Farmlab Public SalonBrent BlairFriday August 15, 2008 @ NoonFree Admission

Liberation Arts Beyond the Binary

About the Salon
An interactive embodied dialog on the exigencies of doing cultural field work in a post-colonial world. How can arts and activism merge to address critical ruptures without re-rupturing everyone in the process? The theory, practice and evaluation of liberation arts and community engagement, with an emphasis on public expressions of performative experiences.

About the Salon Presenter

Brent Blair is an actor, director, voice instructor, and Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner who founded the Applied Theatre Arts (ATA) emphasis at the USC School of Theatre where he is a senior lecturer. As a founding member of the Community Based Learning Collaborative, he offers service learning course credit in all his classes. Students enrolled in Theatre for Youth, Theatre and Therapy, Theatre in Education and Theatre in the Community are required to team up with ECCLA schools, local grass roots activist organizations, clinics, hospitals and/or community-based organizations to address problems specific to these courses and those involved communities around USC. He has been training Cultural Field Workers across Los Angeles and around the world, most recently engaging in theatre for trauma recovery in Rwanda. His research is focused on Liberation Arts from a post colonial model, and his most recent project, The Complex, was part of the 2007-08 Visions and Voices grant called The Press which, in partnership with affected local community members, explored the rupture of the prison-industrial complex.

Image courtesy Brent Blair