Black Healing October Performer & Facilitator Application Form


Beloved Community!!!!

Thank you so much for desiring to be a part of the Black Healing October!!! We are so excited to co-create a month full of healing performances and sacred conversations! We want this month to bring our communities together and steward the collective healing we deserve.

This month will be a little different than last year. Rather than asking people to design and facilitate workshops, we're asking people to perform at the workshops & services we're hosting. We're playing with the idea of creating Black Healing & Liberation Services that feel like church, that build community, that gets our audiences in their bodies and hearts, and that facilitate deep and vulnerable reflection after the events are over.  We're looking for performances that really take risks and go into deep and transformative places.

It's Official! We're Partnering with Pro Bono ASL! Every event will offer ASL Interpretation!

Join us by facilitating healing offerings (6-10 minutes)

  • rituals
  • somatic exercises,
  • meditations,
  • visualizations,
  • sound healing,
  • collective singing,
  • joyful movement,
  • breath work,
  • art therapy activity,
  • call and response,
  • non-religious prayers
  • Groundings
  • Small group activities/games

Join us by performing: (5-8 minutes)

  • Your Writings: spoken word, poetry, theatre, prose (must be live)
  • Dance: burlesque, drag performers, praise, etc (prefer live, but can be pre-recorded)
  • Your Music (live or pre-recorded as music video)
  • Comedy (live)
  • Storytelling (live)
  • Sharing a relevant short film you made.

Workshops (2-3 hours)

If you have a workshop or sacred conversation that you REALLY want to facilitate, please pitch it to us. We may not be able to host it in October, but we're happy to host it in November and beyond.

Payment:

We are currently paying $150 for performances & facilitative offerings and $300 even for workshops.

Prioritization:

We encourage EVERYONE to apply and will accept as many of you as possible. We're prioritizing Black healers/performers in the Bay Area (California) and Black people with multiply intersectional identities. We're also prioritizing workshops/performances/performers/offerings that feel very clearly alined to our work and the event at hand. Lastly, we're looking for workshops that will help us as Black people ground in love for ourselves and each other, healing, and community building.

We will also be hosting events year round. If we're not able to include your proposal for Black Healing October, we will include you in upcoming months.

How Do I Know If I'm A Good Fit for BHO?

  • Do you love Black people and want to see us heal from what we have experienced inside and outside of our community?
  • Do you want to be in a uniquely soft, Black, and healing space that fosters the critical conversations we need to grow and heal?
  • Do you want to be in loving solidarity with Black people who are often excluded and marginalized out of more cisnormative, hetero, and religious Black spaces? Are you the Black person who feels marginalized?
  • Do you believe in intersectionality, feminism, queer liberation, trans liberation, fat liberation, disability justice, and other transformative justice movements?
  • Are you willing to generatively and compassionately participate in tender and vulnerable conversations with other Black people about how we treat each other and how we heal together?
  • Are you able to be patient, compassionate, and flexible with our very tiny team and very grassroots movement?
  • Do you want to imagine a world where all Black people can thrive in loving community, together?
  • Are you a weirdo who just wants to love on and be loved by your community.


BHO Schedule of Events

October 2nd (Performance & Ritual): We're Rooting for Everyone Black! A Coming Together Performance & Ritual.

1 PM - 3 PM PT
Join us for our Black Healing October Kickoff!!! We want to do a deep dive into the conversation of what it truly means to root for everyone Black, while centering the Black people that don't get rooted for enough. Join us to lift up your own experiences of Black love, times when you felt ignored and unheard by Black people, and your insights into loving Black people (across our differences, through our pain) with intentionality and depth. Tell us about what it means to protect Blackness, to have grace for Blackness, and to love yourselves by putting up boundaries. Facilitate experiences to help us love ourselves and our Blackness more. Share your Black love with performance and heart.

October 2nd (Community Conversation) Black on Black Love: How Can We Love Each Other More and Hurt Each Other Less?

4 PM - 6 PM PT
This will be a sacred conversation that follows the performance. We're looking for a Black activist over 40 who is currently and actively doing the work of loving Black people through the nuances of our humanity to facilitate this workshop.

October 9th (Performance): The Blacker The Berry: A Celebration of Dark Skin & Melanated Performers!

1 PM - 3 PM PT

Dark skinned Black people, this event is for you and us. We are looking for deep hued Black people to testify, worship, and glorify their gorgeous Blackness. Celebrate the beauty of not just being Black, but being a Black person with skin free as the night sky, rich as the most fertile earth, heavy as darkest parts of the oceans. Share your stories. Share your art. Share your voice. Perform what ever you want, offer any kind of magic you have, we just want to experience you and your beauty. The purpose of this performance is not to educate lighter skinned/non Black people about your experiences as a dark skinned person, it's just to celebrate your beauteous and wonderful existence. We want this to be a performance that can be healing for all dark skinned people - including and especially our youth,

October 9th (Sacred Space): Understanding & Healing from Colorism

4 PM - 6 PM PT

We're looking for a facilitator for this workshop. This space unpacks the meticulous, covert, and overt ways colorism shows up in our community, our relationships, our families, and our organizing spaces. We want this space to unpack the nitty-gritty, vulnerable parts of colorism that are hard to discuss in public or mixed spaces. This is an opportunity for dark-skinned folks to share their experiences, for lighter skin and brown-skinned folks who care to listen and offer love, and for all of us to explore healing our futures and families, together—in solidarity.

October 13th: (Performance) Black MaGes Smash Up: Exploring The Magic of Gender Outside the Patriarchy - Oriented specifically for Black Youth.

4 PM - 6 PM PT

This performance is specifically for Black youth who are ready to explore the magical world of gender. We're looking for performers, practitioners, and a keynote who want to smash the patriarchy through their art and existence, and support young folks to reflect on what gender means to them and what it COULD mean beyond cisheteropatriarchy. Let's make some magic for our babies.

October 16th (Performance): Thicker Than A Snicker: A Fat, Black, & Liberated Performance

1 PM - 3 PM PT

Fat Black People!!!!!!! This performance is all about us! Our softness. Our beauty. Our fierceness. Our brilliance. Our wildness. Our dignity. Our sexiness. And Our Liberation. White supremacy and the patriarchy want us to be small. They have taught our non-fat family to disrespect us, turn our bodies into jokes, and treat us as problems that need to be fixed. But we say, "Not today, fatphobic Satan!" Join us to uplift ourselves, glorify ourselves, and love ourselves with the expansiveness of our entire collective fat existence. We're looking for performers, self-love facilitators,

October 16th (Sacred Space): Healing from Fatphobia, Lookism, & Uglification In Our Communities

4 PM - 6 PM PT
We're looking for a panel who can talk about what healing from Fatphobia, Lookism, and uglification. Please let us know if you want to be a part of this panel.

October 23th - October 24th: Honoring Our Rage & Protecting Our Magic Through Mindfulness & Embodiment, Joyful Movement, Singing, & Writing It Out—a day long intensive) (4 different sessions, 4 different facilitators)

4 PM - 6 PM PT

Join us for a 2 day Black Art Healing Retreat!!!! We're looking for a keynote, a few performers, and a sound healer/meditation facilitator who can speak to what it means to honor our rage and protect our magic as Black people. We're also looking for facilitators who can facilitate a 2 hour sessions – a mindfullness/embodiment facilitator, a joyful movement facilitator, a singing/sound facilitator, and a writing facilitator.

October 27th (Open Mic & Conversation): How We Stay Alive - A Performance for Black LGBTQIA Youth

1 PM - 3 PM PT

Many of us know what it's like to be bullied, ostracized, and feel hopeless because of homo-, trans-, and queerphobia in our community. Many of us also know what it means to struggle with trauma, mental health issues, and neurodivergence. We're looking for performers & facilitators who will offer performances or healing offerings that speak to how you made it through, how you stay alive, how you learned to love yourself, how you heal. I hope this performance will encourage and uplift our youth and invite them to keep it kicking.


October 30th (Performance): Scary, Sexy, Cool: A Queer Black Halloween Showcase!

5PM - 8PM PT

Calling all Black weirdos, queerdoes, queer-coded villains, and spooky sexy artists! Let’s celebrate with a night of performances that showcase all the beautiful things we’ve been taught to fear and to demonize. All the queerness, the gender variance, the new ways of being we’ve been taught to suppress. Got a vulnerable share about some of the scary things that come with living our full, authentic lives? Bring it! This loving, sacred space is meant to hold those complexities with loving reminders that the community is all around ready to remind us of the beauty we also get for living our truths.
Got a voguing routine all about celebrating your confidence?
A burlesque centering your sensual strength?
A poem about finding your way?
A short story with more questions than answers?
A song that makes you feel heard?
Any and all art that makes you feel seen, celebrated, and honored?
We welcome YOU to share in this loving sacred space! We cannot wait to end Black Healing October with a BANG! And maybe even some fangs? ;)

October 31st: Black Love Tea Time Open Mic & Commitment Ceremony

1 PM - 3 PM PT
Join us for our final gathering of the month, a tender open-floor style event to celebrate the incredible journey we shared through September and October. This open mic invites all Black folks to come together and talk about our experiences and the lasting impact they made on us, and share open-hearted commitments about what Black love & solidarity looks like for each of us. You're welcome to bring something you wrote, whether it be poetry, prose, or song. Or you can speak from the heart, unscripted. The first 50 people to sign up will get a little self-care gift from Sis Got Tea, a Black queer woman-owned tea shop based in Kentucky. We'll mail the tea out to you so we can have a virtual tea party as we reminisce over our time together. We are deeply excited to use this time to hear our community's beautiful voices in one final event before we say goodbye until the next year's SHS/BHO.


Sponsored by
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Reclaim UGLY
Ashland, CA