Diasporas Now: Embodying Avatars

Embodying Avatars was a workshop organised by Diasporas Now, hosted by Decolonise Art History Cambridge and the Bread Theatre and Film Company at the Corpus Playroom at the University of Cambridge.

Diasporas Now’s workshop considered the diasporic condition as a departure from unity to multiplicity, embodied in the ethos of the platform.

Each Diasporas Now founding member shared their personal stories in their paths of becoming performance artists, followed by exercises in movement-based expression by Lulu Wang and Josh Woolford, and world-building and character-development by Rieko Whitfield and Paola Estrella.

Both exercises focused on the idea of embodying hybrid identities that is a central component to POC lived experience, and creating personal, emotive, and more-than-human avatars. The workshop title was inspired by the text “Glitch Feminism,” and writer Legacy Russell’s call to “usurp the body. Become your avatar. Be the glitch.”

The video clip is from an improvised moment with a few participants from the workshop.

On Embodying Avatars:

Each participant was asked to free-write to a song that best represents their identity, and extract two words from the text to write on notecards. Each participant then blindly swapped out one of their cards for a card from another participant.

The participants then partook in embodiment exercises, starting with a group warm-up and leading to gestural choreography expressing the words on their notecards. The participants then used face paints and craft materials to embellish their hybrid avatar.

The workshop concluded with an improvised group performance that incorporated the free-write texts and lyrics from their selected songs, expressed through individual choreography which intuitively coalesced into a collective finale.