The Switching with Jumatatu Poe

**The Switching - A Workshop facilitated by Jumatatu Poe**
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**Saturday, May 7, 2022**
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**10:30am-1:30pm **
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**In Person in the Workroom Studio Theater at 33 Hawley St.**
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**Sliding Scale $25-50**
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I like to imagine that this practice in performance improvisation, The Switching, is a strategy in immediate evolution, rapid-fire shifting, sublime learning of and in the moment. I began this practice while dealing with my curiosities around a question I obsessed over: “Can I change myself?”
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Our practice will deal with strategic essentialization – through the immediate re-design of ourselves into other creatures, or other ways of being our innate creatures – and working with immediately identifying the restrictions/limitations that are inescapable. It’s round about, and ideally will come full circle.
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Now, in **this** moment, it’s circle/curve through my distals, and my distals are everywhere, and my desire travels in orbits, in cycles, and my vision is a limb.
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And *now*, in **this** moment, my vision is a limb, and I am comprised of everything
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that I can sense that I cannot see, and I am composed of the same
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material all throughout my body, and my voice is flat.
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And *now*, in **this** moment, my voice is flat, and my rhythm is insistently
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percussive, and my organs erupt to propel me into movement, and
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then they recompose themselves, and I am responsible for all of the sound I can
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hear, and I am feeling overwhelmed at all of my responsibility, and my
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erotic desire is piercing through my pores.
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For me, there is something deeply spiritual about it, something confusing, something humbling/humiliating about it. I feel like it has theoretical links to code switching, especially as it has to do with my Blackness and queerness, experiences of immediate compartmentalization/contextualization as a defense mechanism, as a means of survival.
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“It kinda asks the “safe space” academic overuse and misuse to reexamine itself cause not only am I accountable for what I’m choosing to put into the room, but I’m acknowledging that there are things about my makeup/training/culture/privilege/unconscious/blind spots that can also cause a shift in the room or the community or the world for better or for worse or who knows really what the effect will be. Something about this philosophy is great to me because it doesn’t make me feel like I have to fret. It doesn’t make me feel totally paralyzed to choose or move. It does make me hyper-diligent about the messiness of it all, the plurality of it all.“
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—Christina Gesualdi
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photo by: Tayarisha Poe