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NOTES Chapter One 1.The website for the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue includes this quotation by Smith along with extensive profiles and Institute production histories for each of those who collaborated on projects. Although the summer intensives ended in 2000, the Institute continues to support work that fosters the kind of contestation, critique, communion, and conversation that characterizes much of Smith’s work 2. Animating Democracy: Strengthening the Role of the Arts in Civic Dialogue (Austin: Animating Democracy Institute, 2003). 3. Lauren Muller, June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. 4. In 2003, Rajasvini Bhansali joined the Austin Project after having been a studentteacher poet with Poetry for the People from 1994 through 1996. In 2006, Maiana Minahal was a Special Guest with tAP. Maiana was mentored by Jordan and became a teaching artist with Poetry for the People. Maiana also took leadership of Poetry for the People when Jordan died in 2002. Samiya Bashir, who was a member of Poetry for the People and was named Poet Laureate of the nine campuses of the University of California in 1994, became an ensemble member with tAP in 2008. 5. I have chosen to refer to the work of the Austin Project as the jazz aesthetic though I am aware of the many critiques surrounding the use of the term “jazz.” Most notably, Robert G. O’Meally examined the complexities of using jazz to understand non-musical forms in the preface to The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, and at one point in his career, activist/artist/scholar Fred Wei-han Ho simply refused to use the term, as he explained in Sounding Off!: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution. But because jazz continues to evoke ideas of opposition, spontaneity, and Blackness, the term suits the politically conscious, Black, feminist, anti-racist work of the Austin Project well. 6. The Combahee River Collective of Black lesbian feminists wrote: We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression. 7. Katherine McKittrick describes the enterprise of her book Demonic Grounds in this way: “I explore the interplay between geographies of domination (such as transatlantic slavery and racial-sexual displacement) and black women’s geographies (such as their knowledges, negotiations, and experiences).” While McKittrick sees the slave ship as “materially and ideologically enclosing black subjects” and contributing to “the formation of an oppositional geography . . . of black subjectivity and human terror, black resistance, and in some cases, black possession,” I see academic institutions also existing as “vessels of human violence” in the way they seek to eradicate Black femaleness through structures 370 that negate our existence. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xi. 8. In Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), Jill Dolan concludes, “[perhaps we should] focus our activism on getting more and different kinds of people into the theater in the first place, so that they, too, might experience their affective power.” It is also my feeling that gathering the widest range of audience members lays the foundation for social change, and this is the world of non-hierarchical differences that I would like to inhabit. It is the world I seek to create through the Austin Project. 9. I have used Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques in the Austin Project, sometimes as writing prompts, sometimes as a tool for encouraging the women to explore their histories more deeply through physicalization. Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz’s persuasive critiques of these techniques require that I use the techniques mindfully, with particular attention to the way in which my role as facilitator (or Joker) may unconsciously introduce a dominating force into the space.This impulse on the one hand and the role of elder on the other hand must be gingerly negotiated. 10.During the spring of 2005,Sekou Sundiata came to Austin through the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas to conduct workshops and present his 51st (dream) state, a production that explores national identity in the United States. As part of his residency, he worked with some of the women of the Austin Project. Almost all of the white tAP...

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