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.



Tuesday 21 March 2017

The Grounded Vessel

As performers allowing stories to be expressed through our bodies how can we remember why we do the work that we do and what keeps us from losing ourselves (whether our intentions/motivations or our sense of self) in the moment of performance? In reading the accompanying guide of the Panza Monologues, Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga advocate for grounding oneself in the performative space both physically and symbolically. In their production notes, Grise and Mayorga highlight the movement of the actors body as an intentional act. They warn against performers meandering across the stage, and suggest props that "anchor" performers to a specific locations the power of the words is not lost in the movement of the body. When the performer is anchored, all their energy is channeled into justly channeling the story... but where does this initial energy come from? What is the source of power for a performer in the moment of performance. The answer is different for everyone. My personal source of energy is my God, my culture, and my (fore)mother(s). As I think about building the onstage altar that Grise and Mayorga offer as a grounding piece in productions of the Panza Monologues I will include words that have grounded me throughout the semester. As I reflect on these words in the everyday, knowing that they are onstage with me will serve as a reminder of why I have chosen to become a vessel for this story.

Actions to carry through:

Ask collective whether we would like to build/create an altar onstage that grounds our work and reminds us of the people, intentions, and energies we carry w



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