Welcome.

There are few living platforms at Colgate that bring people together to find voice and speak life from the margins. This limits our individual and collective abilities, as members of the Colgate community, to understand how each other’s struggles, passions, and the expression of these struggles and passions, are inherently linked to others, and instrumental in shaping our entire lives. Collective Breathing (learn more here) is a space where unheard contemporary voices from the Colgate community  engage in a collaborative process of breathing life into our stories for ourselves and the wider Colgate community.


As a member of Collective Breathing I, Sharon Nicol, designed a companion independent study entitled Collective Breathing: The Making and Memory of a Feminist Art/Performance Collective. This blog is the home of my work in the course and an archive of my experiences within the collective.


The Collective Breathing course is centered around three major themes—Shaping(Making), Telling(Living), Remembering(Archiving). These themes exist as a framework for the present collective and future generations. Shaping the Collective Breathing project involves developing the vision for the current collective, understanding who is part of the vision, and determining how the vision will be realized. Telling the project means executing the vision, whether it be a communal creative space and/or an end-of-semester performance. Telling is not only about the end-product, but all that exists between. Remembering the project focuses on how a project’s herstory is preserved for those involved and future generations. Remembering is in conversation with content and medium, asking what do participants want to be remembered and how? These processes can occur simultaneously, at varying lengths, out of order, and sometimes not at all, yet having engaged with other models that uptake such a structure and in recording the collective’s experiences with these themes as they happen, we will be better able to return to order/the vision if there are any missteps during the process, and better contextualize our outcomes post-vision. Through this blog, I will document my reflections as I move through the Collective Breathing syllabus (which can be viewed here, along with the independent study proposal) 


This is my attempt at remaining accountable and transparent with my own thoughts and further humanizing the process myself and fellow collective breathers are engaged in, for generations to come. I am imperfect, and I recognize the value of sharing the imperfections of the building process in order to sustain this work.

I welcome feedback and hope that you will stay engaged throughout our journey. Please visit the larger Collective Breathing Blog/Archive that will feature voices of the whole group.



Monday 20 March 2017

Playwriting Workshop with Maestra Moraga

Before attending the playwriting workshops with Maestra Cherrie Moraga, I had approached my writing as a space for autobiography. It is not until Maestra Moraga said that "we are often our worst and most underdeveloped character" because we are too closely aligned to our stories and unable to view them with an artistically critical eye, that I began to consider my writing as having the potential and necessity to be something more than just my personal story. Maestra Moraga took participants through exercises that helped us identify the fullness of our characters through their backstories: fears, quirks, memories, relationships and more. Insodoing, I saw an opportunity for my characters to be, even if influenced by my personal life, more than my real world context allows me to be. I learned that the power of fiction is in making statements and creating outcomes that the everyday prohibits.

The differentiation between theatre as an transformative experience for those involved and that which is made simply for aesthetic pleasure of the writer is in the agency of the forces that influence the work. Theatre made solely for the self can follow a predetermined structure according to the story the writer knows they want to tell. Theatre as a process of being impacted/impactful however, requires that the writer(s) is responsive to where their personal and social environments as well as the experiences of the character are directing the story. Maestra Moraga calls this manifestation of theatre the form play (as opposed to the formula play) because the work is propelled by itself, telling the writer what form it will take, not the other way around. It is within this form play, and a further metaform play, that theatre can become a ritualistic and healing practice. As the writer dedicates themselves to unlocking the direction in which the play will unfold, they learn from the development process things that they wouldn't have expected. As these pieces are revealed through the work, the writer also has the responsibility to themselves to understand what the form the play has taken is trying to communicate to them and their audience. It can be difficult for the writer to find these answers alone. Through the workshop I experienced the benefit of reading and receiving feedback on my work. As others told me the impact and interpretations of my work, I was able to better understand my work as a communal experience. Their feedback caused me to think not only of myself but what I wanted to communicate and the limitlessness of its impact.
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