Description:
This multidimensional dialogue is a tactical disarming of hegemonic structures and internalized queerphobia that utilizes queer methodological strategies and embodied contemplative practices. Working with LGBTQ2IA+ dance and theatre students in higher education, Queer Contemplative Pedagogy provides a fluid, holistic, and supportive scaffolding for performance training, individual student development, and creative/critical thinking. Queer Contemplative Pedagogy is a countermeasure to the sweeping bans on queer/decolonial education within the United States by challenging binary thinking and static approaches to performance practice. I ground this work theoretically in interdisciplinary artist Adesola Akinleye’s theories of emplacement, artist Jane Brucker’s framework of contemplative pedagogy, and queer feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s practice of Spiritual Activism. Pedagogically, this process creates the conditions for LGBTQ2IA+ students and allies to confront and articulate mechanisms of power impacting their distinct positionalities while using embodied acts of creativity to connect deeply with self as a member of a collective community. I propose that this framework is adaptable to fit the needs of the artistic practitioner or educator who may situate themselves within various relationships to queer theory, contemplative pedagogy, and populations of practitioners. This 45-minute digital workshop includes an ancestral invocation, a period of contemplative movement, a lecture describing the practice and theoretical framework, and dialogue for deploying this fluid pedagogical approach to performance training in various academic/artistic contexts. As members of the LGBTQ2IA+ community and our allies, we transgress toxic, oppressive legacies with this practice galvanizing queer contemplative approaches to embodiment as an essential labor of care and connection.
BIO:
Jeremy M. Hahn (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator of dance and performance, and is in residence at the Brewery Artist Lofts in Los Angeles, California. Their research investigates the formation/practice of Queer Ritual Ecologies, illuminating how the embodiment of queer presence promotes self-knowing and collective transformation. Artistically, they create durational site-oriented performance installations, poems, and facilitate “Cultivating the Expressive Body,” a movement workshop investigating queer embodied art practices with J&S Arts. He has worked notably as a performer with Jane Brucker, Efflorescence, Lucent Dossier Experience, Pennington Dance Group, Yuval Sharon, and SkyE. He holds a BA in Studio Arts from Loyola Marymount University, an MFA in Dance from California State University, Long Beach, is pursuing a Ph.D. in Dance at Texas Woman’s University, and is a full-time lecturer in The Department of Theatre and New Dance at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.