Design|Chance|Transmission

a salon-style performance work facilitated by Deborah Goffe based on Liturgy|Order|Bridge.

For the past year Deborah Goffe has been gathering folks at our studio each month for what she calls LOB Practice Sessions in our first ever TRANSMISSIONS Artist Residency. On November 21 she, along with several local artists and culture bearers who have been gathering with her, will share a salon-style performance at the studio.

Practice Sessions are a series of gatherings facilitated by Hartford performance maker Deborah Goffe and built on themes and processes developed through her recent work, LiturgyIOrderIBridge. Rooted in communal experience, practice sessions invite participants into creative process inspired by the embodied strategies of the black church, the spectacle of fashion shows and Fellini movies, the sacred and social functions of public performance, and the intimacy of conversations with old friends.

A note from Deborah Goffe …

Over the last several years, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways cultural workers in various localities throughout New England, particularly those of us of color, create threads of connection across our professional, familial, and community networks. Those relationships support us in realizing our creative visions. With or without formal access to established systems, we find our way to each other and our work. In large and small ways, and through most of the projects I undertake with Scapegoat Garden, I’ve been looking for ways to talk with others about the strategies we employ, and to be increasingly deliberate about the ways we uplift our capacities for mutual support.

Liturgy|Order|Bridge, and these proposed practice sessions, are outgrowths of that intention. Liturgy|Order|Bridge centers performance as an organizing principle in a ritualized public ceremony—and asks: What might it mean to engage performance practice as faith practice and  communal ceremony, performance space as consecrated site, and audience engagement as a fellowship of shared witness, place, and inheritance?

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Holyoke Local Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.