BDAC Springs Into Restoration and Retrospection
Reflection Points…
As BDAC wraps the first quarter of 2021 and welcomes spring, we have been in a creative and an introspective space. The last fifteen months have been full, defining, and clarifying. As a boutique consultancy and performance studio, we are grateful to still be operating from a space of love, heartfulness, integrity, and rigor. We shifted expectations, goals, priorities, strategies to stay afloat. We struggled with a significant revenue reduction, downsizing our consulting bench, fewer clients, and more.
Portrait: Melisa Cardona
2020 unfolded with unstoppable force yet in many ways it feels as if we haven’t quite entered a new year. For many, 2020 was a time of deep introspection and reflection on how to navigate and redirect our practices when our methods no longer work as they once did. As an organization, we have been fortunate to not only have had the time to do just that, but we were also able to support our colleagues, collaborators, and clients through a necessary pivot with #BDACisDIGITAL.
BDAC was founded during an economic recession and here we are again—global shifts, climate crises, and the nation in a catalytic process of reckoning with a legacy of racial violence and oppression. We believe that our work matters and will continue to matter until Black people and communities comprising the global majority experience sustained reparations, creative expansion, and collective wellness. We insist on thrival, even in the lean times and in-between times.
In the midst of it all,we have continued to work as a constellation of organizers, artists, and strategists.
Develop two performances in a series of digital workshops set to premiere in 2022;
Create, curate, and moderate free/conjure/black a digital liberation salon which hosted scholars and artists in panels and a live performance;
Launch black/water our first micro-commissions project which gave artists the opportunity to develop new work on Black futurities, which led to the premier of a recorded digital ceremony;
Direct and devise a virtual performance with university students.
Complete and sustain our consulting offerings with arts and culture organizations nation-wide;
Serve as an advisor for a nationally-recognized arts funding institution; and,
Serve the mutual-aid needs of artists and students in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
As we continue our work this year, we are clear that we are still living through a pandemic—the spiritual and economic residue of which will be felt for many years to come. BDAC is truly grateful for the support that our communities have shown us. Our work is in honor of the communities that even in these moments continues to exist in resilience and softness.
In the midst of it all, we truly hope you are getting all the rest, pleasure, and care we all deserve. We are committed to building the constellation that sustains us. As National Black Theatre founder Dr. Barbara Ann Teer once wrote, “We are beautiful, imaginative and gifted people, and we owe it to ourselves and to our future generations to restore, to recreate this beauty.”
This past year has reminded us to focus on restoration—to look within ourselves and see how the BDAC could work under new realities. We have immense gratitude for those who continue to support BDAC and our projects for the upcoming year.
Freedom Forward,
Ebony Noelle Golden and Team BDAC
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Dates and Happenings
Illustration by Angela Davis Johnson
1. Development Intensives of IN THE NAME OF.. and Jubilee 11213
Development intensives for IN THE NAME OF… and Jubilee 11213 are now in session. These intensives will occur throughout the spring leading to the public sharing of Jubilee 11213 this summer.
2. Impact Fellowship
We are currently working with a cohort of artists and cultural workers who will strengthen and advance BDAC’s impact measurement and evaluation praxis. Each fellow is investigating the viability, efficacy, and transformative power of community-based arts interventions.
3. The Perpetual Black Liberation Throughline: Public Performance as an Ecological Imperative, invited by Dr. J.T. Roane April 14, 5:30pm-7pm
Invited by Dr. J.T Roane, this seminar will host intellectuals from across the U.S and diaspora working on the topic of Black Ecology. More than a discussion, this seminar is a meditation on commissioned art and writing.
4. Jupiter Performance Studio Spring Research Trip
Given CoVID protocol and safety measures, BDAC is planning a potential research trip to the Gullah Islands. This research trip will be in service to the development of the premiere of IN THE NAME OF… in 2022. The Gullah Islands hold historical significance as the Gullah people are known for preserving more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African-American community in the United States.
Still from free/conjure/black created and curated by Ebony Noelle Golden View here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IPIcu3d8Ss
GET INVOLVED…
BDAC continues its commitment to community-based learning with two practice groups coming this fall. Applications launch this May for the fall 2021 FREEdom Fellowship in collaboration with Weeksville Heritage Center and a new fellowship in collaboration with Double Edge Theatre.
The FREEdom Fellowship will focus on public ritual, cultural reparations, and collective remembering. The fellowship in partnership with Double Edge has yet to be titled and will focus on climate justice, public performance, and public wellness. Please be on the lookout for important dates and times regarding application process and due dates.
BDAC is Digital…
Fire This Time Festival directed by Ebony Noelle Golden
SPECTER OF SUNLIGHT//FOR ELANDRIA WILLIAMS by: Ebony Noelle Golden
SPECTER OF SUNLIGHT// is a telling and a witnessing of how Black women multiply themselves to be many in the collective work and ritual of liberation. In intimate and impactful ways. Waking the earth beneath them. You hear? They are working on this side and the others. This work is a work that invites the “allness” of us. Legions of light-bringers that surround. Teeth glinted. A miracle in their eyes. This moment, I dedicate to my dear, too soon departed, sister of the heart Elandria Williams who took her last breath strategizing Black liberation.
2. Ebony's Keynote at Black Spatial Relics
Black Spatial Relics presented their second annual convening livestreaming on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv from February 23rd to Saturday February 27, 2021.
For this convening Ebony was invited to give a keynote address on the first day of the conference. Black Spatial Relics is a new performance residency about slavery, justice, and freedom. The residency annually supports the development of new performance works that address and incorporate public histories of slavery and contemporary issues and pursuits of justice and freedom.
3. Women in the City and Mobility
Part of a series organized by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung New York City, in cooperation with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Sao Paulo (Brazil) and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Brussels (Belgium) on mobility and transportation justice.
Ebony and other members of this virtual panel examined how transit agencies and local governments must account for women’s need in public transportation, and how activists, artists and policy makers are taking these demands to the streets.
Support BDAC
Have you witnessed black/water? Visit the archive here: https://www.bettysdaughterarts.com/blog-1
BDAC is grateful for your support. Consider making a generous donation via Venmo: @ebonynoellegolden or our Paypal account: ebonygolden@bettysdaughterarts.com. Thank you.
