The Whole Time... A Redwoods Rasanblaj Epic Poem on 7 Pwen
You are invited to an extraordinary public performance, live streamed from U.C. Santa Cruz at 6pm PT, 9pm ET, April 16, 2024. At 1am UTC, April 17, 2024. Link to live stream registration below.
featuring Gina Athena Ulysse with improv dance by Linda Isabelle Francois Obas
Inspired by Sinéad O'Connor and 11th Hour’s caffeine chronicles, this epic stream-of-consciousness ethnographic poem meditates on origins, a theory of everything, the dark arts, shadow work in the upside-down arboreal classrooms in these redwoods on Indigenous Land of the so-called holy cross.
Lacing ancestral chants, cosmos spaciousness, and history with misfit tales, this non-psychedelic surrealist journey explores the contours of linear and all-around time in search of aliveness on scorched earth while ruminating on the impossibility of all sentient beings everywhere experiencing peace among the plantocracy with their disdain for brilliance, where praxis is a floating signifier, and our humanity is routinely questioned.
April 16th public performance, free & live streamed from Santa Cruz, CA. 6 pm PT, 9 pm ET, 1 am UTC
Register here: https://calendar.ucsc.edu/
Commendation from Charles Knight: I have known Gina Athena for nearly two decades. I met her at a large feminist research conference in New York City. There was an end-of-the-day reception, which featured a spoken word performance. I had no idea what to expect. It turned out that Gina Athena was accompanied by spirits who proceeded to travel across the crowded room right into me, the powers of these spirits experienced viscerally. The next day, Gina Athena sought me out. Apparently, she had witnessed my encounter and meeting with the spirits. She thanked me for receiving her message! I was astonished she had focused her attention on me among the hundreds in the room, and I fumbled for a response to her. I said something like, “You are so very welcome. I had an amazing experience.” Ever since, Gina Athena and I have been collaborators and friends.
The performance on April 16th is called the 57th Annual Faculty Research Lecture at the University of California Santa Cruz. I assure you, you have never before heard a lecture like this one. Prepare to be unsettled in a way that can bring you new clarity and even healing. Between Gina Athena, dancer Linda Isabelle Francois Obas, and the spirits of the Redwoods which may well reveal themselves for the occasion, this event promises to be fabulous. As Gina Athena reminds us, quoting Suzanne Césaire, "Be in Permanent readiness for the Marvelous."
April 16th public performance, free & live streamed from Santa Cruz, CA. 6 pm PT, 9 pm ET, 1 am UTC - register here: https://calendar.ucsc.edu/
Bio + Statement - Gina Athena Ulysse
The impulse to create began with surrender to sound. I wanted to be a singer at a very young age in Haiti. Migration spun the quest for song into rock star dreams, poetry, and a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology. Today, as an artist and educator (who has been teaching in universities for over 21 years), the work I do is a direct response to the calls I receive, that is, whenever they make themselves known. Using a multitude of forms, I explore the borders and spaces between ethnography and performance, physical and textual materials, seen and unseen forces, unmasking our fierce urgency to identify, name, and reckon with the power and vulnerabilities lodged in unprocessed horrors of colonialism and empire.
I came to both my performance and visual art practice as a Black feminist ethnographer who pushes the boundaries and challenges the tension between humanities and social science that undergirds anthropology’s schizophrenic standing as a discipline because no subject lives life along disciplinary lines. Still-point. Rooted in the foundation of my being, I seek beauty and grace with humility, however haunting or ephemeral to confront the visceral too often absent in structural analyses. In response to the muses, I play with “recycled ethnographic collectibles,” my projects mix the tangible with the intangible. I commune with the dead and the living adapt at remixing natural and sacred objects, archived and contemporary histories, narratives and theories often with popular songs, laced with Vodou chants. My fondness for numbers and statistics remains grounded in Marassa logic 1+1=3. The aesthetics in my feminist praxis stem from an organic approach to rasanblaj (a gathering of ideas, things, people, spirits) that is fueled by ancestral, liberation, and love imperatives. My aim is to access/face our collective dehumanization… engage with the present… to recreate a fully integrated being without leaving the body behind. I am still an inspired dreamer who wishes to make some contribution to a more just world.
Gina Athena Ulysse is based in Santa Cruz, California where she is professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC. A photographer, poet, chanteuse, and cultural anthropologist who is always writing something, she has presented her works in numerous colleges and universities nationally and internationally. She has also performed in artistic venues, including The Bowery, Brecht Forum, The British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Court Theatre, Gorki Theatre, House of World Cultures in Berlin, LaMaMa, Lyric Stage Theatre, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, MoMA Salon, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia among others. In 2020, she was invited to the Biennale of Sydney.
In these times, she’s engaged in a RedwoodsRasanblaj.
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