ForwaRD FERguson

A SEASON-LONG FIREHOUSE OF ARTS AND ACTIVISM 

Combining art and activism has been JACK's mission from its very inception, and this season we feel more strongly than ever about relevance of this approach. Throughout the season, we will be presenting FORWARD FERGUSON – a series dedicated to furthering the conversation around racial justice in America, featuring dance, music, theater and performance art. The highlights include a discussion on community-police relationships; work by Social Health Performance Club; the dance collective Wildcat!; a Freedom Songs Festival; readings of Black-authored anti-lynching plays of the early 1900s, performances by our resident youth theater company Truthworker, and a partnership with the activist group Equality for Flatbush.

Pictured: Chaney Sims

January - July 2015
PAST EVENTS

Social Health Performance Club II: DARK DICTION
January 16 and 17, 2015

The Brooklyn-based performance art group Social Health Performance Club brings several performance artists to JACK with works that investigate resistances, regulations, and relationships between public speech, vocabularies of image and symbol, diction, and construction of identity. The two evenings are curated and organized by Ayana Evans, Esther Neff, and Elizabeth Lamb, who will also be performing framing texts and raising questions as emcees throughout the two nights.

Public Discussion: COMMUNITY-POLICE RELATIONS
Led by Prospect Heights Democrats for Reform
January 21, 2015

Come and talk to your neighbors, and tell us what you think. Let's work together towards a positive resolution to an intolerable situation.

Colloquy Collective presents:
STRANGE FRUIT
Sundays: Feb. 8 | March 8 | April 19 | May 17 | June 7, 2015

In the early 1900s, many Black playwrights wrote works about lynching -- usually family-centered dramas focused on the tensions leading up to a lynching, or the effect on the family after a lynching. Given the renewed, legalized violence on black and brown bodies, JACK, in collaboration with director Courtney Harge of Colloquy Collective, will present readings of five of these plays throughout the spring, with professional actors. Each reading will be followed by a discussion.

AKAI GURLEY BENEFIT READING
February 15, 2015

Students and faculty in The Pratt Institute MFA in Writing program, along with Ty Blizzy Black (Akai Gurley organizer) are working together to host a benefit reading on behalf of Akai Gurley's surviving family and to raise awareness around their struggle. All proceeds raised at the benefit will go directly to the Indiegogo campaign and we hope the event inspires people to spread the word about this injustice. This is a fund set-up to support the household survived by Akai Gurley; which includes his widow Kimberly Ballinger, his 2 year old daughter Akaila Gurley and her big sister Kamiya, who is 5. The family has yet to receive reparations, therefore we're hoping the community can help support them.
Readings and Performances:
Pamela Sneed, Jack Waters, Stacy Szymaszek, Jackie Wang, Mahogany L. Browne, Ariana Reines, Erica Hunt, Ty Blizzy Black, Her-She Nebula, Sarah Gambito, Aurora Rose Barnes, Ras Osagyefo, To Whom It May Concern, Falu, Roya Marsh, Katherine George, Jive Poetic and Adam Fitzgerald. More T.B.A.

Which side are you on, friend?
A Freedom Songs Festival
February 18 – 22, 2015

In the wake of continued racial injustice in America, JACK provides a platform for contemporary artists to revisit and reinterpret songs of the Civil Rights era, in an effort to fill our city with activist energy.

Fundraiser for EQUALITY FOR FLATBUSH
April 8, 2015

JACK hosts a benefit party for Equality for Flatbush, a new people of color-led grassroots organization which does anti-police repression, affordable housing and anti-gentrification organizing in Flatbush and East Flatbush, Brooklyn. They seek to organize communities for social change and justice through street outreach, social media campaigns, political advocacy and direct action.

Truthworker Theatre Company:
IN | PRISM: Boxed In & Blacked Out in America
May 7 - 10, 2015

JACK's youth theater company-in-residence, led by Samara Gaev, presents an original work devised through direct conversation with those inside the U.S. prison system, examining the impacts & practices of solitary confinement and tracing one mans remarkable capacity for liberation within the walls of death row. Truthworker has had the unique and humbling opportunity to be working directly with Jarvis Jay Masters, an innocent man on death row, who has been incarcerated since the age of 19 in San Quentin Prison & institutionalized since he was a young boy.

Wildcat!
Assembly
June 11 - 14

Wildcat!, a dance collective consisting of interdisciplinary artists Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Eleni Zaharopoulos, and André M. Zachery, will hold an assembly presenting two programs: I DO MIND DYING: danse précarité and 3 Meaningful Meditations. These two evening-length performances address social justice issues of racism, gender inequality, and economic oppression through the lens of three artists from unique artistic mediums: dance, physical performance, and sound.

Brooklyn Gypsies
Conversation: How to Make it in Black America, Pt. 1
July 2 - 12, 2015