Strategies for Survival

Weeksville Heritage Center
Brooklyn, NY | 2021
       

Nine women from the Weeksville neighborhood in Brooklyn, simultaneously read and performed manifestos, poems, and other texts found in Weeksville Heritage Center's archive. Using Zoom breakout rooms, each woman live-streamed herself from a space that had been significant to her during 2020—a year that people around the world spent in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A cozy kitchen, a neighborhood café, an improvised home office, and a Montessori school, among others, connected the content of the texts to the performers' realities. Zoom's format allowed members of the audience to jump between the nine spaces during the course of one hour. 

This project received the support of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, where an earlier version of Strategies of Survival was presented in 2018.

Click here for a PDF version of the program and the participant’s bios.