Minnesota Accessible Activities Calendar

Arts and Disability Forum: Disability as Identity

Arts and Disability Forum: Disability as Identity
Event image shows title, date and three performers (left to right): Jamie, a Sri Lankan-Polish-American woman, walks across a stage holding a microphone and waving at the audience. She wears a maroon skirt, black tights, boots and a black hooded sweatshirt with a white line drawing of a woman's face and text that reads "awkward." Photo Credit: Yang Xu Photography. Atlas has a mustache and short haircut looking directly into the camera with their head slightly tilted to the right. The photo is tinted in purple with a faint magenta lens flares. Taja has tattooed brown skin, long black hair touched by gray, some pulled into a knot at the top of their head, with bright red dangly earrings and rings on their hands featuring bright red painted nails. Photo credit: Nanne Sorvold.
Metropolitan Regional Arts Council event via Zoom
    Wed., February 22 at 6:00 pm
    • ASL Interpretation
    • Real-time Captioning
    • In addition to ASL interpreting and captioning, the event will be archived on the MRAC YouTube channel for future viewing with edited captions that can be translated into additional languages.

Location

VIRTUAL - Online
U.S.

Schedule and Tickets

Register online to receive instructions to access the event. If you would like any modifications to aid your participation in this activity, please indicate requests in the registration form or contact Sam at sam@mrac.org or 651-523-6388.

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About the Show

Feb. 22, 2023

What does it mean to identify as "disabled"? What about "person with a disability/disabilities"? How does it feel when others ascribe that label to you? What would it mean to claim it?

This Arts & Disability Forum: Disability as Identity features three local artists, Atlas O. Phoenix, Jamie Kalakaru-Mava, and Taja Will, in a virtual discussion exploring how being disabled informs their art, spaces, community, and care.

Th hour-long virtual event is appropriate for arts groups seeking to be more accessible, arts groups serving and/or made up of people with disabilities, and individual artists with disabilities who want to learn strategies from peers to embrace and uplift their own identities.

Panelists are:
Jamie Kalakaru-Mava (she/her) traded the warm beaches of California for the snowy lakes of Minnesota. She found art, community, and more - but it took months for what she found to thaw out completely. By day she works with LISC Twin Cities, supporting creative placemaking and accessibility within the Twin Cities cultural districts. By night she’s a visual artist and writer. Her creative work can be seen in murals throughout the Twin Cities and her written work has been featured in Pollen, Star Tribune, and Minnesota Women’s Press. Her two books, It’s Never Going To Work (2018) and Butterflies and Tall Bikes (2021) are narrative nonfictions featuring Minnesota’s creative communities. Jamie is a 2023 Loft Literary Center Mirrors & Windows Fellow.

Atlas O. Phoenix (they/them/theirs) is an award-winning director, writer, producer and editor who creates films that are personal, powerful and uninhibited. They were an actor and performer for Dykes Do Drag (2017-20) and The Naked I series (2018/2020). They also cohost the trans and nonbinary talk show and podcast, Genderful, with Gender Meowster (available on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts).

Taja Will (they/them) is a non-binary, chronically ill, queer, Latinx (Chilean) adoptee. They are a performer, choreographer, somatic therapist, consultant and Healing Justice practitioner based in Mni Sota Makoce, on the ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe. Taja’s approach integrates improvisation, somatic modalities, text and vocals in contemporary performance. Their aesthetic is one of spontaneity, bold choice making, sonic and kinetic partnership and the ability to move in relationship to risk and intimacy. Will’s artistic work explores visceral connections to current socio-cultural realities through a blend of ritual, dense multi-layered worldbuilding and everyday magic.

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