The Fertile Dark

November 19th, 2024 | 10 - 4pm EST

with Wolf Willow faculty Syrus Marcus Ware, Vanessa Reid, Laura Blakeman and guest artist, dbi.young anitafrika

The season invites us to get to know the dark as a rich space of gestation.

We will work with the darkening of the days as a generative force for creativity and for shifting us out of our ordinary mind so we can access what’s on the periphery and outside of our normal sight-lines.

What in your work or systems is in the dark?

Many of us have been taught to fear the darkness including all of the beauty and magic of Blackness on this earth. We are inviting you further into the darkness. With our guest Artists, Syrus Marcus Ware and playwright-performer and poet d'bi young, we will dive into the Imaginarium with art practice, complexity, cosmologies, somatic re-imaginings of our relationship with darkness and the joy and beauty that is Blackness.

Join us in The Imaginarium.

Part art studio, part petri dish; this is a practice space for building our complexity muscles. Bring your burning questions about the systems work in which you find yourself. Bring questions to which you do not have answers. Bring your exhaustion and overwhelm, or a bit of that audacity of a vision you dare not bring to your Board, your collaborators, or investors. We will marinate them in an Imaginarium process. 

Our aim here is to bring what is known and unknown into a new inquiry. And if complexity thinking and leadership is anything, it is to be in the questions and inquiry with curiosity, rigor and a good dose of synchronicity. Here in the Imaginarium we combine creative practice and creative constraints (pressure makes diamonds!). We open different vantage points and lean into what we call “embodied imaginings” to access different kinds of intelligences. We combine provocations and perspectives, art practice and contemplation, synchronicity and sense-making. The intention is to access new neural and imaginal pathways and to impact our inner and outer work in meaningful ways.

  • Wolf Willow Faculty Syrus Marcus Ware, Vanessa Reid and Laura Blakeman and special guest artist dbi.young anitafrika will be hosting you.

    d’bi.young is a playwright-performer, director-dramaturge and activist-educator, who creates, embodies and teaches decolonial performance praxis. Culminating their PhD in Black womyn’s theatre at London South Bank University (LSBU), their research centres on the epistemological, ontological, cosmological, ethical, aesthetic and somatic emancipation of the oppressed self, through theatre making. d’bi.young developed the Anitafrika Method—a nurturant Black-queer-feminist pedagogy of transformation—offering arts practitioners globally, an intersectional framework of knowing, doing and being. A widely anthologised Siminovitch Playwright Prize finalist, three-time Dora award winner, and founding Artistic Director of Watah Theatre, Spolrusie Press and Ubuntu Decolonial Arts Centre in Costa Rica, d’bi.young has authored twelve plays, seven albums, and four poetry collections. Currently they are lead faculty at Soulpepper and Obsidian's theatre training programs and a lecturer in theatre at the University of Victoria BC.

  • Tuesday November 19th, 2024

    Opening: 10am - 12 pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

    Break/ Reflective Practice: 12 pm - 2 pm

    Exploration: 2-4 pm (EDT)

    The session will take place on Zoom. We will send you the link a week before the Imaginarium opens.

  • Bring a sketchbook, your favourite pens. A cup of something warm to drink. Your burning questions. And something soft. Something with feathers, a textured scarf or length of fabric. Whatever you consider to be soft.

  • This course is offered on a sliding scale.

    90$ CAD

    120$ CAD

    140$ CAD