Part 1, BORDER BEINGS, INNER LANDSCAPES: A GENERATIVE, 2-Part WORKSHOP

Part 2- BORDER BEINGS, INNER LANDSCAPES: A GENERATIVE, 2-Part WORKSHOP

with SUSANNA VELARDE COVARRUBIAS

APRIL 17th & 24th @2:00PM/PT, 3PM/MT, 4PM/CT, 5PM/ET

"Why Bother

Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape of your words."

- Sean Thomas Dougherty from The Second O of Sorrow

"Letting go of borders and limits, we will explore what lies underneath… What lives within our dreams, our unconscious minds? What stories do we hold in our bodies? What characters?

What melodies? How can we begin to call them up from our body’s deep well of knowledge?"

"In this workshop, we will create a sacred communal space where we will explore these often-ignored worlds and places within ourselves. Using different exercises - somatic work, guided imagery, dreamwork, art/mask making, music, we will engage with our inner voices and landscapes in order to gain a better understanding of how to maintain contact with this rich world. We will seek to honor it so that we can enter into dialogue with it - through writing, images, metaphors, music, movement - and in so doing enter into conversation with ourselves and our deep sacred creativity. This is a generative workshop where I especially invite BIPOC artists, border beings, liminal beings, tricksters, travelers, outsiders… to attend. We will create our own undercommons, our own Nepantla, and explore the strength in our liminality. We will become border crossers. Together."

Artist BIO:

Susanna Velarde Covarrubias is a poet, playwright, translator, percussionist, and performer. Daughter of Mexican immigrants, she’s drawn to the borderlands, be they geographic, linguistic, cultural, or the liminal spaces found between genres, labels, breaths…

Susanna trained at Megaw Actors’ Studio, and is a founding member of Mujeres del Sol, a multicultural collective of women in the arts producing cross-disciplinary community performances. A long-time percussionist, she’s accompanied poets, dancers, storytellers, and has played in bands throughout the valley – from Latin jazz, and salsa to rockabilly – at venues such as Crescent Ballroom and The Rhythm Room. She’s lived and traveled throughout México, Cuba, Europe, Canada, and Morocco, where she studied Arabic through a scholarship for Peace & Diplomacy.

A 2017 VONA/Voices of Our Nation playwriting alum, she was also selected for the 2017 Fornés Playwriting Workshop in Chicago, the 2018 Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive in Washington, D.C., and received a scholarship for Sojourn Theatre’s 2019 Summer Devising Institute in Chicago. This year, she was awarded a Research & Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Arizona Community Foundation supporting the writing of her play Estrella, which will be in dialogue with an exploration of the ways in which cultural hybridity plays into the navigation of grief, loss and mental health in communities of border beings.

After earning a B.A. double major in French and Spanish, and pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Literary Translation from Arizona State University, she studied playwriting at the University of Notre Dame, and earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. Her poetry has been showcased at local venues such as The Nash and The Heard Museum; KGB Bar in NYC; as well as others throughout New Jersey, Florida, and Hermosillo, México. Her poetry has also been featured on PBS’ Art in the 48, and will soon be available on NPR’s The Show. She is currently a Core Artistic Ensemble member of Teatro Bravo based in Phoenix, Arizona. She can be reached at susanna.velarde@latinostories.com