BDAC & DE Launch Catalytic 3-Year Partnership
Photo by Travis Coe.
Double Edge Theatre and Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative Launch a Catalytic 3-Year Fellowship Powered by Black and Indigenous Performance and Climate Activism
HARLEM, NY. (May 17, 2021) Double Edge Theatre and Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative (BDAC) are thrilled to announce the Art and Survival Fellowship. This in-person training and performance opportunity brings together established and emerging performance artists, educators, and activists to explore climate justice, cultural wellness, creative activation, site-responsive performance, and community-building across rural and urban geographies. Priority will be given to Black and Indigenous performers. Fellows who successfully complete the full fellowship will receive a $2,000 honorarium. All required travel, lodging and meals will be provided.
Fellows will experience facilitated workshops grounded in Art Justice and Living Culture — principles honed through Double Edge Theatre’s decades long engagement with the cultural, economic, and political realities in communities from Buenos Aires to rural Massachusetts. Ebony Noelle Golden, founder of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative and Jupiter Performance Studio (JPS), will facilitate workshops rooted in her Body Ecology curriculum which brings a womanist and Black feminist lens to public performance, cultural organizing, and climate justice. Fellows will also receive rigorous physical training including aerial arts, and develop new solo works in a focused and supportive environment. In between immersions, fellows will participate in virtual gatherings, peer feedback sessions, and artist talks.
The application period opens on May 17, 2021 and closes on June 17, 2021. Applicants can expect to receive a decision by June 25, 2021. Please visit bettysdaughterarts.com or doubleedgetheatre.org to apply. In addition to performing their own work at Double Edge Theatre in 2023, select fellows may be invited to participate in Ebony Noelle Golden’s new work titled In The Name Of...,the second in a tryptic of public performances centering Harlem as a site of prismatic Black liberation. In The Name Of... will be presented as an expansive multi-site processional ceremony at Double Edge Theatre’s 40th Anniversary Festival in 2022.
Double Edge Theatre is proud to be a BDAC/JPS touring partner for this transformative project, and to offer space for its continued development. Double Edge Theatre’s Founder and Artistic Director Stacy Klein said, “Since Ebony Noelle Golden’s voice was first resoundingly heard at DE’s Art and Survival Gathering in 2016, we have followed her work in Harlem building 125th and Freedom, and also upon her return for numerous residencies at DE. Golden’s commitment to her creative process, her cultural work, and her vision of change, dares to place her art as a transformational landscape, wherein the entirety of her community is invited to participate in re-visioning their environment.” DE’s vision is to prioritize imagination in times of creative, emotional, spiritual, and political uncertainty and it is with this in mind, that we place our collaboration on the Art and Survival Fellowship and In the Name Of... with Ebony Noelle Golden at the very center of our fortieth anniversary year and beyond.” The fortieth anniversary celebration will conclude in Summer 2022 with the Double Edge Ensemble’s original rendition of Euripides’ The Bacchae, as told entirely through the women’s ritual voice.
About the Partners
Double Edge Theatre
Double Edge Theatre, founded in 1982 by Stacy Klein, is a cultural cooperative and ensemble collective -- a place of nurturing and sanctuary. We fuse the highest caliber of artistic work, a deep love of the natural environment, and an unwavering faith in human potential. Like the water that runs around and through the land it occupies, Double Edge is a river for artists who thirst -- from all ancestral legacies, cultural backgrounds, community contexts, walks-of-life. Often artists, educators, scholars come here to identify more clearly, to understand themselves, and to seek where their courage will allow them to go. doubleedgetheatre.org
Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative
Led by artist-scholar-organizer Ebony Noelle Golden, Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative (BDAC) is a cultural consultancy and arts accelerator working nationally since 2009. BDAC powers systems, strategies and solutions to advance social justice, cultural wellness, creative emancipation with community organizations, artists, activists, and educators. In 2020, BDAC launched Jupiter Performance Studio, which houses all of the company’s creative and arts education endeavors. Jupiter Performance Studio is a hub for the development, exploration, and production of diasporic Black performance traditions.
