Intra-Action
Build connection, acting, resilience, and storytelling skills. Using breath, movement, and character development practices, we help people notice their nervous system responses to become aware of the stories we tell about ourselves and our environment.
Play
Build deeper connections and get curious by playing fun games and being silly together.
Diffraction
Explore topics of common concern in a co-learning and creative environment.
Creative Becoming*
Collaborate to co-create new stories.
OUR PROGRAM
With a spirit of curiosity, we create a world of play that values difference and builds a courageous community of collective care. Creative Becoming classes include theatre games, singing, making music, poetry, creative writing, creative expression, somatic-based practices, and lots of storytelling. They are fun, healing, and surprising. We will change and grow together.
Each class and course follows a four-step feedback loop of:
Thank You to Our Sponsors
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts
*Creative Becoming is an applied performance method conceived of by Dr. Ballew as a result of pedagogical research that spanned over a decade in women's prisons and with people in reentry. It is an adaptation or updating of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Theatre of the Oppressed through queer performativity, quantum physics, and somatic psychology to produce a program that engages body-mind-spirit through play and creativity. We look at theatre and performance as a set of tools we can pull from to help us listen and respond collaboratively to challenges in a playful manner that shows care and seeks healing for the whole.
Creating a caring community by teaching the whole person, body-spirit-mind through our Creative Becoming theatre classes and research.
Join Us in 2025: class dates, location, and application coming soon!
Initial class offerings include:
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Classes for people who are incarcerated
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Re-entry classes
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Classes for loved ones of people who are/have been incarcerated
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Classes for queer and transgender people
Creative Becoming’s applied theatre method, research method, and teaching method were created while teaching in carceral institutions and are deeply informed by working with people who have experienced repeated trauma and traumatizing systems.
Our classes are support, co-learning, and resilience training spaces for all people open to narrative change. Our lived and professional experiences inspire us to work with people who have encountered complex trauma and traumatizing systems such as incarceration, gender binaries, poverty, and abuse.
