What Our Grads Are Up To: Body Empathy & Touring On The Sly

From leading Body Empathy writing workshops in San Francisco to touring with drummers and a Ghana dance troupe through the Rockies, our graduates are rocking the real world.

On Nov. 13, Jen Cross, IMA-TLA who focused on erotic writing as a pathway to reinhabit the body, will co-present with Alexandra Cafarelli a workshop called "Body Empathy." Here's their description: "What if we could truly experience empathy for our bodies as they are – and then, by extension, for ourselves, as we are? As queer, genderqueer & trans survivors with a wide array of backgrounds and identities in a sexuality-/gender-restrictive culture, our self-protective tendency can be to “check out” by detaching mind from body to such great degrees that it can be dangerous. Physical activity and writing are two ways to check back in with your embodied self.
With deep respect for the privacy and variety in our personal experience of gender expression and our individual histories, this workshop will create safe space for participants to embrace our bodies as they are, and to write the stories our bodies have been wishing to speak, while allowing possibility for the integration of identity and physical presence. Using brief writing exercises and low impact body mindfulness exercises derived from improvisational theater, Zen meditation practice, and the internal Chinese martial arts, participants will have the opportunity to fully embody our gender complexity in a healing and playful environment." For more information, visit Jen's website, writingourselveswhole.org.

Griffin Brady, a recent graduate in world music, cultural studies and ethnomusicology, has been touring with his group, On the Sly and the SAAKUMU Dance Troupe of Ghana, West Africa, heading toward the Rocky Mountains to drum and dance in the new year. In between gigs, Griffin and the community he's coalesced run the Slyboots School, offering workshops on Rhythm Study, Harmony Study, Melody Study, Improvisation Study and Composition Study. He also organizes the annual Slyfest each August. Listen to some of the music and check out one of the coolest, most whimsical and edgy websites around at www.onthesly.orghttp://onthesly.org/

Deena Chappell: Voices of the Archetypes

Deena Chappell, a IMA graduation who specialized in consciousness studies, came to Goddard as an accomplished musician who has performed widely for years. Listen to an interview with Deena on the Carl Jung Gateway radio show on Blog radio. Her new album, "Voices of the Archetypes," was the central part of her thesis, bringing together Jungian studies, spiritual exploration, and her astonishing and provocative voice and instrumentation. You can also see more about Deena at her website.

Born into a family of musicians, Deena has been performing bluegrass, rock, folk, swing and jazz since she was 14. A well-known bass player, she also plays mandolin, sings in a popular swing/jazz duo with Nathan Knowles, and plays in a bluegrass trio, Dirty Old Strings. She's worked with the Vermont Arts Exchange for six years, offering music therapy sessions with vets, songwriting workshops for children throughout Bennington County, and other workshops throughout the area.

Taina Asili: Writing, Singing and Facilitating Toward Home

Taina Asili was already a songwriter, artist, writer, activist and workshop leader when she started in IMA's Transformative Language Arts concentration. Through her studies of the power of singing, storytelling and writing to help people resist post-colonial oppression, particularly in Puerto Rico, where both her parents come from, she found her own way home. From that homecoming, she's gone on to create writing, art and music, not to mention some powerfully-needed workshops for many populations seeking their own homecoming. As she explains, “I learned a lot about how my own family – my grandmother, mother and father – passed that tradition on, and I now incorporate very deeply what I learned into the work I create now.”

She's currently plenty busy raising her son, Yabisi, for whom Goddard is a second home, while touring with her band, Taina Asili y La Banda Rebelde, preparing to release their debut album, “Mama Guerrilla” (celebrating the mother warrior spirit), and playing at colleges, festivals, community centers, nightclubs and political events in Vermont, Boston, New York City and Philadelphia. She recently performed at a large May Day event focused on worker rights, organized by a coalition of anti-war and worker-support organizations in Troy, NY. She explains that her new album brings together a lot of what she created during her MA, and also, when she performs, she now talks about that history and the broader transformations possible through the word.

The immigrant experience of her family (although Puerto Rico is technically a territory of the U.S.) also informs her teaching. Her current workshop, “Refugee Voices,” brings together 15-20 refugees from Burma, Iraq, Nepal and the Sudan for photography and poetry, all of which helps them forge community with each other and find a new way of making home in this country. Taina explains, “The first thing refugees have to deal with is finding food, clothing and shelter, but there's not a lot of opportunity to really process the experience of being in refugee camps and then transitioning to this country.”

The workshop not only helps refugees tell their stories through photographs and poetry to each other, but to the larger Albany, NY community. An exhibit at the end of the workshop breaks down barriers between the refugee community and their new-found hometown. “It's phenomenal because the larger community, now hearing the voices of these refugees, really want to support them.” The workshop series, funded by the Capital Region Arts Center, is organized by a coalition of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Grand Street Community Arts, and the Workforce Development Institute.

In reflecting back on what she learned at Goddard, Taina notes the essential lessons about the ethics of facilitation, “...to really be able to support other people's voices, and to nurture people in their own self-empowerment.” She also learned of multitudes of resources to use, such as the poetry of Martin Espada, suggested to her by an advisor she had, to many workshop exercises she's created for her thesis project, which combined her poetry, music, and a comprehensive curriculum on using writing for social change.

“That personal and social transformation I experienced is something I want to facilitate in others,” she says.

Visit Taina's site for more on her good work. Photos (from top): Taina performing with her band; Taina and family in Puerto Rico; "Refugee Voices" group; Taina Asili

Awakening Through Pilgrimage: Angela Mullins

Angela Mullins, an accomplished flutist who has performed and taught around the country, came to Goddard with a yearning to go on a pilgrimage – a sacred journey to a site of religious and spiritual significance. So she set out to study pilgrimage, which she defined as “an intentional journey in which the pilgrim communes with the divine, communes with the divine, contemplates his/her life path, and renews his/her connection to the sacred.” Inspired by a pilgrimage to Camino de Santiago in Spain before she started the IMA program, she focused her IMA studies on pilgrimages to China, Tibet, Bolivia, Peru, and even Paris. The journeys culminated in her thesis, Awakening to Awakening: An Intimate Exploration of Pilgrimage, a comprehensive exploration of the traditions, psychology, and religious roots of pilgrimage, and a beautifully-written memoir of her own journeys that also includes her sparkling photographs.

Mullins explains that the study “allowed me to integrate parts of myself that never integrated before. When I first went on my original pilgrimage – to Santiago – that itself unraveled my life in a powerful way, and I realized that writing was going to be really important to my life, but the process of studying pilgrimage at Goddard and integrating my own experience to the depths of my soul, and my writing and study, enabled me to realize my work and life don't have to be separate things.” Along the way, she also took her bamboo flute with her on many journeys, and played around the world, offering her music and collaborating with local musicians. “Being in other cultures, I learned how music served culture, and how music is beyond high art and is its own pathway to healing.”

In addition to her music, she awakened the writer and photographer in her. She says she only started taking her writing seriously right before she started at Goddard. “Up to that point, I was a closet journaler, and would have smacked somebody if they dared to read it, but going on that first pilgrimage, and realizing writing would be an important part of understanding pilgrimage showed me how to follow writing wherever it took me, and how writing was its own pilgrimage path.” What she saw not only infused and opened up her writing, but her photography also as she took thousands of pictures on her travels.

Her pilgrimage continues in several forms. Right after she finished her thesis at the end of 2007, she went to Pisco, Peru to volunteer for Hands on Disaster Response. She currently is on a journey through massage school, and she's studying yoga, looking all the time for how these healing arts enhance and integrate into her writing, photography, and music, and in how she serves her community.

While she continues to teach flute at a studio in her home, perform, and do arts outreach in Washington, D.C. public schools – taking music into the classroom to help students find their own voices – she says her journey in the IMA program and around the world has “taken music from where it was before my life – as an intellectual process – and taken it back into my heart and back into my body. It's also opened up my whole life so that everything I do – music, writing, photography, yoga, massage, everything – now comes from that place within me.”

For more on Angela's reflections, please see http://mysticalroad.blogspot.comand http://mandalajourney.blogspot.com

Photos (from top): 1) Walking along the Camino near Pamplona, Spain; 2) Inside the Inca Ruins at Ollantaytambo, Peru; 3) Flying over the Himalayas: the Rooftop of the World; 4) Sharing melodies inside the Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China; 5) Friends from the Camino, in front of the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain; 6) Connecting with the music inside Templo de la Luna, near Cusco, Peru

Lorraine Hammond: Bringing the Song Back to the Source

Lorraine Hammond – a well-known folksinger and songwriter with decades of experience performing and teaching Americana roots and folk music – came to the IMA program to study traditional music in her homeland, the Northern Appalachian region. “I grew up in a community where we sang the old songs, and I was the child of a farm family.” She not only sang, but learned to play the Celtic harp and 5-string banjo, and also became the foremost exponent of the Appalachian dulcimer.

Hammond's career teaching and performing takes her to festivals and folk schools around the country, including the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, the John C. Campbell Folk School (NC), the Mountain Collegium of Early Music (NC), the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop (WA), the Augusta Heritage Program (WV), and Summer Acoustic Music Week (NH). Yet over years of performing, she became increasingly concerned about the disconnect between this music's scholars, founders, performers and audiences. “There was a huge disconnect. Folk music is interesting to the upper class as something to be studied; it's interesting to academics as a form of literature; and it's interesting to the people who play and sing it because it's their vital expression of their lives and community. As I wrote the thesis, I was actively examining my own place in these three levels,” she says.

Having grown up learning folksongs from the likes of Oscar Degreenia, one of the original old time singers of this music, Hammond was in the unique position of coming from the very tradition she was studying. By employing an ethnographic approach, Hammond was able to combine a scholarly unfolding of the history of this music's origins with a discussion of the class issues, ethical dimensions, sense of place, and her own experience. She also bridged class issues that have historically denied early performers of folk music access to archival materials. Degreenia's daughter, Dolly, who is now in her mid-70s, hadn't heard her father's singing since his death because Middlebury College denied the family access to the songs collected by Helen Flanders on the grounds that they were now the property of Middlebury College. After negotiations, Hammond secured copies of Degreenia's singing, and she brought the tapes to Dolly, who heard her father's voice for the first time in 50 years.

In bringing the music back to its source, Hammond also found her own gifts as a scholar. “I have acquired a sense of competence that is the very reason I came in the first place. I really know my literature now. I know my sources. I understand how the important pieces of history fit together and have led up to the situation I find myself in,” Hammond adds.

Photos: Hammond with a rental mustang; Indian Neck Folk Festival, 2007. Dave Kiputh and Phil Zimmerman standing, Lorraine and husband Bennett seated; Folksongs with pre-schoolers, Soule Rec. Center, Brookline, MA 2007