A guided meditation, picnic and workshop with June Yuen Ting as part of Artist Archive.
How can movement practice be a method through which we body forth a world without prison and police? Abolitionist Kinaesthetics is a movement research that began with a desire to learn and practice collective care, mutual aid, community accountability and transformative justice — to build relationships that make prison and police obsolete. June Yuen Ting invites you to experience this work anew through a meditation room, an abolitionist picnic and a movement workshop.
The project develops movement research originally undertaken by June Yuen Ting, Jeremy Guyton and Shao Shin Frieda Luk. To explore the research archive go to abolitionist-kinaesthetics.tumblr.com.
Thursday 2 June, 11am – 4pm
At the studios
Tickets
General: £5
Bursary: Free
Pay-it-forward: £10
Book your place
Day Outline
Guided Meditation – Embodying Transformative Justice
Research Studio
11am – 4pm
This is an installation, you can come and go as you like.
Free admission, no booking required.
BSL interpretation from 11am to 1pm
How do our bodies teach us about taking accountability, addressing harms and working through conflicts? Visit the meditation room to dive into the embodied sensations of transformative justice through an audio installation co-produced with Zinah Mangera-Lakew.
What’s in the space: A 30-minute guided meditation audio will be played in a loop. A BSL interpreter will be available to offer interpretation from 11pm to 1pm. On the floor there will be bean bags, cushions and chairs. It will be a relaxed environment and visitors can move around and come and go, as they wish. To take the meditation experience outside of the studio, QR codes will link to the audio, so visitors can listen on their own devices. A MP3 player will also be available for those who don’t have an appropriate device. Links to the audio will also be emailed in advance to those who have registered for either the picnic or the workshop.
Community Picnic – Collective Imagination as Abolitionist Praxis
Courtyard
12 – 1.30pm
Join us at the abolitionist picnic for conversations and reflections on the meanings of safety, care, accountability and justice beyond punishment and disposability. We will gather around food, conversation prompts and flipchart pads to imagine the world otherwise.
What’s in the space: A communal meal of vegan, gluten-free Ethiopian food will be provided in an outdoor space. There will be chairs and tables. Written, short discussion questions will be shared on paper. Participants will be invited to engage in a number of ways: having casual conversations with one another, writing down responses on flipcharts, or simply listening and/or observing. People can join at any point during the picnic and are free to come and go as they please. The food will be served in a buffet style, but some individually packaged meals will also be available.
Movement Workshop – Beyond the Box
Roof Studio
1.30 – 3.30pm
What is an abolitionist way of moving? Join Jeremy Guyton and June Yuen Ting for a movement research workshop that revisits and remixes some of the generative practices drawn from the archive of Abolitionist Kinaesthestics.
What’s in the workshop: In a 2-hour workshop, you will be invited to move, write and dialogue with others. In a relaxed environment, choices will be given to you to engage with workshop activities in ways that are most accessible to you, or that are best aligned with your intentions and/or desires. Activities may include breathing exercise, movement improvisation, reflective writing and small group discussion. Parts of the workshop may also involve learning about relevant social-political issues. The workshop is open to anyone with an interest in abolition; no prior experience or dance background is needed. Interested in accessibility as a collective process, we are keen to work with all workshop attendees to create a space open to multiple modes of participation.
ABout the ArtistS
June Yuen Ting
June dreams of another world that is already here — a world, or worlds that are so expansive, so abundant and so immanent that the confines of colonial capitalist modernity cannot hold. June dances, organises, agitates and grieves. They wake up everyday yearning for transformation — for rematriation, redistribution and revolution. They want so deeply for all those who survived European imperial violence a chance of loving one another against the colonial imperative of heteropatriarchy.
juneyuenting.tumblr.com
Jeremy Guyton
Jeremy is an alchemist, dreamer, instigator, new world conjurer, director, choreographer, scholar, and teaching artist. His current creative practice is a messy play date with his inner child god. Credits include: Solange Knowles, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Kesha McKey, Leyla McCallah and Kiyoko McCrae, Maya Taylor, KM Dance Project, Junebug Productions, B.U.K.U. Dance Krewe, and Goat in the Road Productions.
jeremydejon.com.
Zinah Mangera-Lakew
Zinah Mangera-Lakew is South-East London born and based movement artist, facilitator and yoga teacher. She believes that embodiment practices like movement and yoga should be accessible for all. Her other interests lie in inclusive arts practice – she creates and facilitates work in community settings. Zinah incorporates radical self-care into her creative practice and believes that doing so is a critical form of resistance that can help to offset the effects of living through oppressive environments.
Covid-19 Safety at SDS
Before attending our studios we ask that you read our COVID-19 page and familiarise yourself with the precautions we’ve put in place to ensure the safety of staff and all our users.
ACCESS AND AMENITIES AT SDS
Please note: Our lift is currently out of service. We are in the process of resolving the issue and expect repairs to be completed by mid-July.
Amenities include:
- Changing facilities*
- Communal showers*
- Lockers
- Toilets / wheelchair accessible toilets
- Kitchen: tea and coffee making, fridge, and microwave (not fully accessible)
* Our changing facilities and showers are not fully accessible. Our closest publicly available and fully accessible changing facility is at The Castle Centre, a leisure centre 0.3 miles away from the studios. You can find full details of their features here.