TRAINING DAY is a live art diversity workshop, exploring the languages and performances of diversity and multiculturalism in American institutional spaces. TRAINING DAY replicates and deconstructs diversity discourse through participatory attempts at transformation.
The three hour diversity workshop is led, in part, by diversity counselor clowns who reference different institutional modes of performing diversity, multiculturalism, anti-oppressive ethics, and tolerance. Embodying these villainous personas, the FELLOWS lead audiences on a semi-improvised journey through the trials and tribulations of diversity work. If institutional diversity is a game, the only way out is through. To that end, the workshop uses media, dance, and team-building activities to take audiences through the many stages of diversity performance, offering games of collectivity as decolonizing forces. Snacks included!
Informed by research on racialization, institutional diversity, representation, and futurity, TRAINING DAY pushes diversity training to its edges, to its most absurd abstractions, asking participants to consider the underlying assumptions and contradictions of performing the sanitized norms of diversity and inclusion in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism and institutional absorption.
TRAINING DAY has been presented at the Community College of Rhode Island, AS220's Black Box, and the Rhode Island School of Design.
