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CFP

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The Convergence of Consent and Cultural Competence While Staging Intimacy: Editors’ Comments
by Amanda Rose Villarreal, Cessalee Smith-Stovall, and Mya Brown

Emily Kitchens illustrates her journey as a faculty director while recognizing and navigating a gap in their own cultural competence. This note illustrates how the process of developing and actively including cultural competency impacted the artistic process. Kitchens models ways that faculty and directors can acknowledge and seek to overcome our own lack of cultural competency, and how artists can work to respectfully include others’ cultural competence when it is offered.

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Joy Brooke Fairfield’s interview with Aastha Khanna, who has been hailed by Indian media as the first intimacy choreographer in Bollywood, serves as a reflection of the ways in which intimacy choreography can become flexible to serve the varying needs of different national, local, legal, or artistic cultures, communities, and production practices. This piece highlights how cultural expectations related to genre and form can be included in intimacy practice, rather than imposing one approach on all artistic communities.

Read this Note From the Field Joy Brooke Fairfield

Matthias Bolon reflects on his experience as a trans individual performing a gender not their own. This Note presents a lens on gender inclusivity that has not been widely explored while offering a kit of tools for educators and artists considering casting someone to play a character of a gender that fuels the actor’s dysphoria. The tools presented offer practical steps collaborators can take to support genderqueer artists in communication, casting, costuming, and throughout the production process.

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Michael Poblete, PhD, presents an artist educator’s concerns and experience with facilitating devising processes with students not of his own culture. This Note highlights the artistic and interpersonal value of approaching devising with intercultural awareness, by acknowledging one’s own cultural competence and lack thereof, and by centering care when seeking to uplift collaborators’ cultures within the devising process and devised product.

Read this Note From the Field by Mike Pollute

Matt Denney introduces a new framework created to support culturally sustaining practices for Filipino-American artists. Denney highlights the cultural specificity of first-generation Filipino-Americans, calling readers to think beyond overgeneralizations such as “Asian” and to consider the ways in which we can offer individualized, specific, and culturally sustaining support for diverse artists and collaborators.

Read this Note From the Field by Matt Denney

Elaine Brown invites readers to consider the cultural competency required to facilitate collaboration with neurodiverse artists. This Note highlights common misconceptions related to autism, asking artists and educators to recognize the ways in which these generalizations hinder collaboration with neurodiverse artists, and calls upon readers to consider neurodiversity when we consider the impact of cultural competence on communication and creation.

Read this Note From the Field by Elaine Brown