🌸What is Your Ancestral Performance Art?🌸
Happy Spring! The days are getting longer, the flowers are blooming all over the place, and it’s time to double down in seeking wisdom and creating joy with our ancestors.
The blooms all fade so quickly. I need anchorage during these times, and I wonder if you do, as well. Something that helps us stay steady through all the violence and indignities we’re witnessing and enduring. I am finding ancestral work to be a powerful source of grounding and healing. Embracing the non-linearity of time helps us remember we aren’t unique in our suffering and that we have deep embodied wisdom we can call on and share.
On MLK Day this year, I attended an Ancestral Inauguration at JACK, a civics and arts space I’ve consulted with. Described as “an urgent activation conjuring artistic medicine and ancestral reinforcements to put a battery in the back of the people,” it included offerings of poetry, ritual, theater, storytelling, and music from Black artists as first-responders to the chaos and crises we are currently undergoing.
I am pleased to offer ancestral medicine in this vein as well. My second book, Ancestral Performance Art, is currently at the printers and available for pre-order. It is lusciously designed by Patrick Barber of Impeller Press, and I can’t wait to see it in the flesh! It will be ready to live in your hands and dance with your imagination in June.
In my previous book, Organizational Performance Art, I laid out a framework for offering productive possibilities and space for joy in the workplace. In Ancestral Performance Art, I share the intimate work of witnessing and holding space with my dying mother; uncovering and reinterpreting racist and separatist practices within my white Jewish family; and the twinning and untwinning and twinning again I experience with my mother, all in the service of communal thriving and liberation.
There is a Workbook section at the end of the book that offers tools and prompts to help you make your own Ancestral Performance Art.
One new area of ancestral inquiry for me is in creating and performing works that unearth and celebrate the embodied joy of individuals in my lineage. This spring, I’ve been taking a drag class and imbibing its powerful medicine of queer liberation. I’m excited to perform on May 17 in Brooklyn and will be doing a piece about my father.
Also, stay tuned for details on interactive Ancestral Performance Art readings/performances/workshops coming up in Portland, OR; New Hampshire; and Brooklyn.
In the meantime, here’s a snippet of spontaneous storytelling about my Jewish ancestors emigrating to the United States and assimilating to dominant white culture that I shared during a winter gathering of my neighbors and artists at Gallery Particulier.