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Chapter One MAKINGSPACE Producing the Austin Project Omi Osun Joni L. Jones In this chapter, Austin Project founder and producer Omi Osun Joni L. Jones describes the theoretical and historical context out of which her vision emerged. Jones identifies several ways in which the Austin Project is distinctive. The Austin Project works from the premise that all women—all people—are inherently creative, are artists in their own right, and that claiming this identity can be transformative for individuals and communities. Rather than training teachers, the Austin Project offers rigorous discipline in writing and performance that participants take back to their own work—as artists, activists, academics, or in other roles—and enrich their own practice. Finally, this introduction identifies the foundational precepts of the jazz aesthetic, the philosophical and artistic basis for the methods of the Austin Project. When I first conceived the idea of the Austin Project in the fall of 2002, I didn’t know that I was trying to save my life. Perhaps each attempt at art or scholarship or activism is a way to ward off the annihilation of the self. Even as the idea began to acquire clear contours, I just thought it would be a good thing to do—bring together artists, activists, and scholars to collaborate on artwork and thereby share their individual techniques for bringing about social change. Now, eight years later, I know that I started the Austin Project (tAP) to invent the community I most wanted to live in—a place where there were no divisions between the passions in one’s life, where writing one line of prose through the ache of truth telling was as necessary and transformative as community organizing, where research into the details of human lives was a compelling form of scholarship, where talk of spirit was the norm because it was understood that all things are spiritual. And the Austin Project did save my life. I can’t be certain of its full impact on the other women, but for me it was the place where I couldn’t 4 hide and ultimately did not want to: there I was required to be free. The Austin Project pushed me to unearth the moldy, dank places of fear, and to fully be. I realize now that these places of fear were born of the rejection I had come to think of as the expected response to my very existence. I do not exactly know how this expectation crystallized into my worldview but it was surely some mix of childhood loneliness, institutional racism, unconscious and pervasive sexism, implicit homophobia, and the U.S. class structure that leaves the middle class and underclass longing for material possessions as evidence of worth. By 2002 these forces had left me empty, almost broken, and in need of a way to live with the joy, wisdom, and peace that I believe enable us to be personally and communally fulfilled. The Austin Project (tAP) is a collaborative venture of female artists, scholars, and activists of color from diverse races, ages, sexualities, and backgrounds, and our white women allies, who come together to create art—mostly writing—while learning new strategies for social change. Under the guidance of an Anchor Artist and a Producer, the women meet once a week for eleven consecutive weeks. Anchor Artist is a title I created to signify the way this person must hold the ship steady through the eleven weeks of each tAP term. The Anchor Artist facilitates the weekly workshops and courageously pushes the women to examine the choices that impede their development as present and responsive human beings. Since tAP’s inception, Sharon Bridgforth has served as Anchor Artist; her work has given a distinctive force to tAP’s presence in the world. I have been the Producer, shaping the weekly meetings, securing resources, providing managerial services, and, over time, creating physical exercises for tAP. Guest Artists provide additional workshops and offer public performances of their works in progress.The women are encouraged to use the techniques from tAP for their own projects, and to acknowledge tAP on their résumés, bios, curriculum vitae, and other such public documents. During approximately the same time that I began tAP, other similar initiatives were already underway in the United States. In 1997, Anna Deavere Smith initiated the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University with several goals: “to support the creation of artistic works that address the issues of our time...

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