Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 7-9 pm
@ Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street #600 (btwn 6th and 7th Ave)
New York, NY
$5-10 donation will help fund the 12th Year programming for SAWCC
This event will highlight five artists’ practice through individual performances followed by a panel discussion. A Change of Heart looks at performance poetry transformed within the queer South Asian experience. While looking back at the scene, how have we made it our own and transcended identity politics, and what happens now? For example, what other questions of visibility are still left unanswered, etc.
A Change of Heart brings together poets whose work inform each other in myriad ways. As YaliniDream vigorously builds her tale, a seamless fusion of poetry with dance with song with music emerges. Dulani’s storytelling intersects class, queerness, and generation across unsuspecting lines. Similarly, Roopa Singh’s perpetual homage to hip-hop fleshes out family ties, queer love and politics, war and violence. Sarah Husain’s poetry explores the female body and treads the conflicted spaces of memory and trauma. Finally, Anurima Banerji theatrically channels the seemingly intranslatable prose of ancient tradition and interrogates the juncture where performative form and subject meet. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Sunita Mukhi from the Charles B. Wang Center at SUNY.
A Change of Heart is ultimately each artist’s re-reading and repossession of performance poetry while questioning its current status quo as well.
Participants: Anurima Banerji, Dulani, Sarah Husain, Roopa Singh, and YaliniDream
Moderator: Sunita Mukhi
Photography by Sabelo Narasimhan
