DIVERSITY FELLOWS! present TRAINING DAY: the live art diversity workshop to end all diversity workshops. (We hope.)

TRAINING DAY explores the languages and performances of diversity and multiculturalism in various institutional spaces, from the classroom to the boardroom to the yoga studio to the wide open spaces of the West. TRAINING DAY replicates and animates diversity discourse through participatory attempts at transformation.

The 200-minute diversity workshop is led by pairs of diversity counselors, played by the DIVERSITY FELLOWS!, Marc Boucai and Reya Sehgal. These counselors reference different institutional modes of performing diversity, multiculturalism, anti-oppressive ethics, and tolerance—occupying the kindergarten classroom, the lecture circuit, the corporate office, and, of course, reality TV. Embodying these personas, the FELLOWS lead audiences on a semi-improvised journey through trust knots, role-plays, privilege lines, and sticky situations. The workshops use media, dance, art-making, and team-building activities to take audiences through the many stages of diversity performance. Snacks included!

Informed by a range of texts addressing racialization, privilege, institutional diversity, identity politics, neoliberalism, 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.

TRAINING DAY premieres at AS220’s Black Box Theater in Providence, RI, on April 30th.

Show times:

Saturday, April 30, 6–9:20pm
Sunday, May 1, 6–9:20pm

$15–$25 sliding scale
$10 student tickets at the door
Free with Brown or RISD ID

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