Apply to black/water: The Harlem Immersion
JPS LAB - black/water: Worlding, Wilding, and Wandering as EcoWomanist Praxis
Application Guidelines
Program Dates: April 1, 2024 - May 25, 2024
About JPS Lab
JPS Lab is a hybrid creative development initiative for emerging, established and advanced performers, organizers, and educators.
About black/water
The course, black/water: Worlding, Wilding, and Wandering as EcoWomanist Praxis, offers an experiential exploration of environmentally-conscious, performance devising and sacred site activation. The course builds on Golden's current field work, ritual art practice, and cultural organizing efforts. Admitted students will explore a range of topics including theatrical ceremony, womanist spirituality, ritual poetics, and collective approaches to climate reparations. The course features lectures, workshops, readings, viewings, and fieldwork in HARLEM and beyond. Each participant will be required to complete an individual and a group project, along with required readings, writing, performances, and field trips.
No previous professional artistic or academic experience is required. The Lab prioritizes Black, Indigenous, women, femmes, and gender-expansive folks of the global majority. All are welcome to apply.
Course Themes
Womanist Ritual Performance
In the tradition of…
Alice Walker, Nina Simone, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Kimberlee Crenshaw, Maxine Waters, Harriet Tubman, Alice Coltrane, Alexis De Veaux, Barbara Ann Teer, Ntozake Shange, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Elizabeth Catlett, and many more ancestors, elders, and folks of all ages conjuring freedom.
black/water examines the cultural and sociopolitical impact of womanist and Black feminist theatre and experimental performance from the 1970s to the movement for Black lives. The term “womanist,” coined by Alice Walker, is rooted in the cultural and political work of Black women's freedom. We will explore womanist and Black feminist performance praxis as a holistic framework for creative activism, movement building, and liberatory transformation through a range of creative texts and media.
Research and Ethnography
Participants will utilize ethnographic research methods for building solo performance work. These forms of research will include gathering oral histories through interviews, site visits, and field work notation. This practice will be the foundational process for devising each participant's project proposals, final presentations and performances.
Environmental Justice
Participants will learn about visioning techniques that center an ecowomanist approach to supporting and advancing the movement for environmental justice. We will study the Red, Black, and Green New Deal as a framework for political and cultural organizing, among other approaches and texts. We will also explore how others have created alternative infrastructures to care for communities in the midst of climate crisis and ecological resilience. Participants will leave with a clear and foundational understanding of how they can make behavioral and institutional changes that support the thriving of people, communities, and systems.
Reparations
The program views reparations as an approach to holistic and sustained community repair that encompasses transformation in the cultural, political, economic, and social beliefs and systems. We envision reparations as a non-reactive, autonomous, and generative process that is inextricably connected to the throughline of diasporic Black liberation. Participants will participate in strategic and creative study that deeply considers the systems of mutual aid, support, and well-being which have guided our communities historically, in this contemporary moment and into the liberated Black future.
Harlem in Focus
Centering June Jordan’s intersectional design (Skyrise for Harlem) for architectural liberation in Harlem, iteration of black/water focuses on the rich movement for environmental justice and climate reparations in the village of Harlem. Harlem has long been a space for visioning new possibilities and pathways for Black liberation and wellness. The neighborhood will allow us to consider the ways in which the natural world and the built environment support each other and our larger community. Through garden visits, meditative walks and salons with activists and healers, we will learn about and activate sites that have supported these movements and gather information to support our overall thematic exploration and creative development.
black/water participants will engage in the following critical questions:
What is the relationship between emancipation and land justice?
How can artistic practice and performance transform our relationship to our environment?
How can womanist and Black feminist performance practices and rituals affirm and advance radical and reciprocal relationships with the natural world?
What constitutes a womanist and Black feminist powered economic system?
What is a womanist model for economic and climate reparations?
By the end of the black/water course, participants will gain insight into methodologies, strategies, and creative embodiment techniques that advance womanist praxis, climate justice, and reparations within their own personal practices. The course concludes with a series of collective and individual presentations. Participants will leave this experience equipped to build collective artistic and movement-sustaining practices.
Participation and successful completion in JPS Lab includes:
Attend all sessions
Complete all performances, projects, course materials and events
Engaging in independent and group study
Complete (1)Group presentation
Complete (1) Solo performance
Please note: select participants may be invited to join Jupiter Performance Studio or perform at public events.
Who Should Apply?
The JPS Lab accepts participants, 23 years of age or older, into the virtual group until we are at capacity. This opportunity is open to both emerging and established educators, activists, and performance artists regardless of age, gender and ability. Community participants of various levels of performance, educational, or community organizing experience are highly encouraged to apply. We are building a creative learning community of folks, from emerging to advanced, who will be excited to learn both independently and with others.
Applicants should be interested in creative exploration and public scholarship rooted in activism. They should also be interested in creating work that demonstrates critical exploration and deep love for Black culture and legacies of Black liberation that actively engage individuals, families, and the constellation we are creating through this course. Applicants should be excited to both learn independently and as part of a community. Priority will be given to Black, Indigenous, and people of the global majority.
Program Calendar
JPS Lab meets virtually via Google Meet and in person in April and May 2024. All times are EDT.
Applications Launch: January 22, 2024
Scholarship Application Due: February 17, 2024
All Applications Due: March 20, 2024 (late applications will be considered.)
Notification of Acceptance: March 27, 2024
Final Payment Due: April 1, 2024
Tuition:
Scholarship Rate: 500.00 (Payment Due March 1)
Sliding Scale: 800.00 - 1000.00 (Payment Due April 1)
Late Registration: 1500.00 (Payment Due April 10)
Pre-Immersion
Independent Study | Upon Tuition Retrieval
Immersion 1
12:00 PM - 4:00 PM | April 13, 2024 (virtual)
Immersion 2
12:00 PM - 4:00 PM | April 20, 2024 (virtual)
Immersion 3
12:00 PM - 4:00 PM | April 27, 2024 (virtual)
Immersion 4
12:00 PM - 4:00 PM | May 4, 2024 (in-person)
Immersion 5
12:00 PM - 4:00 PM | May 5, 2024 (in-person)
Immersion 6
12:00 PM - 6:30 PM | May 11, 2024 (in-person)
Immersion 7
Times TBD | May 25, 2024 (in-person)
*All dates are mandatory. Participants are expected to attend all meeting dates and public events.
Contact Information
919.283.9032
jupiterisfreedom@gmail.com
FAQ’s
Yes! We will accept late applications.
Yes! We will accept payment plans.
No! You do not have to be in Harlem for the entire course. In person sessions begin in May.
No! You do not have to be a professional artist or scholar.
Yes! You will receive a syllabus/course of study.
Watch the info video to learn more: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4gO-iVuBuq/?igsh=dHFibjUwdjhpd2h6
Course Host
Jupiter Performance Studio
Ceremony. Spectacle. Flight.
Established in 2020 by Ebony Noelle Golden, Jupiter Performance Studio (JPS) conjures theatrical ceremonies rooted in diasporic Black cultural, spiritual and performance traditions. JPS’ work activates stages, streets and sacred sites as spaces of liberation. JPS supports the movement for environmental justice and climate reparations through Watering (W)hole, its community engagement cosmology.
Recent projects include: The Art and Survival Fellowship + Festival, produced in collaboration with Double Edge Theatre and The Keeping, commissioned by Weeksville Heritage Center with major support from Creative Capital. Current work includes: In The Name Of The Mother Tree (ITNO), commissioned by Apollo Theater and co-produced with National Black Theatre with major support from Double Edge Theatre, Green Apu at Central Mesa and the National Theater Project. Indoor and site-specific iterations of ITNO will premiere and tour between 2024 and 2026.
Instagram: jupiterperformancestudio.
Website: jupiterperformancestudio.com
Email: jupiterisfreedom@gmail.com
Previous Programmatic Examples
free/conjure/Black
Program Description: free/conjure/Black is a communal mediation, a spirit-sourced intervention, a virtual ring shout calling forth a perpetual and inevitable throughline of prismatic Black freedom. free/conjure/Black centers the rich legacy of the Weeksville community and movements for sovereignty in the United States.
The Homecoming: A Creative Emancipation Mini-Festival
Program Description: The Homecoming: A Creative Emancipation Mini-Festival welcomes community to explore the intersection of art and emancipation in the time of now. The festival features conversations, performances, live music, food, and fellowship.
The Homecoming: Joy. Ritual. Resistance.
Program Description: The Homecoming: Joy. Ritual. Resistance. is orchestrated by Artist-in-Residence Ebony Noelle Golden and is co-produced by Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. The Homecoming: Joy. Ritual. Resistance. is a mini-festival that centers public joy rituals, celebration, conversations with artists, thinkers, organizers, and community members. Today’s program features public performances by artists who have been exploring joy as praxis with Ebony since April, an artist talk, and a panel conversation with community artists.
black/water: the digital ceremony (2020)
Program Description: black/water is a micro-commissioning opportunity for seven performing artists to create new work that centers on diasporic Blackness, waterways, waterscapes, water rites, water rituals, and water routes/roots. This digital ceremony, BDAC's first public broadcast, is an extended meditation on water and community. The ceremony, composed of performances, conversations and rituals, asks viewers to continue to imagine and envision a relationship with water that is expansive, fluid, emerging and transformative. This is a space to think about the bodies of water we have crossed ancestrally, literally, and symbolically.
