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Artists as Second Responders
October 18, 2023 @ 5:30 pm
Three Stories
Rachel Carrico (UF College of the Arts)
Colleen Rua (UF College of the Arts)
October 18, 2023
Ustler Hall Atrium
5:30 PM
Artists and culture bearers are among the leaders of our most inventive and regenerative responses to environmental crisis and injustice. They have even been called “second responders,” because their art can function in the aftermath to foster greater healing, political critique, class, gender, and racial justice, and lasting historical consciousness.
In this presentation, Rachel Carrico and Colleen Rua will share three stories of women-led, community-based, arts and culture initiatives in response to hurricanes in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, and Fort Myers. These stories evidence the power of theatre, dance, and the visual arts, to not only respond to crisis, but also to actively create viable paths to a more resilient and compassionate world for all.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the Speakers
Dr. Rachel Carrico is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies in the School of Theatre + Dance, University of Florida. Her research explores the aesthetic, political, and social histories of second lining, an improvisational dance form rooted in New Orleans’s African diaspora parading traditions. Her scholarship has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, TBS: The Black Scholar, and several edited volumes, including Freedom’s Dance: The Second Line in New Orleans (2017), The Oxford Handbook on Dance and Competition (2018), Contemporary Scholars and Artists Respond to the Baby Dolls of New Orleans (2018), and The Futures of Dance Studies (2019). Dr. Carrico’s research was awarded the Society of Dance History Scholars’ Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for excellence in dance scholarship and has been supported by grants from, among others, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation and the Center for Gulf South Research at Tulane University.
In 2008, she co-founded the New Orleans performance ensemble Goat in the Road Productions and launched Play/Write, a youth playwriting festival in New Orleans schools. Carrico was a consultant for the 2018 documentary film on New Orleans vernacular dance, Buckumping, directed by Lily Keber. She parades annually with the Ice Divas Social and Pleasure Club
Dr. Collee Rua is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of Theatre + Dance, University of Florida, and an Affiliate Faculty member in the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Arts in Medicine, and the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship. Her recent book, Performance, Trauma, and Puerto Rico in Musical Theatre (2023), puts commercial theatre in conversation with community-engaged practice in Puerto Rico, and considers the Y no había luz theatre collective as “performers of care,” as they mobilize joy and belonging in response to natural disaster, trauma and healing. Her recent scholarly work has been published in Delos Journal of World Literature and Translation, Theatre History Studies Journal, Teatro Magazine, and American Literature in Translation 1980–1990.
Her recent directing credits include productions of Yemaya’s Belly, Marisol, …And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, Conference of the Birds, Assassins, Pilgrims of the Night and the family-centered immersive experiences An Awfully Big Adventure, Alice in Wonderland. and The Skin of Our Teeth, as well as staged readings of Nosotras que los queremos tanto by Hugo Salcedo, Lomas de poleo by Edeberto Galindo, and Red Bike and In the Time of the Butterflies by Caridad Svich.
“Artists as Second Responders” is sponsored by Imagining Climate Change and the Center for Gender, Sexualities & Women’s Studies Research.