May Town Hall: Healing

Artists have always been central to helping individuals and communities process grief, connect, and take care. A4’s May Town Hall will gather the many creatives whose practice is centered around the work of healing.

Featured presenters include Noelle Ghoussaini, who will be sharing about her work leading creative ceremonies & sacred spaces for artists, organizers, students in participatory community gatherings, and how she engages these healing practices in her newest theatre works in development: a shadow of light and The Magic Bullet, a co-creation with LubDub Theatre. We’ll also hear from Huiyin Zhou of the CAO Collective, who will be sharing about their work with Chinese massage parlor workers in partnership with Red Canary Song, and the Ciba Punch, a collective performance involving punching steamed rice into a sticky rice cake.

Additionally, the evening will feature a line-up of brief pitches from the community. After the presentations, we’ll host a potluck meal, so please bring something to share; homemade or store bought items are welcome. A4 will provide drinks.

This event is FREE and open to the public. We suggest a $5 donation to go towards keeping A4’s programs free. RSVP is required to attend and/or pitch, but you do not have to pitch to attend.

For pitching guidelines and other information about A4 Town Halls, please visit our FAQ. If you have additional questions, please email programs@aaartsalliance.org.

Accessibility: Prime Produce is wheelchair accessible and has gendered restrooms.

If you need CART Transcription, ASL interpretation, large print, or any other accommodations for this event, please email programs@aaartsalliance.org at least one week before this event.

To keep everyone safe and healthy, if you are not feeling well, please stay at home. We will provide masks and hand sanitizer at check-in.

About Noelle Ghoussaini

Noelle Ghoussaini creates performance, ritual and sacred gathering with and for community. Each embodied experience aims to nurture freedom in the very fabric of our being; cultivating connection with our inherent belonging to the world around and within us.

Noelle’s work lives in public parks and at community gatherings, in theatres, schools and detention centers, from Turtle Island / the US to Palestine. Grounded in the mysticism, histories, land and migrations of her ancestral lineages in Lebanon and beyond, Noelle’s visions thread together artistic and sacred spaces of homecoming. She is dedicated to collective liberation and decolonial creative practice and nurturing the radical creative intuition that lives within each of us. www.noelleghoussaini.com

About huiyin zhou

Born and raised in the industrial hub of Dongguan, China, huiyin zhou 徽音 (they/ta/她) is a queer feminist organizer and community-based photographer, writer, multimedia artist and cultural producer. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies at Culture Push, The Seventh Wave, Durham Art Guild, Pedantic Arts, and BRIClab: Contemporary Art. Their work has been published by Massachusetts Review, Apogee, positions: asia critique, Scholar & Feminist Online, and elsewhere.

About CAO Collective

hú-tu (Laura 嘟嘟 & huiyin zhou) is an artist duo with backgrounds in social practice and anthropology, working across moving image, photography, performance, and collaborative writing. Dedicated to multidisciplinary art and transnational organizing, huiyin and Laura co-founded and co-direct the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草. CAO Collective creates art to empower relational community healing. Their works investigate systems of discipline, control, censorship, and capitalist extraction and reimagine memory/memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures.

About A4’s Town Hall

Town Hall is A4’s bi-monthly community gathering event that features presentations, pitches, and power networking over a potluck meal. We welcome artists of all disciplines, as well as arts organizations, to share upcoming projects, find collaborators, or discover new opportunities in a lively space.