Workshop Session 4
Friday 1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. | Friday 3 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Saturday 1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. | Saturday 3 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Spoken-Word Education Strategy Sharing Session
As long as we have artists and educators from around the country in the same place at the same time, let’s share some educational strategies, engaging writing prompts and stories from the classroom. How can we be more effective as educators who use spoken-word? This will be a space for brainstorming and resource-sharing.
Guante is a hip hop artist, two-time National Poetry Slam champion, social justice activist and educator. He’s been featured in URB Magazine’s “Next 1000” list, City Pages’ “Artists of the Year” list, CMJ and the Progressive. Guante also founded and manages the MN Activist Project, freelances as a music writer, curates the Hip Hop Against Homophobia concert series, facilitates writing and performance workshops for youth and serves as arts coordinator of the Canvas, a Saint Paul teen arts center. Guante is signed to Tru Ruts/Speakeasy Records.
In the Global Arena Pt 2: Revolutionary Art and Your Role as an Artist
What happens when an artist no longer creates art for art’s sake? This is a multimedia workshop meant to explore various disciplines that propel social justice movements, discuss the freedom of artists’ expression amidst countries experiencing censorship and repression, and questions the role of artists in the international arena. We will also address the various ways spoken word artists and poets can broaden the scope and reach of their work through community involvement.
Patricia Nguyen is passionate about the work of healing and transformation. Born and raised in Chicago. She is currently in the Mekong Delta region in Vietnam on Fulbright- working at a community college, hoping to empower people’s voices through self-expression- cultivating critical and creative thinking and action.
Hanalei Ramos is a writer, cultural worker, and community activist. She authored Letters to Martha, Foiled Stars, and Guns and Tampons: A History of Violence Against Women I Know, commissioned by the Asian Arts Initiative and the National Asian American Theater Festival. Ramos is also a founder of Filipinas for Rights and Empowerment (www.firenyc.org) in New York City.
Gender Identity, Creativity, and Justice: An Exploratory Workshop
In this workshop we will attempt to make sense of gender identity, feminist thinking, and social justice, in both personal and political ways. We will engage in a variety of activities – sharing stories, listening, writing, moving – in order to help gain clarity and learn from each other. Workshop facilitator Joe Kadi will answer questions about his personal gender journey, from female to male.
Joe Kadi is a writer, teacher, and editor who lives in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. He edited the groundbreaking anthology Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists in 1994. This book, the first of its kind, gave voice to the histories, experiences, and visions of Arab feminists. Kadi lived in the Twin Cities for most of the 1990s and participated with arts organizations such as Asian American Renaissance and Mizna. A long-time member of the GLBTQ community, Kadi now lives as a transgender man. He is a musician, a yoga student, environmentalist, and a teacher of Women’s Studies at two Canadian universities.
taking back MY body: taking back OUR bodies (Come as you are)
Why are you drawn toward spoken word? Spoken word is powerful, enriching, moving, and risky. The body is also powerful, but more often than not it is seen as something to be ashamed of or awkward. Spoken word and the body cannot exist without the other. We will explore a range of movement from the presenter, and the participants themselves. Through a thorough warm up of the body, we will explore what it means to build community through movement while simultaneously encouraging each other to take our own physical risks ranging from performing to day-to-day activities. Participants are encouraged to wear comfortable clothing in which they can move freely in.
Kurt Robert Kim Blomberg is a South Korean Adoptee who grew up in Mounds View, Minnesota. Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theater is the current company Kurt works with but has had the opportunity to work with Black Label Movement, Shaprio & Smith, Time Track Productions, and the Minnesota Opera. He is on staff as a dance teacher at FAIR downtown and also runs the after school dance program. When Kurt is not in the studio or classroom, he finds time to study Capoeira and Aikido.
Kinh T. Vu (TK) is a doctoral fellow in music education at the University of Minnesota and an Imagining America PAGE Fellow (Publicly Active Graduate Education). After teaching music in public schools for eleven years, Vu’s current research is centered on Hmong Hip-Hop, youth culture, and their relationship to critical pedagogy.
FILM SCREENING: “Travel in Spirals”: Reconnecting Roots with Words
“Travel in Spirals,” directed and edited by Tou SaiKo Lee and Justin Schell, is a documentary that tells the story of Hmong hip-hop MC, spoken word poet, and community organizer Tou SaiKo Lee and his journey back to his birthplace of Thailand. Born on the Nongkhai refugee camp, his parents fled Laos after the Vietnam War and came to America when Tou was two months old. Taking its title from the spirals in Hmong paj ntaub, “Travel in Spirals” documents Tou’s journey to the source of himself and his heritage almost 30 years after he left.
Tou SaiKo Lee is a spoken word artist, mentor, hip hop emcee and community organizer in St. Paul, Minnesota. He teams up with his grandmother Youa Chang who does the traditional Hmong art of kwv txiaj (Hmong Poetry Chanting) to form the group “Fresh Traditions.” Lee received the Jerome Foundation Travel Study Grant in 2008 and is a 2009 Intermedia Arts VERVE Spoken Word grant recipient. In 2008 he was featured in an online video documentary in the New York Times called “Hmong Hip Hop Heritage.”
