Enfleshment, Rapture, & Trance with brontë Velez
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We explore lead to life’s ceremonial practice and black spiritual traditions of coming back to and departing from the body as a ritual practice. Zora Neale Hurston’s short story High John de Conquer will be our point of departure to explore the rapture, those eschatological stories where god takes you elsewhere/elsewhen at the end of the world.
How can we create sanctuary to be carried away in a time that demands our dissociation? How does exploring fugitivity support us? What does black trance and dance have to do with it all? We will spend time with reading, performance, practice, and storytelling together.
brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). As a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, curator, trickster, educator and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration and death doulaship.
They embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the land through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth. They are currently co-conjuring a mockumentary with Esperanza Spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and caring for/being cared for by land with their partner in unceded Kashia Pomo territory in northern California. Mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life.
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