<nettime> [Fwd: [nobordercamp2007-sd] Circus of (Im)Migration tour reportback]

[lotu5 <lotu5@resist.ca>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [nobordercamp2007-sd] Circus tour reportback
Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 14:42:25 -0700 (PDT)
From: working_girl1912@riseup.net
To: nobordercamp2007-sd@lists.riseup.net


Here's a brief reportback from our lovely clowny tour of the west coast.


The Circus

You'll all see the content of the circus tonight, but overall we got a
lot of good feedback about the circus performance. We had fairly large
crowds in olympia, eugene, santa cruz and san francisco from 30-100
people. The audience sizes in berkeley and portland could've been
better. But in berkeley there was a lot of traffic of students passing
by who at least saw what we were doing and were intrigued/confused. In
portland, although the crowd was small, they were alomst all organizers
and expressed a lot of interest in the No Borders Camp.

Workshops

We did workshops in Olympia, Portland and San Francisco and got really
positive feedback in each place. There were people in each place that
said they want to start a clown gaggle. In portland, the folks who came
to our workshop were still talking about it the next night at the Root
Force tour event. Also in portland, a lot of people talked about the
usefulness of our games for any collective, not just clowns, for
improving our ability to move in the street and for building group
affinity, cohesion and friendships.

New Projects

Some of the most exciting developments were people talking about new
projects. Seeing clown gaggles in portland, sf and santa cruz would
make us extremely happy and would be a real accomplishment for the tour.
Also, in SF people responded to our interactive theater skit about the
immigration raids by talking about plans to start a Migrawatch in SF. In
Santa Cruz, a lot of people expressed interest in helping the recently
started Migrawatch.

No Borders Camp Outreach

In  Portland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz we ended the circus by
discussing the No Border Camp, in Olympia and Eugene we did a quite
summrative overview and gave out zines, and we also talked about it in
every workshop. Some people were just hearing about it for the first
time, but many people said "I'm definitely going." We had a great
conversation with a person from Portland Sin Fronteras who said that
they want to organize a regional encuentro for the northwest in
Portland, as it seems like the "next step" in mobilizing their
communities for the camps. Also, we met someone in San Francisco who
wants to work on a San Francisco regional meeting as well, which people
in Santa Cruz were also excited about attending.

Critiques

One critique or suggestion that came up repeatedly was that we should do
our circus performance for audiences made up of mostly migrant people.
While our audiences were mostly white and young, we have lots of
thoughts about doing our circus for migrant people - in migrant camps
etc. While act 3 does use forum theater for a collective/collaborative
learning process to encourage one to be perhaps more empowered and
prepared in case of an immigration raid by ICE. with our agreement that
we would like to work toward translating and developing the circus more
intentionally to share with the migrant community. nevertheless, we feel
that the information needs to get out to as many people as possible and
that hopefully the organizers we did reach out to will help spread the
information and organize with that new information in mind. Also, we
don't want to try to tell migrant people their stories, which we don't
know about as intimately as they do.

What we do want to continue to do is is to work with communities to
share and exchange ideas to learn from them and build our understanding
and relationships/friendship with groups led by people of color and/or
migrant people doing these kinds of performance, like Teatro Jornalero,
Day Laborer Theater in San Francisco or the performance groups in
Tijuana and Ensenada who have approached up about working on a La Otra
CIRCA. Still, we realize that we and the organizers we know have a lot
of work to do in building closer relationships with the many diverse
communities outside the young anarchist community on the west coast.

What's Next

One big idea that came out of this tour is an idea to start something
like a Borderlands Performance Laboratory. We're hoping to create a
space for all kinds of radical performance against borders and
neoliberalism, but a virtual space without a physical location, open to
anyone anywhere who wants to collaborate, but coming first out of
collaborations with groups in the San Diego / Tijuana border lands.

Also, we're hoping to do another traveling circus, building on what
we've learned, but traveling across the Southwest of the US and the
Northwest of Mexico. Now that we see how expensive it is, we're hoping
to apply for grants for the next tour to enable more people to be able
to travel and continue to spread clown love, joyous resistance and a
passion for destroying borders.


http://circasd.org


-- 

blog: http://deletetheborder.org/lotu5

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