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Reforming Arts has a renewed vision of creating caring communities.
JOIN US IN FALL 2024
Class dates, location, and application coming soon!
- A class at a transitional prision center
- A re-entry class
- A class for loved ones of people who are/have been incarcerated
- Queer and transgender classes in metro Atlanta and rural Georgia
Reforming Arts seeks to heal the world by changing the way we Teach, how we conduct Research, and the Stories we tell ourselves. We are creating a caring community by teaching the whole person: body-mind-spirit through our Creative Becoming performance classes and research. Reforming Arts' applied theatre method, research method, and pedagogy were created while teaching in carceral institutions. We continue to teach in carceral institutions and also offer classes and workshops to people directly and indirectly impacted by trauma and binary systems. Our classes are space for anyone that was placed in a women's prison, for loved ones of people who have been incarcerated, and for trans, non-binary, and queer people.
OUR PROGRAM
Creative Becoming classes include theatre games, singing, making music, poetry, creative writing, creative expression, somatic based practices, and lots of storytelling. It will be fun, healing, and surprising. We will change and grow together.
Each class and course follows a four-step feedback loop of:
1. Intra-Action: Help people notice their nervous system responses, especially their responses to fear and recognizing when they are becoming defensive. Learn about performativity, systems, and how trauma impacts us.
2. Play: Get into a mode of play. Notice self, other, and the environment. Explore connections. Challenge long held beliefs.
3. Diffraction: Once clients are in a mode of play, open body-mind-spirit learning and collaboration (consciousness raising) can occur.
4. Creative Becoming*: Stories of care emerge from the whole self and collective.
Reforming Arts is a small grassroots organization that has completely rebuilt. We are relaunching on faith and need your generous support!
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OUR VALUES
Reforming Arts’ central essence is Care, manifest in our values:
- We embrace the core processes of Creative Becoming* which nurture the awareness of whole being knowledge
- We declare that the syndrome of false binaries (“yes/no”) is a pernicious force, and we take every opportunity to dismantle it, encouraging more expansive being of “yes, and...”
- We believe in and encourage imagination and creativity as a wellspring of health and healing, and that every living soul inherently has these resources.
- We welcome expansive questions and ideas discussed with kindness and respect, so that we can learn and grow together, to build collective understanding and a community of care.
- We applaud courage in ourselves and others as we seek to face our fears.
- We recognize and support resilience.
- We stand as witness to improvisational theatre techniques that build trust, allow for courageous space for storytelling, inspire creativity, and create opportunities for connection.
- We seek to heal trauma through Creative Becoming.
*Creative Becoming is an applied performance method conceived of by Dr. Ballew as a result of pedagogical research that spanned over a decade in women's prisons and with people in reentry. It is an adaptation or updating of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Theatre of the Oppressed through queer performativity, quantum physics, and somatic psychology to produce a program that engages body-mind-spirit through play and creativity. We look at theatre and performance as a set of tools we can pull from to help us listen and respond collaboratively to challenges in a playful manner that shows care and seeks healing for the whole.
