This wednesday I had a google meeting with the team of lovely people who are teaching the class that I am observing/interning! There are 5 people, the leader Matt, Chrisitian the moderator, Greg and Akiko who are the TA’s and Phyllis who is the ASL interpreter. All of them were extremely kind and supportive, and it was amazing meeting them. We discussed the basic form of the open enrollment class that is going to happen tomorrow, as well as just generally getting to know each other better (although they already knew each other pretty well). I was unable to have my camera on because they forgot to send me the link earlier, so the meeting caught me totally be surprise and I was fresh out of the shower with a really messy room! But tomorrow, I am going to attend both the class and the pre class meeting, camera on, so they will actually get to see me then. I also filled out and sent away the forms needed for my background check, so that is exciting!
On thursday morning I attended my first upstream arts class! We had a pre-class meeting on zoom with Matt, Christian, Akiko, Greg, Phyllis and myself to go over what was gonna happen and any special considerations we should take. This was an open enrollment class, about movement and expressing emotions. Performance based work is not something I am super familiar with as a primarily visual artist, but I was very excited to learn something new. After figuring out some technical difficulties with zoom, we concluded our meeting and started the class. There were maybe 20-30 people attending, not including the upstream arts staff. There were people across a wide range of ages, types of disabilities, and level of experience with upstream arts classes, all of which were taken into consideration by the staff. It was really useful having so many people, because it made it so everyone's needs were met. As we participated in a variety of movement based activities, it was very open to anyone at any level of mobility could participate, and care was taken to ensure that those leading the movements were audio describing what was happening so the blind students could understand as well. The instructors did a great job of balancing the activities as a group while also spotlighting individual participants who could bring their own unique style and perspective into what we were doing. A lot of it was using movements to describe emotions, so one of the leaders would prompt everyone to do some sort of movement with their body, and have that movement reflect an emotion (example: how would you move across the screen if you were sad, or happy, or surprised?). Then after demonstrating, they would spotlight individual people and how they were doing it specific to their own personalities and abilities. They also called on specific people to suggest their own movement and emotion prompts. Everyone mirrored each others versions after doing their own. The team at upstream arts did an amazing job facilitating community in a digital space. It was a fun, welcoming environment where it was clear that everyone felt free to be themselves without fear of judgement or failure. I am very much looking forward to shadowing more of this class, and eventually participating more in the demos as well!