Pricing: Pay what you can = Full price $175, minimum $50, Email Vanessa Sabourin if $50 is still prohibitive to your participation.

SPECIAL NOTE: This Intensive is ASL/English Accessible

Facilitator(s): d’bi.young anitafrika

The Anitafrika Method is an intersectional, anti-oppressive, liberation praxis.  It cultivates self-recovery, creativity, and leadership in its practitioners.  Originated by queer Black feminist d’bi.young anitafrika, the method has been used as a performance training tool, a self-actualisation framework and a practice in leadership development by artists, instigators, educators, and change-makers globally.  The Anitafrika Method, which emerges out of Jamaica’s Dub Poetry and Dub Theatre, was inspired by the seminal Dub theory work of anitafrika’s mother, pioneer Dubpoet Anita Stewart. The acronym S.P.O.L.R.U.S.I.E represents the method’s nine foundational principles of Self-knowledge, Politics, Orality, Language, Rhythm, Urgency, Sacredness, Integrity and Experience balanced by nine bodies: Beyond Body, Spiritual, Mental, Community, Emotional, Economic, Creative, Physical and Earth Body. Over the course of the two-day workshop, participants will reflect on their own lived experience, as a catalyst to creating new work using the method as guide. The Anitafrika Method’s multiple applications include personal growth, art/theatre-making, creative development, health intervention, organisation-culture-building, transformational justice, and leadership development. The method has been utilised by Nightwood Theatre, The Stephen Lewis Foundation, The Banff Centre, University of Toronto, Ryerson and York Universities, MaRS, Women’s College Hospital, and other institutions globally.

Bio:

From touring the world as a Dubpoet, to curating international residencies for artists in the Caribbean, North and South America, Africa and Europe, to being heralded as a Womxn of Distinction in the Arts, the creative endeavors of African Jamaican D’bi Young Anitafrika are globally celebrated. A triple Dora award-winning published playwright-performer (of nine plays, seven books and seven Dub Poetry albums), director-dramaturge and educator-scholar, Anitafrika is also the creator of the intersectional Black feminist praxis — the Anitafrika Method. She is the founding Artistic Director Emeritus of the Watah Theatre where she taught emerging and established BIQTPOC artists in Canada (2008-2018) and the founding Creative Director of the Anitafrika Retreat Centre where she teaches artists globally. Addressing issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and the human experience, through her radical interdisciplinary arts practices, Anitafrika is currently engaged in postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, researching the Praxes, Politics and Pedagogies of Black Performance, the Anitafrika Method and Dub Theatre.