Baladé Black presents:

A FREE 2-HOUR CLASS WITH THEATRICAL JAZZ ARTIST AND TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIST: SHARON BRIDGFORTH

This is the precursor to Sharon's upcoming online workshop: FINDING VOICE (we will send you more information when you sign up).

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The Prosperous Artist / A Radical Road to Prosperity

Learn how your personal creative power and art-making are the key to radical prosperity in all aspects of your life (creativity, health, relationships, spirit, work and money) and how to bring that wholistic kind of prosperity to our communities. *** Sharon will share Theatrical Jazz techniques as tools to access radical prosperity through practicing the art of being present***


LIVE Q&A session open to all participants!

SIGN UP & RESERVE YOUR SPOT for this FREE 2-hour WEB CLASS

Class takes place on: Tuesday, October 13th

@ 6pm PST / 9pm EST

(If you can't make it live: a video link of the recording will be available for a limited time to those who sign up)

 
 
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In this class, Sharon will talk about...

  1. THE TRUE MEANING OF PROSPERITY - particularly for creatives, artists, scholars, activists and healers in communities of color (and those who support SOCIAL JUSTICE work).
  2. How to honor our RIGHT TO BE PROSPEROUS (physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially etc.) while maintaining a RADICAL VISION FOR CHANGE… and why we may deny ourselves that right.
  3. The relationship between CREATIVITY, ART, ART-MAKING, PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION & DAY-TO-DAY LIVING (with a focus on the importance of our ANCESTRAL, CULTURAL, FAMILIAL traditions as fundamental creative resources).
  4. How our CORE CHALLENGES are both blocks and OPPORTUNITIES for greater prosperity.
  5. And what JOY has to do with it all.
 

Is this only for artists? No and Yes.

 

If you consider yourself and artist > READ THIS SECTION.

If you don't consider yourself an Artist > skip to the next section!

As radical artists, our creativity is the blueprint to accessing prosperity… but we’re often made to believe otherwise. We associate our creative path with emotional struggle, severed relations (familial, communal), false idealism or financial limitations (lack of employment, limited resources). These sometimes conscious and subconscious associations can prohibit us from truly committing to our radical creative power and our most authentic artistic voice -- the kind of commitment that ensures radical prosperity. You think you’ve committed? Most of us think we have… but the wise know it’s a daily struggle.

It’s hard to commit to our path due to lack of support from our families, our communities, the institutions that don’t fund us, a system that ensures our work is overlooked/undervalued, and that we’re pitted against each other to fight for crumbs…

Most of us still live in the romantic yet tired story of the starving artist-visionary-messenger (no matter how hard we try). One that often expects,  accepts or can’t seem to evade poverty as a way of life. As people of color, we’re often told that choosing to be artists is choosing poverty, struggle, loneliness, financial ruin, pain etc. But some of us know that is BS, yet we don’t always know how to counteract that BS. In this class, we want to reframe the artist as key to prosperity. Choosing to develop our creative power (really committing to that fully) is the only way to prosperity -- not just for us, but for our communities as well. Choosing to develop our creative power is choosing to heal, not only personal but communal wounds, to undergo tremendous personal transformation -- the kind that transforms our communities. And choosing creativity also means choosing a sustainable, radical path to wealth and prosperity -- that kind we have long deserved.

Are you ready to (re)commit to your creative path with a prosperous perspective? Join us for Sharon’s class.

 

 

So you don’t consider yourself an Artist? Then READ THIS.

You are either a closet-artist (afraid to claim the identity because it comes with complicated associations), or you’re someone who’s wanted to explore their creative power but has not had or taken the opportunity to…

Well, you may not be an “artist” by profession or practice, but you are one by birth.

Creativity may be more consciously pronounced in people who identify as artists. But, creativity,  -- our ability to remember the stories that make us, understand ourselves and the world around us, metabolize our experiences into embodied wisdom, resolve unsurmountable challenges, imagine what does not yet exist, and access radical prosperity -- is inherent in all of us. And if you’ve looked around lately, you know we’re in desperate need of some more free-flowing creativity (for our sake and the sake of those we want to support).

It is creativity that heals us, that grows us and deepens our relationships to the people and environments we need to live prosperous lives.

If you’re on the road to reclaiming that kind of personal power, go ahead and join us for this class with Sharon, and recommit to being the artist-by-birth.

 
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Sharon Bridgforth

TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIST/ THEATRICAL JAZZ ARTIST

"I am a southern Spirited/queer gendered wo’mn-mother/lesbian/child of The Great Migration.  I am a Transdenominational practitioner of Jazz.  I believe in Love and Joy and generosity and kindness.  My life’s mission is to create and share art and art-based processes that are rooted in my personal healing journey and that use Black traditions to bring people from different backgrounds together for transformational experiences."

 

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More on Sharon's artistic work...

Sharon has been a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2009. She has been Artist In-Residence at institutions around the country including: International Development Exchange; allgo, a statewide queer people of color organization; the MFA Playwriting Program at Brown University; the University of Iowa’s MFA Playwrights Program; The Theatre School at DePaul University; and The Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Sharon is producer, founder and curator of the Theatrical Jazz Institute, produced by The Theatre School at DePaul and Links Hall in Chicago, 2011-2012.  Her work has been presented nationally at venues including The Theater Offensive, Links Hall, Pillsbury House Theatre, The New Black Fest and the New York SummerStage Festival. She is the RedBone Press author of love conjure/blues and the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories. Her performance script delta dandi, is published insolo/black/woman, Eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University Press, 2014. Sharon, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Lisa L. Moore are co-editors of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project, University of Texas Press.  Sharon is one of the subjects in: Dr. Matt Richardson’s, The Queer Limit of Black Memory – Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution, The Ohio State University Press; Francesca Royster’s Queering the Jazz Aesthetic: An Interview with Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Joni Jones, in Volume 25, Issue 4, December 2013, Journal of Popular Music Studies; and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones’sTheatrical JazzPerformance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment, The Ohio State Press, 2015. 

 

SIGN UP & RESERVE YOUR SPOT for this FREE 2-hour WEB CLASS

Class takes place on: Tuesday, October 13th

@ 6pm PST / 9pm EST

(If you can't make it live: a video link of the recording will be available for a limited time to those who sign up)

 
 

If you're excited about this class, or you've worked with Sharon, leave us a note to let us know: