Cherished friends,

We are honored and excited to invite you to con’spirar, an experimental platform and folxart salon in which we generate creative processes to sustain community dialogue. Over the last year, we (Naomi & Milvia) have been in intensive collaboration and community practice as fellow artmakers, family, activists, teachers, dreamers and espiritistas. Within this 90-minute Zoom meeting, we address the potential for creating shared voice as a resource for intimacy and interconnection. 

How do we activate our ensemblic voice? What accented rhythms emerge in our tongue movement? can sound bring the joy to listen without the aim to decode? How do we offer up prayer and what is the effect on the listener? 

con’spirar draws inspiration from the simultaneous meanings in Spanish & English of conspire and respire, conspirar and respirar: to breathe; move in a spiral course; to recover hope, courage, or strength after a time of difficulty; and to plot with others. We center breath, voice and movement, especially drawing on people’s traditions which may be seen as lower or unsophisticated. con’spirar is one way we envision laying a plot together--a plot from which our collective creative resources take root and grow.   

We’ll begin by facilitating a group attuning meditation and exercises for laying out an audience-generated vocal soundscape. As an ensemble we end with live virtual performance, drawing on these new materials in dialogue with Milvia and Naomi’s collaborative dance-film duet. 

With love 💜

Naomi and Milvia

Naomi Macalalad Bragin. I am a dancer, writer, educator and activist. My early experiences training as a classical violinist in Los Angeles led me to expand my creative freedom through freestyle dance. I’ve danced in underground clubs to the streets of Seattle in the 1999 WTO Protests, and staged choreography as a Hip Hop Theater Fest Future Aesthetics Artist & Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Award nominee. My writing includes Shot & Captured, an essay linking the policing of blackness to Turf dance memorial films in Oakland CA. I’m working on a book, Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics, about black aesthetics of the global streetdance culture which has shaped my love of dance over the last 20 years.

Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra. I am an Afrolatina artist born in Caracas-Venezuela, where I began my career as a dancer combining dance and theater training. Experiences with trauma at an early age fueled in me a pressing drive toward movement. I went on to devote my life to reaching liberation through art and movement. In this Journey, I have become a contemporary dancer, choreographer, performer, bodyworker, mother and Community Organizer. MÁS (Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle) has become the platform where I continue serving as a conduit for empowerment and beyond. 

Together we collaborate on the projects con’spirar: a folxart salon and Little Brown Language: a map for those who remember by losing their way. Here we find familiar spaces where we braid shared rhythms of our voices and movement languages to reimagine ancestral cosmologies as a source of healing wisdom.

This program has been developed in collaboration with Henry Art Gallery and Velocity Dance Center.