Master Classes

MASTER CLASS A: 
Instilling Justice: Moving Beyond Equity and Diversity in the Classroom

MASTER CLASS B: 
From Confederate Monuments to an Empowering Art Platform for Extra-Ordinary People

Presenter: Javier Cardona Otero
Saturday, July 24th from 3:15 - 5:15pm (EDT)  &
Sunday, July 25th from 1:00 - 3:00pm (EDT)

Recognizing, thus honoring that inspiring, resilient, and memorable people come from different geographies and are diverse in colors, genders, sizes, and shapes, and that they have empowering stories to be told by themselves, this workshop provides an interdisciplinary art-making platform for participants to act, reflect, and transform themselves and others. As a theater-based site of engagement for participants to critically brain/body-storm to stage personal narratives, this workshop problem-poses Confederate monuments as “public art.” The workshop also explores the public performative act of diverse people, particularly by African Americans taking a knee to disrupt and challenge the docile entertainment in which systemic immobility has historically silenced and invisibilized persistent violence against BIPOC’s bodies. Participants in this workshop will have a platform to play (with) themselves and their life stories to (re)shape and (re)present themselves on their own terms, with their own bodies and voices. In opposition to a rigid cold stone pedestal to look up to and passively place our hopes, this workshop becomes a creative, flexible, and aesthetic platform to embody, voice, and affirm empowered and extra-ordinary selves. Elements of history, physical theater, storytelling, visual arts, costume design, voice, and music give shape to this interdisciplinary and experiential workshop.

Originally from Puerto Rico, Javier Cardona Otero is a performing artist, critical educator, and facilitator of art experiences as education. His artistic scholarship, which has been presented throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, seeks to critically investigate sociocultural capitals, particularly regarding issues of race, gender, and the environment. His research interest is interdisciplinary and intersectional. It focuses on the production of performing artwork as a teaching and learning form to engage diverse spect-actors to problem-pose and inquire about social phenomena to creatively and critically perform social, cultural, and political knowledge committed to social and environmental justice. As a specialist in the use of arts as an embodied and aesthetic form and a dialogical medium for critical enjoyment, reflection, and social action, Javier crafts original art performances in and out of traditional spaces for arts (re)presentation and education. Currently, Javier is a Curriculum and Instruction Ph.D. student in the Arts Education Program at Indiana University, Bloomington.

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