[2414] in peace2
MIT Peace Concert this Friday April 4
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brice Smith)
Mon Mar 31 08:43:49 2003
Message-Id: <5.0.2.1.2.20030331084152.00a80768@hesiod>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 08:43:40 -0500
To: elrond@mit.edu
From: Brice Smith <elrond@MIT.EDU>
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PEACE CONCERT and SO MUCH MORE - FREE and OPEN to ALL
Featuring :
Jolie Rickman
(nationally touring singer/songwriter)
the Mahina Movement
(NYC-based multimedia performance collective)
Lenelle N. Moise
(an out, Haitian-American performance poet)
Date : Friday April 4, 2003
Time : 9:30pm
Room : 54-100 (in the Green Bldg.)
"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child
of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those
whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose
culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are
paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and
corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world
as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American
to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is
ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4, 1967)
This Friday (April 4), on the 35th anniversary of the assassination of
Martin Luther King Jr., come pay tribute to the struggle for peace and
justice to which he gave his life with an evening of music, performance
art, and slam poetry weaving together resistance to war, gender
oppression, homophobia, sexual violence, racism, and xenophobia. The
artists (detailed profiles below) are part of the Hen Foundation, co-
coordinated by Jolie Rickman, which was founded to help female
artist/activist reach out to the community and to foster the ideas of
creative non-violent resistance to oppression. Jolie and the artists
of the Hen Foundation have appeared at over 100 college campuses and
are currently touring the east coast on their SPRING 2003 Activist-
Arts Tour! The Friday concert will be proceeded by a community
workshop/discussion with the artists focusing on the U.S-U.K. war on
Iraq and the twin attacks on affirmative action and on immigrant rights
here at home (details of time and location to follow soon). And
remember, its all
FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE
PS - please forward far and wide to who ever you think might be
interested. the following lists have already been bcc'd to
peace-announce@MIT.EDU, greens-announce@MIT.EDU, peace-women@mit.edu,
no-war@mit.edu, anti-hate@mit.edu, stop@Mit.edu
Brought to you by :
MIT Social Justice Cooperative
the Thistle
The Women's Studies Department
The Department of Music and Theater Arts
Dean Ayida Mthembu
"When the hen crows, the state will fall" - Confucius
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Artist Profiles :
Jolie Rickman -
Jolie Rickman is a critically acclaimed musician and cultural
activist. She has studied with Marcia Turner and Coretta Scott
King at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social
Change in Atlanta, GA. and has pursued a PhD in Music and Social
Movements. In her career, she has appeared at over 100 colleges
and universities as well as prominent North American music
festivals including the Great Hudson River Clearwater Revival,
Ladyfest East, North By North East (NXNE), the National Women's
Studies Annual Conference, and Club Passim's Cutting Edge of the
Campfire Festival. In addition, Jolie Rickman has created
successful nationally-touring road shows including "Sing It
Down", a multi-media event to close the US Army School of the
Americas, and ARTCAR!, the feminist tour that encourages women to
pick up instruments and take to the streets. Currently Jolie is
the music coordinator for Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" and
co-coordinator of HEN, a new nonprofit providing small grants for
performers who align their work with movements for justice.
Mahina Movement -
In a very short period of time, NYC-based multi-media
performance collective, Mahina Movement, has emerged as one of
the nation's most talked-about political performance forces.
They've recently headlined events such as Lady Fest East - NYC -
2002, Critical Breakdowns Active Youth Summit in Boston, sharing
the stage with Dead Prez, Medusa, La Bruja, Ra Goddess; and
WERISE - Womens Conference at Barnard College - where the
collective shared the stage with renowned activist and poet,
Sonia Sanchez.
Mahina Movement is an emerging artists collective and
producing theatre committed to provoking new ways of experiencing
art, politics, and life. Mahina, taken from the Tongan word for
moon and the Spanish to imagine, explores creative means to
reframe our consciousness as individuals and members of a larger
society. Through images, stories, and words, Mahina Movement
seeks to engender new ideas, reshaping possibilities within our
social reality. Bringing the traditional disciplines of painting,
sculpture, and photography out of defined spaces and infusing
them with dance, theatre, music, and spoken word. Mahina
Movement's goal is to educate and motivate people of all
cultures, ethnicities, genders, sexual identities, and spiritual
identities through their own self-expression. Their work speaks
about who we are, where we are from, how we relate to the world
sexually, spiritually and emotionally. Mahina Movement is Erica
DeLaRosa (Chicana de San Antonio), vaimoana litia makakaufaki
niumeitolu (tongan American from Utah) and Gabriella Callender
(African American - Irish/german, from Hollis, Queens).
Most recently MM's performances deal with issues of War - War
in Afghanistan , potential war in Iraq- and issue of Police
Brutality all over the World. Throughout their programs, Mahina's
art reflects their concerns as women of color surviving within
white male dominated society. The group deals with "Queer" issues
of sexual preference and gender identity, and also focuses on the
joys of love, sex and bikini waxes.
Lenelle N. Moise -
Lenelle N. Moise is an out, Haitian-American, rallying,
manifesto-spewing womanist from Cambridge, MA. A performance
poet, playwright, actor, choreographer, and activist, the Ithaca,
NY, 2000 Grand Poetry Slam Champion has performed in both the
2000 and 2001 National Poetry Slam Competitions as a team semi-
finalist. Lenelle has recited from one U.S. coast to the other;
her favorite spaces include: the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe,
Union Square's Bar 13, Boston's Cantab and Lizard Louges,
Cambridge's Ryles Cafe (of Amazon Slam fame), Northampton's Fire
& Water, Cornell University and Amherst College.
Lenelle has authored various plays including: "The Many Faces
of Nia," an exploration of stereotypes and Black-Jewish
relations; "Cornered in the Dark," a choreopem about the after-
math of sexual assault; "Lesbians Talking About RICE," related
"quickies" about the racial and sexual tensions between women;
and "Purple", a youth-play about dating violence which was
comissioned by the Kitchen Theatre Company in 2001. Lenelle has
acted, too, in a lot of plays, from "for colored girls..." to
"The Colored Museum." She was last seen in Andrea Hairston's
"Soul Repairs" with Northampton's Chrysalis Theatre Ensemble. She
also wrote and starred in video artist Mara Alper's short film,
"To Erzulie," which was screened at the Berlin Sommerfest der
Literaturen in July, 2002.
Her writing is featured in In Our Own Words: Students'
Perspectives on School (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), and in her
very own chapbook, "Repeat Seven Times." She is currently
pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting at Smith College,
reading Angela Y. Davis' autobiography and listening to lots of
Me'shell Ndegeocello.
