Crip Choreographic Witnessing
About this Event
Crip Choreographic Witnessing
In this workshop, Miggy employs their critical teaching practice to engage participants in slow, embodied looking at the photographs in The Classroom. In doing so, we will collaborate to write audio description of the images: a practice which enhances access while also honing our capacity for affect, observation, and creative writing. In line with performances seen in the images, Miggy will offer somatic and choreographic exercises arising from participants’ responses. As a dance artist and disability studies scholar, Esteban attunes us to existing movement and troubles the contexts through which performance is framed: “Choreography is no longer a tool for the mere invention of movement. It is the creative space where we can encounter the movements that are already there.”
No experience necessary. Free and open to all.
Snacks and refreshments will be provided.
Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban is a dance/movement artist, educator, and a PhD candidate in social justice education at the University of Toronto. Miggy’s scholarly and artistic research and teaching explore critical-creative pedagogies and embodied modes of inquiry oriented through disability/mad arts practices of access and care, black radical traditions of counterstorytelling, and dance improvisation. Miggy’s current performance project, “pahinga ka muna,” transforms audio descriptions into choreographic scores that invite audiences to join them in pursuing improvised rituals of navigating mad and queer routes to embody Filipinx (un)rest. An iteration of this work is being presented as part of DanceWorks Sweet Ephemera double bill from June 18-20, 2026 at the Theatre Centre.
Directions
Click here for a detailed campus map and here for directions to UTM.
Accessibility
The Blackwood Gallery is located in the Kaneff Centre on the ground floor. The building is on the south side of campus near Inner Circle Road, adjacent to the campus’ main public transit stop and Student Centre. It features open spaces, round sloped corners, and windows to facilitate visual communication and navigation. Accessible multiuser gendered washrooms are located on the ground and lower levels. The building is AODA-compliant, with wide doorways and powered doors.
This event will include some movement across the campus. Accessible elevators, powered doors, and curb cuts are in place throughout.
The Classroom Public Programming
An event series on experimental education, movement, and creative pedagogy
Co-curated by Fraser McCallum and Jacqui Usiskin
Rooted in is an invitation to enact alternative modes of learning amid educational austerity that erodes access, experimentation, and critical inquiry. Running alongside the lightbox exhibition, a four-part program series heeds this call throughout the summer. Led by guest contributors whose research spans performance, anthropology, critical disability studies, and social justice education, this program animates reflexive, embodied, and community-sustaining pedagogies. Sessions will foreground culture-rooted practices and plural forms of knowledge-making, engaging choreography, accessibility, illustration, storytelling, dance, and photography as tools for shared learning and artmaking. As in Benohoud’s Classroom, learning will unfolding through collective inquiry, dialogue, and play.
Visit our website for full program descriptions and contributor biographies.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 0.00
