black revival: A Movement Healing Ritual for Men

This event is FREE but donations are strongly encouraged to help us continue this important work!

651 ARTS is proud to present André M. Zachery (Creator, Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends & Artistic Director, Renegade Performance Group) and Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (Producing Director, Against Gravity) as leaders and facilitators of this movement-based workshop investigating themes of Black masculinity and all the multiplicities it exists in Brooklyn, Chicago, and America.

Zachery and Baptiste host this as an intergenerational safe space for Black men, boys, and masculine identifying people to:

• Explore what masculinity means to us and how we define it.
• Delve into our relationship with healing and recovery.
• Reflect on childhood experiences and how they have shaped us into who we are today.

Following the movement portion, there will be group reflection & discussion.

All reservations will be treated as first come, first served at the venue so please try to arrive on time.

This workshop is Part One of Community Fly Zone Workshops, a series of workshops in collaboration with André M. Zachery, Artistic Director of Renegade Performance Group & Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, Lead Architect of DuSable City. This series aims to encourage introspection, uplift key historical figures, and honor the abundance of ways Black masculinity exists today through movement, film, and poetry. Community Fly Zone Workshops leads up to the World Premiere of Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends in January 2025.

Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends is a solo performance that uses movement to explore the self-examination of Black masculinity through history, memory, text, poetry, and geography. It is a personal narrative that begins with Zachery’s youth in 1980-90’s Chicago and intersects with three legendary figures: Fred Hampton, Ben (Benji) Wilson, and Harold Washington. Guided in part by the oracular voice of Chicago ancestor and Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, the performer grapples with the legacy of these three men – a revolutionary, an athletic phenomenon and a post-Civil Rights era politician, all viewed in their primes as messiahs.

"Against Gravity: Community Fly Zone Workshop Series" is funded by a 2024 Brooklyn Arts Fund grant through the Brooklyn Arts Council awarded to André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group.

Registering for Black revival: A Movement Healing Ritual for Men enrolls you into the 651 ARTS email list so you can learn about more events like this.

Since its founding in 1988, 651 ARTS has become a trusted convener of contemporary African Diasporic artistic expression, a champion and nurturer for emerging artists and their work and a vital cultural resource for its surrounding community. As it moves forward, part of 651 ARTS’ mission is to preserve the legacy of Black culture in Brooklyn, celebrate the eclecticism of Black performance and to pioneer new visions of African Diaspora artists. This year – the transition year – is integral for the institution as it continues to lay the framework that will further help to reinforce 651 ARTS’ role as a leader of African Diasporic culture while also establishing it an incubator for artistic innovation in the 21st century.

Renegade Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company creating innovative artistic projects grounded in Black and African Diaspora aesthetics and expressions through theatrical, immersive and site-specific performance as well as film, multimedia and technology.

Weeksville Heritage Center is an historic site and cultural center in Central Brooklyn that uses education, arts and a social justice lens to preserve, document and inspire engagement with the history of Weeksville, one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America, and the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses.

Photo Credit: Tara Lynn Pixley

André M. Zachery, artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Renegade Performance Group, is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, researcher, and technologist with a BFA from Ailey/Fordham University and an MFA in Performance & Interactive Media Arts from CUNY/Brooklyn College. His practice, research, and community engagement artistically focused on merging choreography, technology, and Black/African Diaspora cultural practices through multimedia work. His works have been presented domestically and internationally, receiving support through several residencies, awards, and commissions. André is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Gregory Millard Fellow in Choreography, a 2019 Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Choreography, and an Assistant Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts in the Dance Department at NYU.

Photo Credit: Shantre Pinkney

3rd culture seed of two Caribbeans --- one born in the 1st surviving republic in the Western Hemisphere to throw off the yoke of slavery, the other in a colony, Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (Ayinsko: he\they\li) does what it takes, using voice to shift culture, engaging with communities of listening, memory-making, and movement.

Disciple of Kamau Brathwaite, Ayinsko is a sanba/ keeper of memory, whose modal practice shifts as needed -- the participatory media project DuSable City, the online creative sousou Someplace Like Home, the experi(m)ent(i)al podcapsule trance-mission DrumLanguage (2013-16), occasional acts of journalism.

Over the past decade this work has been supported by City Lore, Chicago Community Trust, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, THREAD at Yale, City Bureau, CCCADI, Voqal, & the Center for Cultural Power.

Ayinsko has also served as multiformat arts presenter with The Brooklyn Museum, Haiti Cultural Exchange, City Lore, the DuSable Museum, Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Franke Center for the Arts & more, as well as in advisory & solidarity roles with Let Us Breathe Collective & Honey Pot Performance.

 @Ayinsko, anywhere

@DuSableCity, right here

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Weeksville Heritage Center, 158 Buffalo Avenue, Brooklyn, United States