A Call for Contact Improvisation Citizens
I am happy to announce that I’m presenting “A Call for Contact Improvisation Citizens” at The Future of CI international online conference this coming Friday, April 23, 8PM CDT Chicago time. Conference registration is sliding scale, and presentations will be available online for a month afterwards.
In this hour-long presentation, we’ll move through times we felt safe and brave in contact improvisation jams. We’ll explore how active jam citizens and community accountability lay the foundation for safer brave spaces. We’ll look at the jam guidelines, community practices, group governance, and harm response processes that undergird safer brave spaces.
While I’m looking at the role of group citizens in creating safer brave spaces specifically in contact improvisation jams, the concepts are applicable for many voluntary communities in which people risk vulnerability. If you’re interested in creating safer brave space and you’re not a contact improvisation dancer, direct message me about participating in my practice run through this coming week.
I will be weaving my personal story throughout the presentation as it informs my thinking and is as an example from which I hope we can learn. My thinking on the necessity of active citizens in creating safer brave spaces has evolved through my experience in the Chicago Contact Improvisation Jam, where I experienced nonconsensual sexualized touchin 2014. While the initial violation was upsetting, as is often the case, it was the community response that has been devastating. The leaders allowed the man who violated me to return without my knowledge, much less an accountability process with me or others he had harmed. This year, the current jam leadership offered me an apology, which I found lacking. This journey has inspired me to envision how change might occur. I’ll share what I’ve come up with in the presentation.
© 2021 Michele Beaulieux … Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you are free to share and adapt as long as you attribute to Michele Beaulieux, don’t use for commercial purposes, and use this same license. And if you do share, I’d love to know! I continue to revise, so to avoid sharing an outdated version, I recommend linking to this page, where I provide the date of the current iteration: 4.17.21
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Originally published at http://reservoirofhope.home.blog on April 17, 2021.
