Dialogue and Healing Programs

We The Griot: Performance and Community Healing

In traditional African societies, the griot or djeli is the community storyteller, historian, and archive for communal knowledge. In this workshop, participants are asked to consider what it would mean to live in a society where the artist is seen and valued as the conduit for community healing and health. What if the individual’s health and (dis)ease were still seen as the barometer for the society’s (dis)function?

In We the Griot, Daniel Banks and Adam McKinney, founders of DNAWORKS, will guide participants through the progression they use in their work to think about the role and function of the griot. Using movement, storytelling, improvisation, writing, group dialogue, song, and games, participants will explore the power of their own experiences and stories as they relate to important issues in their communities. They will then consider how these stories interrelate and, finally, begin to think about composition and staging the community’s voices.

Out of this workshop will come an understanding of devising theatre from one’s own personal source material. Participants will also learn a model for generating community dialogue and story circles in order to explore the relationship between art-making and community building.

Back to the Top

MOVE2HEAL

A certified teacher of Re-evaluation Counseling (RC, www.rc.org), a worldwide liberation project committed to healing the hurts of oppression through "discharge" (crying, trembling, laughing, yawning, stretching, shaking, sweating, and raging), Adam McKinney leads participants in community building exercises and healing movements and dances. Focusing on the constructs of oppressive structures and its effects on our bodies, Adam leads participants in channeling energy in the body, collectively concluding with a group healing dance.

Back to the Top

Belonging Everywhere

Adam McKinney reflects on his life as an African American, Native American, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic Jew.

Reared in the Midwest (USA), he did not often see Jews represented in books, newspapers, or films who looked like him.  It was only during his visit to the Jewish community in Ghana (while teaching at the University of Ghana, Legon), that he understood how different his own life and the life of Jewish communities worldwide, would have been had he known about this and other non-European, Diasporic Jewish communities around the world.

Photo (right): Charm Joseph Mintah

Back to the Top

HaMapah

HaMapah/The Map is a multi-media, dance performance piece that traces the intersections of Adam McKinney's multiple heritages.

I am the sum total of my maternal ancestors from Russia, Poland, Austria, Galicia and Spain. Rabbi Moshe Isserles of Krakow, the Rama, wrote HaMapah (literally meaning “the tablecloth”) to the Code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch. I am the sum total of my paternal ancestors from Benin, Arkansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin. Beatrice Dailey, AKA 'B. Trace' was a revolutionary playwright of her time.

I am the map, the quilt, and the tablecloth of those who have come before me. While rethreading the links, I consider our struggle to stay connected to each other as I uncover resistance of my non-Black, Jewish and Black, non-Jewish families and what it means to be true to all of myself.

Back to the Top