Social Justice Projects
IN LIGHT OF CURRENT EVENTS the Fitzmaurice Institute stands with our communities of color across the United States today. On May 25th, a white policeman pinned George Floyd, a black Minneapolis resident down to the ground, pressing his knee into his neck and causing his subsequent death. Since then, America has been in a state of civil unrest, grief and anger. A murderous and choking knee to the neck carries a message that we, as voice teachers and artists, are dedicated to working against. In our practice, we seek to embody diversity and vocal expression. Further, we stand against the killing that prompted the words, “I can’t breathe.” We stand together in solidarity against hate and injustice. We commit to doing our part to support and lift up voices of color through the art we create and the teaching we impart. Black Lives Matter.
Here is a Document linked to a Spreadsheet of Resources. Note: The spreadsheet has 12 separate sheets, each tabbed at the lower margin.
Productions
~ written, produced, directed by, or featuring certified Fitzmaurice Voicework® teachers - alphabetical by project title
MUJERES PODEROSAS
A project imaged and created around International Women’s Day. Using voice as a site of identity and investigation, as co-madres we brought together artists, advocates and activists to create transformative research practices in reinvention of the feminine self in a live art laboratory.
Space: Casa de la cultura de San Isidro
Dates: February 28- March 12
Photography: Frecia Chirinos, Sebastián Dañino, Esteban Sfragulla.
Video: Sebastián dañino, Camila Varela.
Producers: Micha Espinosa & Elena de La Fuente.
Featuring: Lelé Guillen, Natali Zegarra, Ursula Palomino, Araceli Campos, Lola Santillana, Jussara Sifuentes, Christine Brahm, Debora Grández.
Community Partners: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani.
Invited Artist: Qarla Quispe with her brand Warmichic.
ANTIGONE NOW
Margaret Kemp
When it was clear that COVID 19 would impact our campus, I was moved to consider how we could allow this moment in history to positively impact our learning community and our intended production of Antigone. As an artist and instructor at UC Davis, my call to action is to model collaboration, research, creativity, and community engagement through performance and theatre-making practices. For me, this is the soul of the…READ MORE
Living Memorial Single Ribbon
A LIVING MEMORIAL is a hybrid art installation and theatrical event conceived by Margaret Laurena Kemp in conversation with The University of California, Davis', Campus Community Book Project (CCBP). In this work, handwriting is explored as a somatic practice, that like dance relieves stress and trauma both in the writer and the reader. Kemp and her students (UC Davis Theatre for Social Change Organization) set up tables at community discussions about gun violence and posed the question to the attending audiences "Gun Violence our Shared Narrative... what's your personal story?' The group distributed specially designed tags and made a space for the audience to consider and handwrite (on the tags) sharing their personal experience with gun violence. In about one month's time, The Living Memorial collected over three hundred stories. It was always intended that the tags would be affixed to ribbons that would hang freely from an open structure where a light breeze from a fan, suggesting breath, gently moved them. The memorial came to life as the audience entered the structure when it was displayed at UC Davis' Mondavi Center, where the CCBP culmination event was held. Here, the diverse members of the campus and surrounding communities interacted with The Living Memorial writing and adding their narratives to the ones that were already attached to ribbons. The mass of people moved as a chorus speaking softly to friends and strangers reflecting in communion and peace. The installation had the cathartic impact of community building through a shared narrative - the best of theatrical experiences. Kemp's next step with this work is to bring it to the stage in a live performance.
THE MOTHERTONGUE YOUTH ARTS PROJECT
Sara Matchett
For the past 5 years, The Mothertongue Project, a women’s arts collective co-founded by Sara Matchett in South Africa in 2000, has been running an arts and leadership project in the rural Langeberg Municipal region of the Western Cape in South Africa, with unemployed youth. The training has resulted in the creation of participatory performances designed to create awareness around social justice issues. The youth participants receive on-going training in performance skills (acting, voice, movement and performance making) as well as training in leadership development, basic entrepreneurial skills, and participatory facilitation skills. It is envisioned that intervention strategies that utilise these skills will result in an increase in self-confidence and esteem, which in our experience, motivates and assists participants in imagining and actioning a different, more productive life for themselves where they are active agents in the choices that they make. The project consciously creates spaces for young people located at the margins to speak their stories and share their experiences in order to gain power and credence within their bodies and communities.
ODYSSEY PROJECT
Michael Morgan
The Odyssey Project is a leadership program designed for incarcerated youth. The Project leverages applied theater techniques for social justice by providing a creative platform for young people to find their voices and explore their potential, through a very personal retelling of Homer's epic poem The Odyssey. Their self-awareness progresses toward ownership and authorship, as the youth take a lead role in developing their own version of the heroic story. This is a youth-centric endeavor. We invest in youth's power to find new exciting solutions to problematic challenges and believe this is key to fostering a sense of well-being. Participants undertake a curriculum of specialized modules, facilitated throughout by teaching artists from the university and the community while working alongside several undergraduate students as their peers. Throughout the program, the participants undertake a series of challenges formulated to promote self-belief, community, and social interaction. This is a story-based initiative. Self-representation and autobiography centralize the youth's experience. Through theater immersion, the cast discovers metaphors that translate into life skills. The Project aligns artistic values with social justice. One aim of the collaboration is to provide teens in the juvenile justice system with a vision of taking a path that leads them to seek higher education. Another objective is to broaden undergraduates' learning experience by bringing them into a creative partnership with marginalized populations. The Odyssey Project provides a microcosm of cultural intersections between two disparate groups of youth that point toward a harmonious community model for the future. Despite their distinctions, the two demographics discover a shared humanity. The Project has received national recognition through an Art Works National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2014 and a California Arts Council grant in 2019. It has been featured on Senator Bill Bradley's American Voices and NPR Central Coast Voices. An essay on the Project is scheduled to appear in the new Routledge Focus series titled Classics In and Out of the Academy: Classical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century in 2020. A documentary on the project is in post-production .
RESEARCH GROUP EOLIA
Performance, healing and social transformation
Esther Pallejà
We’re researching ways of using performative language to talk about current and past events that had an impact in people’s lives. Together with a group of “performers,” we create a space where the audience has the chance of taking an active role and have it's own voice, reversing in that way the focus of attention, the audience being the one seen and heard in the piece.
URBAN CONFESSIONAL
Ben Mathes
Founded by Ben Mathes, Urban Confessional began as a community of actors determined to challenge the status quo. Every week, they stood on street corners in LA with signs that read “Free Listening” and opened their hearts to anyone who needed to laugh, cry, scream, or chat. Over the years, the community has grown to include people from all walks of life across 6 continents, 50 countries, and 40 states.
THE WAVES
Laura Quigley
The Waves is a new play about birth, motherhood, and post-partum depression, written by Laura Quigley. The Waves was written for mothers, pregnant women, obs, midwives, doulas, birth activists, fathers, health care practitioners, and anyone who has a mother.
“The work approaches the body as a whole system and the vocal mechanism as a part of that totality.”