SUMMER LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
Summer Leadership Institute
SUMMER LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
Summer Leadership Institute
Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute is an intensive 10-day convening where we learn effective ways to deepen or begin our work as artists who want to connect our art to community organizing and progressive social change strategies.
Our theme for 2022: Are We Democracy?
Watch the 2022 SLI Culminating Performance: “Are We Democracy?” (Begins at 6:35)
Urban Bush Women knows that voting is only one part of the democratic effort. As the country grapples with fundamental questions at the local, state and national level -- from voting rights to the role of the courts in the political process -- we must consider what it means to participate beyond voting. And we must consider what role we, as artists, can play.
The SLI forges an “artist as activist” methodology that offers a complex set of competencies and techniques that have evolved from a 40 year practice of art-making. What does it mean to employ strategy and move beyond reactive, survival modes of being?
We believe it is valuable to “use movement to build a movement”. Our leadership development will include:
Embodied Learning through Dance and Movement Classes
UBW’s Entering Building and Exiting Community (EBX) Workshop
The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism Workshop
Presentations
Asset Mapping
Dialogue and Discussion
Groups transform as they sweat, clap, and create together. Communicating nonverbally is freeing in a debate-based society such as ours, and allows for an intimate and authentic way of knowing other people. We deliberately harness the joy and unifying power of rhythm and movement to inspire respectful physical and verbal dialogue.
We use art as a lab for struggling together. Dancing and creating together are the physical parallels to dialogue, a method of communicating that prioritizes multiplicity. The Culminating Public Performances (includes all participants) uses music, dance, theater, visual design, and spoken word to integrate the learning from the SLI into our bodies and voices.
SUMMER LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
ABOUT SLI
SUMMER LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
ABOUT SLI
what is the summer leadership institute?
The SLI is UBW’s annual 10-day intensive that serves as the foundation for all of UBW’s community engagement activities. SLI builds the global network of community arts practitioners, and what UBW Founder Jawole Zollar calls “front line social justice workers,” by connecting dance professionals and community-based artists in a learning experience that leverages the arts as a vehicle for social activism and civic engagement. SLI began in 1997 and formalized as an annual UBW program in 2004.
WHEN BLACK WOMEN (+) PREVAIL, WE ALL PREVAIL: ERASED NO MORE
July 12 - 21, 2019 | Gibney Dance | 280 Broadway, New York, NY
Videographer and editor: Imranda Ward
SLI Core Components
Dance for Everybody
This movement jam/dance class embraces the ideas that each individual has a unique and powerful contribution to make, and that our bodies are a powerful source of agency.
Entering, Building and Exiting Community (EBX)
Based on experiential learning, we embody effective leadership practices that strengthen and develop our understanding of community engagement. Participants gain tools and methodologies for entering, building and exiting community, including navigating a variety of assumptions regarding community-based practices.
Understanding and Undoing Racism presented by The People’s Institute for Survival & Beyond (PISAB)
Through presentations, reflection, role-playing, and strategic planning, this intensive process challenges participants to analyze the structures of power and privilege that hinder social equity and prepares them to be effective organizers for justice.
Asset Mapping
Asset mapping is a process of assessing what resources, skills and strengths are available in the group and/or community. UBW's philosophy is that often communities are addressed by what they lack and not by what they offer. We model and practice asset mapping within various modalities (art-making, community assessment, etc.) so that participants may apply the philosophy to their own work.
Deep Learning through Research, Discussions, Dialogue, Panel and Story Circles
Participants are given thematically based research prompts as well as informational sessions and presentations to investigate and include in our experience together.
Culminating Performance
We have found that creating together towards performance is an integrative process that allows participants to synthesize, rebuild and re-stabilize after deep change processes. Together with UBW, participants create an artistic product reflecting both their learning and their vision for community growth and change. With an emphasis on dance and song, we use various artistic genres including creative writing and visual art, to process, synthesize, and communicate so we can understand the power of culture to support a community of agency.
For more information join our mailing list, follow us on social media or email us at sli@urbanbushwomen.org
BOLD- (Builders, Organizers and Leaders through Dance)
Using movement and conversation, story circles and community sings, BOLD workshops strive to help us all make sense of the world around us—and prepare to take action in undoing racism together.
SUMMER LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
The SLI is a 10-day intensive that connects dance professionals, community-based artists and activists in a learning experience that leverages the arts as a vehicle for social activism and civic engagement.
GENERATIVE DANCER
The Generative Dancer is a multi-day experience for intermediate/advanced choreographers and performers who want to deepen their practice through an immersive learning environment.