Insurgent Learning Workshops

Workshop #1
Harm Free Zone (HFZ)

Community accountability refers to the ability and desire of community members to adopt a harm-free way of thinking. This includes developing the mechanisms to prevent harm, to intervene directly when harm occurs, to repair harm amongst community members, and to transform individual and collective relationships.

HFZ is a transformative justice framework submitted as an anti-violence & community accountability training rendered as an Improvised Music workshop. As such, we examine the HFZ framework, interrogate harms in our midsts, and perform harm-free narratives.

Elements of the workshop include:

• A discussion and analysis of three types of harm that persist in our society.
• A working definition of community
• The four pillars of HFZ: Prevention, Intervention, Transformation & Reparation
• The activation of a HFZ
• Virtues of Improvisation (on and beyond the limits of the bandstand)
• Timed, small group collective improvisations and group responses to narratives in the music.

Products include:

• Participants will learn about HFZ produced by Critical Resistance, a national, grassroots, anti-Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) organizations and Anarchist of Color (NYC) in the early 2000’s.
• Participants will address the types of harm in their community and experiences and strategies towards activating safer communities.
• Participants will perform collective improvisations based in developing a new language for documentation.

Workshop #2
Simultaneous Multi-Dimensionality (SMD).

SMD is a synthesis of African, percussion ensemble dynamics by Ghanaian musicologist, Dr. Willie Anku, rendered as the image below. I have appropriated this image as my contribution to updating and reinserting the secret Underground Railroad (UGRR) quilt codes into everyday life. The codes were a series of quilt block patterns which emblemized actual risk taking and solidarity with fugitives during the period of legal, chattel  slavery in the Americas. For the workshop, we will examine the canon of codes, fugitivity in our midst, and perform narratives of solidarity.

Elements of the workshop include:

• An introduction to the UGRR codes;
• An introduction to timed, small group collective improvisations, and group responses to narratives in the music.

Products include:

• Participants will learn about the use of tactical media, or recontextualized cultural forms (codes, Negro spirituals);
• Participants perform a new language for solidarity codes for documentation.

Workshop #3
Solidarity Economics (SE)

The SE is a framework of concepts to connect “common causes to build systemic economic transformation and strategic cooperation from the grassroots” (US Solidarity Economy Network). For the workshop, we will examine the virtues of Improvisation as a new, creative economy.

Elements of the workshop include:

• An introduction to the concepts and terms of SE;
• An introduction to feminist, Chicana scholar Chela Sandoval’s “Five Technologies” from her seminal book, Methodologies of the Oppressed;
• Perform timed, collective improvisations;
• Respond to music in terms of the communicative behavior performed on stage.

Products include:

• Collective synthesis of SE concepts;
• Collective synthesis of the “Five Technologies”;
• Performance and responses for documentation.