Do you know how to interact with others in our current era of diversity and multiplicity?

Do you want to learn?

Join the DIVERSITY FELLOWS! for TRAINING DAY and learn how!

Saturday April 30th and May 1st

6PM SHARP at the AS220 Blackbox (aka the Diversity Zone!)

$10-$25 sliding scale.

($10 students; no one turned away)

***Warning: This performance is an interactive, participatory happening!  All audience members will be on stage, so come prepared!

TRAINING DAY explores the languages and performances of diversity and multiculturalism in various institutional locations, from the classroom to the boardroom to the yoga studio to the wide open spaces of the West. This live art diversity workshop animates institutional forms of diversity discourse through participatory attempts at transformation. The workshop is led, in turn by pairs of diversity counselors from various institutional sites (played by the DIVERSITY FELLOWS!), each of whom refer to different modes of performing diversity, multiculturalism, anti-oppressive ethics, and tolerance.

During this three-hour diversity workshop, conducted at fast-forward speed, the FELLOWS, embodying these personas, lead audiences on a semi-improvised journey through trust knots, role-plays, privilege lines, and sticky situations. The workshops use song, dance, video, discussion, and team-building activities to take audiences through the many stages of institutional diversity performance. Peppered with language from a range of popular and academic texts addressing racialization, privilege, institutional diversity, identity politics, neoliberal multiculturalism, representation, and futurity, TRAINING DAY pushes diversity training to its edges, to its most absurd abstractions, asking participants to consider the underlying assumptions and contradictions of performing the sanitized institutional norms of diversity and equality in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism.

DIVERSITY FELLOWS! is a critical camp collaborative interested in interrogating aspects of (their) Americanness. Aimed at blurring the lines between performance, politics, and the presentation of self in every-day life, the FELLOWS use race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and more as both lenses and performed identities to produce genre-blurring pieces that refer to pop-cultural tropes, critical theory, and queer performance tactics, creating chaotic environments out of seemingly simplistic interactive structures: Green card interviews, diversity workshops, make-up appointments, karaoke. Grounded in performance training from L’Ecole Internationale de Jacque le Coq and the American Conservatory Theater, educated in queer theory, postcolonial theory, performance studies, and public humanities from UC Berkeley and Brown University, Reya Sehgal and Marc Boucai unite theory, politics, and physical performance in their collaborative work. The DIVERSITY FELLOWS! have performed at conferences and performance festivals in Santa Cruz, Detroit, and New York City, and produce political performance variety shows in Providence, RI.