I’ll admit it. I’m scared.
I joined IDEX less than two months ago, and now, I’m being asked to “take on the mantel of being an artist.” What?!
I’m the Director of Communications. I think up strategy to reach our audiences. I update the website. I manage our brand. I post blogs. I run our social media accounts.
I do not “work on movement” or “improvise with my body.” Art is something I do at home, alone. It’s in my quiet moments that a poem begins speaking to me or that I get completely absorbed in a collage.
Who joins a nonprofit to do art? IDEX gives grants to leaders in the Global South that are working on food sovereignty, alternative economies, and climate justice. I joined IDEX because their work is aligned with my values and their demonstrated impact in affecting social change at the grassroots level.
Ok, this is the fear talking. I do do art in my work. Writing is my passion and can be an art form. I create spaces for ideas, experiences, evidence, and stories on paper or online in written form all day. Why not through theater? Or painting? Or dance for that matter?
Starting July 22nd, IDEX is inviting two artists-in-residence to join our team. Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones will offer theatrical jazz as a tool for improvisation, creativity, and innovation. (See more on their backgrounds below.)
Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones will join IDEX’s team from July 22-30.
“We feel that IDEX staff are already excellent facilitators…that they have access to the best of professional trainings, institutes and conferences provided by your field. The thing that they don’t have/the thing that we have more than twenty-five years experience doing…is using art making practices as ways to return to traditional (and re-imagined) ways of living/of being ourselves most fully,” Sharon explains.
Omi adds, “The vulnerability, humility and courage it takes to be an artist is something that can improve IDEX’s work with their partners, as facilitators and as grantmakers.”
It’s that pending vulnerability in theatrical jazz that has me nervous. From how I understand it now, theatrical jazz is all about the here and now. What’s going on right now is more important than any pre-conceived plan. Wow, what a 180 degree turn from the large-scale, donor-controlled, sectorally-myopic, risk-averse, conditionality-driven, bureaucratic project-based funding world from which I have spent much of my career!
Having Omi and Sharon in house will provide us with the opportunity to remove the veils of our own thinking – the thinking that compartmentalizes our lives. The work of “being present” is, in fact, work. And as people who want to walk with our partners in their fight for social justice, we need the practice in deep listening and collaboration, which is at the heart of theatrical jazz.
We also need to continually explore the relationship between art, healing, and community building. If our jobs are to create a more healthy society, artists are important allies for nonprofits, because they help us imagine, see, and explain that another world is possible.
Am I ready to crack open my masks and get deeply personal with colleagues I don’t yet know that well? I guess I’ll have to find a way, because this is the community and the journey that I’ve gratefully and joyfully joined.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll create a new work of which I’m proud and survive (and even enjoy!) IDEX’s latest effort to turn global philanthropy on its head.
***
More about the artists
Sharon Bridgforth is a writer working in the theatrical jazz aesthetic. She collaborates with actors, dancers, singers and audiences live during performance as she composes moving soundscapes of her non-linear texts. A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2009, Bridgforth is currently touring The River See Theatrical Jazz Performance Installation, with support from the MAP Fund, the National Performance Network and presenting partners in five states. Bridgforth has been Artist In-Residence at universities including: the University of Iowa’s MFA Playwrights Program; The Theatre School at DePaul University; and The Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Publications include love conjure/blues, Lambda Literary Award winning, the bull-jean stories, RedBone Press, and Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project, University of Texas Press, which she co-edited with Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, and Dr. Lisa Lynn Moore. Bridgforth’s performance script, delta dandi is published in solo/black/woman, Northwestern University Press.
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Ph.D. is an artist/scholar and an Associate Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Jones’s scholarship focuses on performance ethnography, theatrical jazz, Yoruba-based aesthetics, Black Feminisms, and activist theatre. Her recent performances include sista docta, Falling (in Love and War), and Gathering Honey. She is a member of the Urban Futures Network and Body Politic Think Tanks at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and is co-editor with Lisa Moore and Sharon Bridgforth of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project (University of Texas Press, 2010). Jones’s collaborative ethnography, Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Ase, and the Power of the Present Moment (Ohio State University Press), was published this year.