The Free Black Women's Library presents Choreographies of Grief (Workshop)

The Free Black Women's Library is a literary hub, social site, Black Feminist archive, and community care space that features over 5000 books by Black women and Black non-binary folks, as well as a wide range of free public programs, special events, and creative workshops, a free store, a period pantry, a backyard garden, a virtual reading club, and weekly book swap.
Each month we curate and create programs that explore specific themes and topics.
Our Theme for the months of October & November are Grief & Craft
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The Free Black Women's Library
presents
Choreographies of Grief
led by Shalewa Mackall
3PM - 4.30PM

“I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. “The condition of black life is one of mourning,” she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living.” - Claudia Rankine

Choreography is the simultaneous practice of shaping bodies and to paraphrase Alvin Ailey, using them to carve space. This simultaneity is echoed in the experience of great loss, with its prescribed rituals, practices, costumes, or paperwork with bureaucratic nomenclature to be completed, these are mourning. Grief is inherent to mourning. Grief is the atmosphere of mourning. In this workshop Shalewa Mackall, an artist working at the intersections of poetry, memoir and dance, will guide participants through a series of encounters with the body (dancing optional!), memory, and release as we consider the choreographies of grief—the ways we are moved by grief, as we move through it. In this workshop, we will read, write, listen, and have an opportunity to share.

Facilitators Bio
Shalewa Mackall (she/her) creates in the tradition of Sankofa—inspired by aesthetic traditions and creative movements that recycle, repurpose and reinvent as they imagine forward. Layering identity, experience and multiple creative practices, Mackall has more than 30 years of experience teaching, performing, and creating traditional and contemporary African Diaspora dance with Giwayen Mata, Maimouna Keita, Ronald K. Brown/ Evidence, Rashida Bumbray/ Dance Diaspora and her own Movement for the Urban Village Dance Company/MUV. Through MUV Mackall presented her choreography at local and regional venues including Joyce SOHO, BAM/Fisher, Judson Church, and SummerStage. Her poetry has been published in Infinite Constellations, edited by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura, as well as Obsidian, Peregrine Journal, Mom Egg Review, African Writer Magazine, The 50in50 Project in New York and Los Angeles, and the 2019 Visible Poetry Project. Mackall is a member of the inaugural cohorts of the Obsidian/ Poetry Foundation O Sessions and Earthseed Black Family History Project, a 2019 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, four-time VONA alumna, Watering Hole Fellow, and has deepened her craft in workshops with Tin House, Cave Canem, and other literary and creative communities.

Host or Publisher The Free Black Women's Library