Conversations | pangeaworldtheater

Difficult Conversations for a Beautiful World

Difficult Conversations for a Beautiful World is a curated series of conversations and readings that will happen through 2021-2024. Each conversation will have invited guests from partnering organizations, artists and activists on Lake Street and will be facilitated by Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe and Meena Natarajan. Difficult Conversations for a Beautiful World is part of Pangea's Lake Street Arts! program.

Our first Difficult Conversation featured Michael Kleber-Diggs, Ananya Chatterjea and Angela Two Starsand explored Art, Trauma and Healing

Art, Trauma and Healing

As writers and artists what does it mean to deal with the ongoing horrors of settler colonialism, white supremacy and misogyny in a way that does not merely reenact or re-traumatize? How do we hold the countless beloveds that have been stolen from this world by state sanctioned violence in ways that do not make them into flattened symbols but actually center their humanity? What roles can art and writing play in the struggle for social transformation and generational healing? What is the artist's or writer’s responsibility to themselves, to history, to the ancestors, to the future and to the audience here and now?

Ananya Chatterjea

Ananya Chatterjea is a contemporary Indian dancer and scholar. She is the founder, artistic director, and choreographer of Ananya Dance Theatre, a professional, contemporary Indian dance company composed of women artists of color. She is also a professor of dance at the University of Minnesota.

https://www.ananyadancetheatre.org/

Michael Kleber-Diggs

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. He was born and raised in Kansas and now makes his home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His debut poetry collection, “Worldly Things,” won the Max Ritvo Poetry prize and will be published by Milkweed Editions in June, 2021. Michael teaches creative writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at colleges and high schools in Minnesota. When he isn’t writing, he is usually hitting a golf ball out of bounds, riding his bicycle, or walking Ziggy and Jasper, the family’s precocious goldendoodles. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

https://michaelkleberdiggs.com/

Angela Two Stars

Angela Two Stars is a public artist and curator. She is the director of All My Relations Arts, a project of the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis, MN. Angela is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and received her BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design. Angela's professional arts career began at All My Relations Arts gallery as an exhibiting artist, which then led to further opportunities including her first curatorial role for the exhibition titled, Bring Her Home, Stolen Daughters of Turtle Island, a powerful exhibition highlighting the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Angela's public art graces the shores of Bde Maka Ska and honors the Dakota people of Mni Sota. Angela was recently selected as the finalist for the Walker Art Center's Indigenous Public Art Commission which will be installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in the fall of 2020.

http://www.angelatwostars.com/index.html

Lake Street Arts!- Circling

Pangea World Theater’s program- Lake Street Arts!- Circling utilizes an experienced and expansive Creative Placekeeping approach that interrogates gentrification and siloing of struggles while centering the histories, stories and present day realities and dreams of Dakota, Ojibwe, Latinx, Asian, Immigrant, Black and East African communities along Lake Street and through out Minneapolis and the greater Twin Cities.

The Twin Cities continues to be at the center of a country wide reckoning around racism, policing, anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous violence and structural oppression. Pangea World Theater’s Lake Street Arts!- Circling will use story circles, poetry, community conversations, site specific theater to deepen our engagement with the communities we work within to create both a space for histories to be gathered and visions for a more just, sustainable and livable society to emerge. We affirm the only world we want is a world worthy of All Black Lives! A world worthy of All Children! Join us.

Honoring our Circle of Many Realities

Pangea World Theater strives to build a just world by creating multi-disciplinary theater
that embodies decolonizing practices of solidarity, sustainability and equity.

Difficult Conversations for a Beautiful World

Art, Trauma and Healing