WHERE WE’VE BEEN

The Practice Progress Summer UNtensive is a virtual gathering for artists, educators, and organizers to build creative anti-racist power over a 3-5 day series of workshops, presentations, and sharings. Often organized in three streams including, Embodied Anti-Racisting - race-based affinity groups building creative anti-racist community, Pedagogy for Change- radical anti-racist pedagogy workshops, and Creative World Building, hands on workshops focused on anti-racist art making.  The UNtensive is a partner program of Arocs Dance and Garden, and has been sponsored by University of Texas, Austin Department of Dance and Ohio State University Dance Department.

The UNtensive has featured an impressive list of guest artists who have co-created the UNtensive with Practice Progress over the years. They include: Alice Sheppard, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Haruna Lee, Irvin Gonzalez, Alfonso Cervera, Rajni Shah, Antoine Hunter, Zahna Simon, Bernard Brown, Andrew Suseno, Miles Tokunow, Ehren Kee Natay, Cheyenne Dunbar, Sydney Rogers aka Miss BarbieQ, Rebecca Fitton, Alex Christmas, and Keegan Sarimiento Kloer. 

UNtensive 2021: We Are Not Going Back
The COVID Pandemic forced white capitalist culture to slow down, do less, move toward accessible modes of gathering, and build structures of collective care and mourning.  The Uprising for Black Lives demands the end to state sanctioned lynching of Black people, and a stop to racist violence in the society at large. The call to return to the way life was before the shutdown, before the Uprisings must be questioned.  We are not going back to racism, to ableism, to urgency culture. The UNtensive is a gathering for participants to co-learn, co-dream, co-manifest forward into the future we need and deserve. Let’s all get free. Produced in partnership with ARCOS Dance and the MFA program in Dance and Social Justice Program at University of Austin, Texas. 

UNtensive 2022: My Body Isn’t Theoretical 
Inspired by Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton’s guiding words “Theory without practice ain’t shit”, this years UNtensive pushes us to move away from talking, thinking, reading, writing as the only way to learn about race and racism, and toward feeling, listening, sounding, and honoring lived experience of the body. For BlPOC, racism is not a thought experiment, it is a lived reality.  For white people, keeping anti-racist work in the realm of “difficult conversations” and out of accountable action impedes change from happening.  This year we will do, be, feel, and act as our ongoing anti-racist practice. Produced in partnership with ARCOS Dance and the MFA program in Dance and Social Justice Program at University of Austin, Texas. 

UNtensive 2023: Less like Busy, More like Body 
Come for rest and reckoning, come for pedagogy as politics, come to lay down your busy body and dance into revolutionary embodiment. As anti-racist dance practitioners, our communal call to the field is to get grounded, get fleshy, and get slow together, so that we may deprogram from the violence of the busy. The UNtensive 2023 was produced in partnership with ARCOS Dance and supported by the Actions that Promote Community Transformation (ACT) Grant awarded to the MFA in Dance and Social Justice Program at University of Austin, Texas. 

UNtensive 2024: Apocalyptic Imagining 
In homage to the creative legacies of BIPOC and more-than-human beings who have survived and shape shifted through multiple apocalypse fueled by racism, colonialism, pandemia, and home-place destruction, this year’s Practice Progress UNtensive invites us to a portal party to embrace the end of this world. In partnership with ARCOS Dance and the University of Texas at Austin, This year’s UNtensive invites participants to cultivate the skills and community to move bravely through this moment of necessary change, and to resist the temptation to retreat to a false sense of normalcy or return to an unsustainable status quo.

UNtensive 2025: Making Time 
5 years into the pandemic, and 5 years since the 2020 Uprising for Black Lives, the UNtensive marks 5 years of resistance. This year is an invitation to refuse urgent reactivity and turn towards the brilliance of ancestors and contemporaries whose resistance work has already mapped the course. Offered in the midst of defunding DEI by a violent federal administration, UNtensive organizers are unshaken. The 5th Annual Practice Progress UNtensive takes place June 20–22, in partnership with ARCOS Dance and Garden.

LISTEN IN, Spring 2020, Summer 2020, Winter 2021, Winter 2022 took place internationally over zoom. These Affinity Space / Working Group gatherings addressed white supremacy and the body over a month long series:

BIPOC Affinity Circle led by Kai Hazelwood: We heal better together; drawing on the lineages of pleasure activism, healing the somatic toll of white supremacy, and honoring rest as resistance and reparation, this virtual space will provide a container for rest, resetting, and releasing. Together we will build a practice of nervous system settling strategies to resource ourselves and each other in our current lives.

White Working Group led by Sarah Ashkin: This virtual workshop supports white people in cultivating sensation in the body in order to embody anti-racist action from a place of awareness.  Over the five weeks, we will use movement, reading and discussion, and accountability practices to process our bodies’ feelings, privilege, and potential for action.  This intentional anti-racist white space is in direct accountability and support of the LISTEN IN: BIPOC Affinity Circle.“