MORPHOLOGIES: Free Workshops and Panels!
MORPHOLOGIES: Queer Performance Festival will present performance and collaborative arts that expose, highlight and expand the spectrum of queer expression and culture, and the transformative social impact it has on the world. MORPHOLOGIES promotes the lives, politics, and experiences of the queer community, both locally and nationally.
Please click here to RSVP for the FREE workshops and panel discussions!
WORKSHOP: Gender Self-Esteem: Loving Non-Conformity for All Bodies and Identities
with Scott Turner Schofield
Saturday, November 10 || 10:30am-12:30pm
For: Transgender individuals of any identity or experience.
Participants will identify their positive traits as they relate to their lives as gender non-conforming or transgender people. They will link these traits to the places in their lives where their strength is most needed, and create a plan for linking their truths to their individual powers in an everyday context.
This engagement is supported by the Arts Midwest Touring Fund, a program of Arts Midwest, is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts with additional contributions from the Minnesota State Arts Board.
WORKSHOP: Pages, Stages, Stanzas and Sound Checks – Thoughts on Writing, Performance, and all the Goodness In-Between
with Ryka Aoki
Saturday, November 10 || 1:00pm-3:00pm
This workshop will address ways that page work can transfer its energy and passion to stage. As writers, we have a somewhat different skill set than performers, but we can use the gifts we possess to create amazing stage work, as well. And no, you don’t always have to memorize everything! 
Feel free to bring some original work that you might want to perform, hone, or discuss! Led by Ryka Aoki de la Cruz.
PANEL: Aesthetics & Politics of Queer Art
with Scott Turner Schofield, Ryka Aoki, Nastalie Bogira, Nicole M. Smith, Maren Ward, and Zenzele Isoke
Saturday, November 10 || 3:30pm-5:30pm
Does queer art have a specific aesthetic? Is queer art political? Does one have to be queer in order to produce queer art, or is it the lens through which we view the art that makes it queer? How does the world we live in inform perceptions of queer art? These are questions that often arise when we hold gender and sexuality in a particular artistic spotlight. Join us for a panel that explores these questions and your own! Heck! Let’s even dismantle the title of this panel!
WORKSHOP/READING: “Waiting for Giovanni” by Jewelle Gomez
in collaboration with Harry Waters Jr.
Sunday, November 11 || 2:00pm-4:00pm
Join us for a staged reading of “Waiting for Giovanni” – a play that explores the impact of seminal artists on their immediate communities, particularly when they forgo predictable subject matter to delve into more personal terrain. Although playwright Jewelle Gomez’s new play centers on an incident in the life of a celebrated civil rights-era writer in the year 1956, you don’t need to be an activist or a writer to relate to the show.
Gomez began writing the play six years ago, when longtime collaborator Harry Waters Jr. invited her to write a piece about novelist James Baldwin. Thus began “Waiting for Giovanni,” a piece that focuses on the publication of Baldwin’s controversial 1950s novel “Giovanni’s Room,” about an American expatriate’s romantic dalliance with a man he meets at a Parisian gay bar.
Gomez says that the story revolves around a moment in Baldwin’s imagination during which he is second-guessing publishing his novel.
PANEL: Intersectionality of Queer Brown Artists
Presented by RARE Productions, Panelists will be announced soon!
Saturday, November 17 || 10:30am-12:30pm
RARE Productions is an arts and entertainment media production company. We promote, produce, and co-create opportunities and events utilizing innovative artistic methods and strategies. Through engaging LGBTQ Artists of Color and allies, RARE Productions seeks to unite communities and families in healing relationships and bridging cultural gaps via the vast mediums of art.
WORKSHOP: Queerly I’m Creative
with D’Lo
Saturday, November 17 || 1:00pm-4:00pm
Created specifically for the LGBTQIQTSSGL community with an emphasis on writing and performing around gender presentation and orientation, this workshop is intended for both non-writer and non-actors as well as self-defined writers and actors.
For most queer people, being seen as human is oftentimes a daily challenge. The burden of being queer bodied or queer minded causes health issues manifesting in both the mental and physical realms. In this workshop, D’Lo asks participants to be fearlessly introspective around personal health and spiritual growth. The participant will write and share/perform their personal stories, and through a series of creative exercises, will also engage in artistic conversations relating to their unique experience of identifying as queer.
WORKSHOP/PANEL/DISCUSSION: Open Space Discussion
Saturday, November 17 || 4:30pm-6:30pm
MORPHOLOGIES: Queer Performance Festival staff wanted to leave one workshop spot open for YOU. Let’s talk about what you want to talk about!
“Open Space Meeting” generally describes a wide variety of different styles of meeting in which participants define the agenda themselves at the start of the meeting, and know that it may adjust it as the meeting proceeds.
Please click here to RSVP for the FREE workshops and panel discussions!
