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

Larry Greer: A Calling for Death and Dying

When Larry Greer, a building contractor in Maine, first received a Goddard postcard in the mail, he ignored it, thinking there was no reason for him to finish his bachelor's degree. But then a little magic and his wife, Peggy, intervened, and the next thing he knew, he and Peggy were driving to the college to learn about the programs offered. When he saw the sign that said, "Goddard College," he started crying without having any idea why. "If you told me then what would happen, I would have laughed in your face. No way would this lead to me holding the hand of someone who's dying," Greer said.

Fast forward almost a decade, and you can find Greer, now an ordained Interfaith minister, who specializes in death and dying, educating groups of ministers all over Maine on how to help parishioners come to terms with death. He completed his BA and his MA at Goddard, both degrees bringing him deeper into end-of-life studies. During his MA degree, he also developed a curriculum to help pastors as well as the general public cultivate greater awareness about death and dying in their lives and communities. He gives talks to medical professionals, including University of Maine nursing students, and Maine Medical Center doctors on the spirituality of death. Recently, he started leading workshops, based on Stephen Levine's ground-breaking book, A Year to Live, to three groups that include people as young as 20 and as old as 70 to explore issues such as unfinished business, forgiveness, and what people want in terms of disposal of the body.

His main job as an interfaith minister contracted with a local hospital in Scarborough, ME, to provide spiritual care for their patients brings him to nursing and assisted living facilities, homes, and hospitals. His work doesn't just inspire people; it brings them to his door. He tells the recent story of sitting down to dinner with his kids and grandkids when someone knocked at the door, and said, "My friend is dying." He looked at his family, who completely support his work, and they told him he had to go.

His work and calling are one and the same. "There is that piece, the call, and if don't answer it, it becomes a monologue, and not a dialogue." He's answered the call that came to him through a postcard in the mail, and it turned out to an extensive dialogue that provides others ways to engage with the biggest questions of their lives.

Pictures: Larry at home in Alfred, ME., and the studio where he gives some of his workshops. You can also contact Larry at LarryGreer@roadrunner.com directly to arrange talks or workshops.

Katt Lissard & the Winter/Summer Institute: Changing the World Through Theatre

Katt Lissard, IMA faculty member, believes theatre can be an effective vehicle for social change, especially when it comes to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2006, along with colleagues from the U.S., U.K., South Africa and Lesotho she founded the Winter/Summer Institute in Theatre for Development or WSI (http://www.maketheatre.org/). WSI is a multi-cultural, multi-national project that brings together student performers and faculty facilitators from three continents to create collaborative theatre focused on HIV/AIDS. The roots of the Winter/ Summer Institute project are in the Fulbright Lissard received as a Goddard faculty member in 2004. She spent most of 2005 in Lesotho, teaching in the Theatre Unit at the National University of Lesotho (NUL), directing and producing shows, and researching the "theatrical response" to HIV.

By any measure, the Winter/Summer Institute has been successful beyond the co-founders dreams. After WSI worked to create collaborative theatre with rural villagers in the Malealea Valley in 2006, the villagers decided to form their own theatre group, which they call Khalemang Bohlasoa (Eradicate Negligence). They’ve been performing issue-based theatre for their rural mountain communities ever since, and joined with WSI again this past July to create a new performance for the 08 Festival. Student performers from each of the participating countries/universities have also continued the work of the Institute in the intervening periods between residencies in Africa. "The National University students are amazing," Lissard says. "Once the rest of us left in 2006, they recreated the show we'd made together, filling in all the now-missing foreign actors with other NUL student performers, and then proceeded to do the show almost until we reconvened in Lesotho this June (2008). They took that show all over the place, including to festivals in Botswana and Zimbabwe. A performance they did in Lesotho in 2007 for National AIDS Day prompted a call by the government for a renewed commitment to the battle against the virus!"

Lissard continues to work with students in New York at Empire State College, SUNY with Prof. Lucy Winner, a WSI co-founder and colleague there; and to collaborate with students and faculty at Wits in Johannesburg and the National University in Lesotho. She explains, "The other really important part of WSI is what happens to the student performers from every culture involved in the program - not just those from South Africa or Lesotho, but from New York, too. They're transformed when they do things they didn't think they could do or that they never imagined themselves doing. Former WSIers have been engaged in some remarkable endeavors - from creating a project for urban garbage pickers in Argentina, to running a youth program in the Bronx, to starting a school in Lesotho. WSI seems to encourage a level of self-esteem and confidence along with a desire to build and create projects that serve community."

The Winter/Summer Institute is an ongoing project. WSI will offer a weekend residency in New York City March 6th-8th, 2009. See WSI's website for more info.

PHOTOS - Top: Katt Lissard in Johannesburg in 2007 with WSI 06 student performers Kim Hess and Ditchaba Lekaoto; Middle: WSI performers and village actors in procession to the 2008 WSI-Malealea Festival performance site; Bottom: Over 600 villagers from the Malealea Valley attended the WSI-Malealea Festival in July 2008.