Browsing by Author "Wilbur, Sarah"

Political organizing—the work of building relationships and capacity to execute collective action and bring about social change—is an embodied practice. It is learned by doing as people meet, in person or virtually, to hone skills, grow in relationship, develop leadership, and engage in intentional action to shift power. The long hours and commitment that organizers dedicate to building and executing campaigns requires intense bodily engagement. The exhaustion, concern, hope, and elation involved all fall on the body. Race, class, gender, and nationality differences also mark bodies, impacting who organizes, from what standpoint, and with what stakes, as well as the issues and urgencies evoked. While somatic and contemplative practices, which foreground the internal experience of the body and the information it holds, are being taught as organizing competencies by groups such as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity and generative somatics, the relevance of embodiment to organizing is not widely accepted or known. Paying close attention to the body can strengthen and deepen organizing work by providing insight into how to ground in presence in order to build relationships and earn trust, to expand political education through embodied proposals, to better assess the balance of power within and beyond campaigns by considering who is moving and how, and to provide resources to counter burnout and increase care. Transformative experiences as a movement artist and organizer in Brazil and in the United States serve as the basis for this MFA thesis project, which applies embodied lessons I learned in Brazil about how to disorient from U.S. hegemony and white supremacy in my home context in the United States. It is a proposal for movement-based relational organizing in response to the call from leaders of the Black freedom movements from the 1960s through to the present for white people to “organize your own.”

Through Her Looking Glass: Emancipation of the Black Muse, An Undertaking of Black Women Artists, and “Emancipated Spaces” seeks to explore the creative possibilities of Black Women Artists when disassociated from the stigma of misogynoir. Using closed spaces that protect and permission artistic practice and embodied engagement as technologies to reach the truer self, these spaces become a site to acknowledge and support the self-actualization and agency of Black Women Artists. In doing so, the showing of the produced art transcends the vulnerabilities of experienced misogynoir while making visible the autonomous Black Woman.

Engaging race, gender, and performance theory, this research unpacks the embodied reside of layered structural marginalization Black Women face in the U.S., through curatorial practice, collective artistic process, and embodied offering. In a six-month excavational undertaking, Ife Michelle Dance, an all-Black Woman dance company based in Charlotte, NC explore overlapping spaces: inner space, intersubjective space, rehearsal space, and intentionally curated public space where Black Women Artists can be supported mentally, physically, and artistically as liberated women and muses of [their] art.

What Are Y’all Looking At?: Transness and Durational Performance in the AmericanSouth in for public view (twenty-four) is a creative project, centering embodied performance, moving image, and time, that seeks to explore both the lived experiences and under-representation of queertrans people in the American South. Using durational endurance performance, queer memory work, and nonlinear filmmaking installation, the twenty-four-hour performance for public view (twenty-four) synthesizes ideas on transness relating to durational and endurance performance, the politics of display of transness and gender presentation, queer legibility and illegibility, embodied storytelling via queer memory work, and externalizing interiority. By engaging with queer theory and southern queertrans community stories and memories, for public view (twenty-four) exists in a lineage of works that urgently seek reflection on the violence inflicted upon queertrans bodies in the United States, with a focus on the American South.