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.



Saturday 6 May 2017

The Role of Heartbreak


 "In particular, this paper explores the role of art in facilitating that heartbreak—that moment of breakage that opens up an unsettled pedagogical space where students and teacher might begin to
imagine, vulnerably, an alternate mode of being together, of convivencia—a movement or
“decolonial movida” towards what I am attempting to name as “a pedagogy and politics that
breaks your heart.”
- Ríos-Rojas, A. (2016). “Pedagogies of the Broken-Hearted”: Notes on a Pedagogy of Breakage, Women of Color Feminist Decolonial Movidas, and Armed Love in the Classroom/Academy. Paper presented at the NWSA, Montreal, BC.


If we, as students, educators, creators, citizens of the world, are not shaken on an emotional and spiritual level by the injustices present in our world at large, but also spaces of institutional learning, we have no incentive to create new practices, realities, and ways of learning in these spaces. It is only through heartbreak that change is made possible, yet heartbreak cannot be the final destination. The question becomes, how can we creates practices of learning that piece our hearts back together, in community? Collective Breathing has been an experiment at answering this question. On their own, the memories and experiences that inspired the pieces we produced could only bring about pain and (re)trauma. Yet because we came together, fostered a community of support and care, and focused our joint energies towards excavating our stories for a purpose, we were able to find individual and collective strength and healing through what once only hurt us. We shared our heartbreak in the hope that something transformative could be drawn from the vocalization of the depths at which we feel for ourselves as individuals and for others, and the attempt to visibly work through those depths in community. Collective Breathing would not have been if I and others had not had our hearts broken by the erasure and silencing of our identities and experiences in other performance centered productions and if we had not experienced heartbreak from the lack of interpersonal care in other community-oriented spaces on campus. We needed our hearts to be broken for us to move from dreaming up a different way of being, to implementing as an attempt to piece ourselves back together. These attempts at piecing our hearts back together in the midst of heartbreak are what serve as the foundation for the pedagogies that we carry on in our teaching and learning routines, and become the basis for how those we teach and learn with conceptualize their own ability to create in the midst of heartbreak.


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