Cosmologies of Creation with TAJA WILL
MAY 25-29

Together we will span practices of ceremony, ritual, dance improvisation, design-centered world making, creative writing and conversations around past, present, and future artistic culture building.

This immersive workshop is an invitation into parallel play with choreographer and Healing Justice practitioner Taja Will, and their Diaspora Futurismmethodology. Their methodology centers BIPOC kinship, Disability Cosmology and Queer Ecology, joining voice in tandem with the many thought authors sharing these terms and growing in an emergent process. For Taja, the practices living in this methodology come from 15 years of noticing how they engage, snag, fight, love and rest in the greater field of contemporary dancemaking as a queer, non-binary trans, BIPOC, chronically ill artist. They blend dance making with Healing Justice foundations, nervous system awareness, ensemble and group constellations, ancestral ceremony, and everyday magic with justice aligned action.

This intensive workshop will touch, skim, and scan multitudes and settle where the participant group feels called; blending time of facilitator proposals and instigations and times of more laboratory-like simultaneous research.

ABOUT TAJA

Taja Will (they/them) is a non-binary, chronically ill, queer, Latinx (Chilean) adoptee. They are a performer, choreographer, somatic therapist, consultant and Healing Justice practitioner based in Mni Sota Makoce, on the ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe. Taja’s approach integrates improvisation, somatic modalities, text and vocals in contemporary performance. Their aesthetic is one of spontaneity, bold choice making, sonic and kinetic partnership and the ability to move in relationship to risk and intimacy. Will’s artistic work explores visceral connections to current socio-cultural realities through a blend of ritual, dense multi-layered worldbuilding and everyday magic.

My work animates questions of belonging, kinship, queerness, solidarity and calls to stewardship. Developing a methodology of Diaspora Futurism is an invitation to the displaced to find renewed & remembered interdependence. This methodology poses Queer Ecology, Disabled Cosmology & BIPOC Kinship as pathways for healing past and future generations.

The aesthetics of my collaboratively created artistic works insist on attention to revolving state-based material for example a sense of loneliness, or control, or tenderness, or humor, or dissonance, or ritual, or a combination; resulting in multi-dimensional layering of physical and vocal expressivity. Themes in my work are comprised of collective humanity; how we exist in our mundane and extraordinary socio-cultural environments.

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