Diane Roberts The Arrivals Legacy Project: Navigating Loss, Reviving Stories of Recovery & Return

In compliment and lineage with Tony's work, we share these scenes from Diane Robert's hands-on workshop and creative process, The Arrivals Legacy Project: Navigating Loss, Reviving Stories of Recovery and Return. There is no bypassing loss. Loss of language, culture, dance, songs, history, memory, home. For those who remain, there is a continual longing for a forgotten past. For those who leave, there exists a sometimes-unspoken longing to return (Césaire 1956). In the context of African Diasporas Studies (Gilroy 1995), as well as in Performance Studies (Roach 1996), there is a debate about what practices may enable individuals, families and communities to either re-construct or acknowledge the continuing existence of distinct, inherited cultural values and traditions. Terms such as “embodied memory” (Roach 1996) and “ancestral” memory have been used to refer to those processes by which one may inhabit or embody memories of dead ancestors (Vrettos 1886). In this workshop, I introduce The Arrivals Personal Legacy Process, an embodied performance-based approach which I have developed to facilitate the emergence of re-remembered connections with ancestors. Working through particular centres of gravity rooted in the body and infused by the spirit, the process aims to bring to the fore the complexities of association and the politics of resistance (internal and external) that members of African Diasporas and Indigenous peoples living in the Caribbean and Canada go through when faced with the challenge of engaging their ancestral memory. As a result, the process itself demands a level of engagement that contradicts the traditional role of the researcher as knowledge producer by asking the researcher to step into a state of unknowing and to grapple with what is potentially unknowable.

Find out more about Diane Robert's work at www.arrivalslegacy.com.

This workshop was offered October 24, 2019 for Decolonization, Social Movements and Performance in the Caribbean and Canada 1968-1988 hosted in Toronto, ON, on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First
Nation and the Dish with One Spoon Wampum.