence.
The Brain Café will conclude with an open conversation with the audience about the issues that were brought up during the presentations.
CONTACT IMPROV JAM WITH STEPHANIE TURNER
Contact Improvisation is an evolving system of movement initiated in 1972 by American choreographer Steve Paxton. The improvised dance form is based on the communication between two moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their motion—gravity, momentum, inertia. The body, in order to open to these sensations, learns to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement. Practice includes rolling, falling, being upside down, following a physical point of contact, supporting and giving weight to a partner.Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one's basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened. —early definition by Steve Paxton and others, 1970s, from CQ Vol. 5:1, Fall 1979
Demonstration
Shura Baryshnikov, Jeff Doff and Stephanie Turner
Lab and Jam
Stephanie Turner will lead an introduction to the practice of Contact Improvisation including weight sharing, communicating through the skin, and following impulses for improvised movement. A facilitated score will lead us as a group into an open jam to explore, play and improvise to live music.
A Contact Improvisation Jam is an open time for the practice of CI. All skill levels and ages are welcome.
Demonstration
Shura Baryshnikov, Jeff Doff and Stephanie Turner
Lab and Jam
Stephanie Turner will lead an introduction to the practice of Contact Improvisation including weight sharing, communicating through the skin, and following impulses for improvised movement. A facilitated score will lead us as a group into an open jam to explore, play and improvise to live music.
A Contact Improvisation Jam is an open time for the practice of CI. All skill levels and ages are welcome.