Hana Van Der Kolk: Weirding Desire Workshop

Thursday, April 11, 2024 at 1:20pm
Theater Department

FREE! RSVP to kbrewerball@wesleyan.edu

Experiencing desire is a very, very big feature of being human, as is internalizing fears and limitations around desire. Taking cues from Audre Lorde’s ideas about the erotic as power, in this workshop we experientially study desire so that we might cultivate more intimacy with ourselves, others, our work, and the whole heartbreaking/heartbreakingly beautiful world. In the process—through body-, attention-, and imagination-centering practices, work/play with objects, and embodied reading together—we wonder how and why we might jostle and weird desire. The etymology of “weird” is from the Old English wyrd, “having the power to control fate” or “that which comes.” It also has origins in the Germanic root wer, “to turn, to bend.” So, in this workshop we research weirding desire as a way to potentially induce otherwise and intervene together in neuro-typical, white supremacist, human-centric, cisheteropatriarchal, and rationality-privileging holds. Perhaps in doing so we can tend our tenderness, become more hybrid, fluid, and monstrous, and expand our clairvoyance, recognizing/uncovering our already multiple, contradictory, messy selves, groupings, world in the process. The workshop is from 1:20pm to 4:10pm.

Hana Van Der Kolk is a queer dancer, artist, and facilitator of ritual, learning, and celebration living, dying, and tending heart and community on unceded Mohican, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee lands, colonially known as the Hudson Valley, New York. They are committed to reckoning with and understanding systems of oppression and to everything from here on out being work with the intention for the mutual thriving of all life. Hana works across pedagogy, performance, celebration, and personal and collective restoration and transformation. This takes the form of performances, workshops, one-on-one counseling & sex and gender expansion work, events, writing, and videos, talismans, and environments. Hana has worked internationally as a teacher and facilitator, performer, and artist, and holds an MFA in Dance from UCLA and a practice-based PhD in Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In addition to lineages of Euro-American and Japanese contemporary dance, body-based performance art, and somatic practices, they are strongly influenced by the Internal Family Systems, Buddhist thought and practice, and Urban Tantra. Hana collaborates with many artists, healers, and activists, including with Erica Dawn Lyle, Dori Midnight, Tomislav Feller, Eli Nixon, and Angela Beallor and Elizabeth Press (EP) on the FlagSSS Day Collective.

Co-sponsored by the Theater Department and the Dance Department.