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.



Thursday 2 March 2017

Staging Social Justice

Staging Social Justice is an anthology that highlights the work of those who have been involved in the Fringe Benefits Institute theatre group and the impact that being part of the group has had on their work going forward. The chapters of the book are organized to address certain themes pertaining to developing community "devised" theatre under which past participants relay their thoughts and experiences. I've learned that developing community theatre is not an isolated experience. Theatre in itself is finite, but its power comes in how the participants and audience allow the experience of creating with others for a specific artist objective to affect aspects of their life moving forward.

The anthology is edited by the founders of the Fringe Benefits and it is inspiring to see how they not only created space for others to tell gain the tools and practice of performing their stories through the Fringe Benefits Institute, but brought the same ideology into the framing of the anthology. The founders' intentions with bringing together the works are found in the introduction of each chapter, yet ultimately they allow participants work to speak for itself. It is a necessary for all visionaries/innovators/pioneers to be able to surrender their vision to be impacted and informed by the people involved. This is how innovative spaces retain their relevance and impact. Ultimately, the impact of theatre is only possible when those involved are willing to be impacted and follow through with the actions that make impact possible. In terms of theatre at Colgate and Collective Breathing this stands as a challenge to the notion of the "universal transformative", the productions on are campus that are widely believed to be impactful yet yield little/no long lasting or significant change. This lack of tangible impact is not a failure of the moment of production and performance but our own failure to put in the daily work that makes that impact sustainable. Many people have shown interest in the vision of Collective Breathing, few people have shown up to the weekly meetings. If we want to have transformative and collaborative experiences on our campus, we can't only show up on the show day.
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