About
Welcome to our first EDPeeps month of content! Thank you so much for joining us on this journey. We are so grateful for your support, and we hope this will be a wonderful beginning to an ongoing conversation and sense of community for everyone involved. Enjoy.
HOW ARE WE STAYING CREATIVE DURING THESE TIMES?
Welcome
Welcome!
First of all, we would like to express our sincerest gratitude for your continued support and love through these challenging times. This pandemic has truly pushed us to find a resiliency deep within ourselves like no times before. We want to congratulate you for your unrelenting dedication to the arts and your community.
We are beyond excited to share this new project with you. It is no surprise that our wonderful collection of dancers, volunteers, and board members have stepped in to help find meaningful ways for us to stay connected, inspire one another, and share educational opportunities. We are calling this new project EDPeeps: Friends of Esperanza because that’s what we are. We are all friends here, we want to help each other grow as individuals, heal from our past difficulties, and share in our collective achievements. Our vision for the EDPeeps project is to bring together a multimedia collection of elements surrounding a new topic each month. Here you will find snippets of original poetry, movement created by the dancers, personal projects, and a place for conversation. For a very small monthly donation, ongoing contributions to this project is a direct way to support us as a performing arts organization, help us to continue to create new work and inspire hope for healing.
Thank you for being a part of this journey. We are delighted to begin this sustained giving project and we hope it’s a great avenue for future collaborations and collective work for all of us to learn how to be better advocates for ourselves, sexual and domestic violence survivors, and racial justice. With our first month dedicated to creativity, we hope that EDPeeps will be a seed of inspiration and motivation to continue on your own personal creative journey. We will meet you wherever you are. Please know that this is meant to be an open conversation and we value your input and feedback. Feel more than welcome to utilize the private facebook group we have created just for EDPeep inspired discussions. We can’t wait to hear how you are staying creative during these times. Enjoy this material on whatever device you prefer, and please help us to share with your loved ones.
We wanted to launch this project now because April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM). While this month’s topic is not focused solely on sexual assault, it aligns with our mission to find healing and resiliency in creative ways. We want to take this opportunity to open doors that may not have been fully explored in the past. In January we celebrated our 10-year anniversary as an organization, and while considering the great leaps and bounds we have made so far, we can’t help but dream and set goals for the next 10! With your continued support we can share our message to erase the stigma surrounding childhood sexual violence and deliver a message of hope, strength, and empowerment.
-Esperanza Dance Project
This month we are taking a look at all of the many ways the dancers, board members and Esperanza family is staying creative during these unprecedented, unsettling and changing times.
C R E A T I V I T Y
What you'll find this month:
Making Masks - Dancer Gabi's ongoing sewing project
Choreographing through Dreams - Dancer Karina documents her experience with creating movement through dreamtime
A Gardening Project - EDP Dancer Anita's recent home improvement project
"Smile" A photographic typology project by Grace
A Curated Content Guide to Internet Goodies by Board Member Maya Fay Braun
Poem of the Month - Original poetry by EDP dancers
Comment Section - Please feel free to leave a few words here
* Click any of the colored headers to jump right to a section!
Making Masks with Gabi Chancay
Hi! Something that has helped me to stay creative and make a positive impact during the past several months has been sewing face masks! As an 11-year-old, I played around with my mom’s sewing machine--teaching myself to make dresses and skirts, but haven't touched the machine in years (I’m 21 now). Learning to sew together face masks has re-ignited my love for sewing while helping me to better protect my friends and family from COVID-19. Below is a brief step-by-step of my sewing process along with some images. I encourage everyone to rekindle their love for an old hobby--I know I’ve been especially thankful to have mine this past year. Sending love and wishing you good health!
Step One: I use my mask template to cut out four pieces of fabric--in this case, two black pieces with white interfacing ironed on and two purple Snoopys (a new favorite material of mine)!
Step Two: I match together the purple fabrics, (right side facing in) and I match together the black fabrics (interfacing side out). Then I sew together the nose-side edge of the purple pieces and do the same to the black pieces. Lastly, I trim the excess fabric with pinking shears, which leaves the zig-zag pattern along the edge and prevents the material from fraying!
Step Three: Now that we’ve made one large snoopy piece and one large black piece, and it’s time to sew them together! For this next step, we will form the shell of the mask. Match the purple fabric to the black, right side facing in, and sew along the top and bottom edges. You should end up with something like what is shown in these two pictures.
Step Four: Next, I flip the material inside-out and iron it. Then I do a little more trimming with those pinking shears (again to prevent fraying).
Pre-Iron
Post-Iron
Step Five: Back to the sewing machine! For this step, I sew a four-inch-long rectangular pocket that will fit around the bridge of the nose. Inside this pocket, I slip in a small piece of copper wire before I finish sewing the last edge. The copper wire cinches to the nose--it’s meant to be bent and adjusted so the mask can better fit each individual’s face!
Me sewing :)
Ends up looking kinda like this, except the wire is inside the mask
Step Six: On each side, I fold the material over and sew to make a nice edge (and a pocket to hold elastic)!
Step Seven: Almost done! Our final step is to slip elastic into both sides of the mask. The elastics I’ve made are adjustable--the black bead on the end allows you to adjust the mask to fit your ears and face best. I use a little homemade tool made of copper wire to string the elastics through the pockets. Then, I tie the ends of the elastics together, and adjust the ties so the ends are hidden in the mask.
Finished Product!
*also, fun-fact: this mask is reversible!
I choose to wear it snoopy-side out, but you can also
wear the black side out if that’s your thing ;)
Happy sewing!
CHOREOGRAPHY THROUGH DREAMS
In the awake world, I overanalyze. I want perfection. I find it hard to find a creative space to be openly expressive. While dreaming, I am able to completely submerse myself in feeling and expression. I am free to remember movements from my past experiences and intertwine them with my current experiences to find movement and patterns that work for me. With Esperanza, we are able to contribute words, and create movements based on those words. In my dreams, I am able to associate those words with movement and find movement that represents my deeper self, my free-flowing thoughts and feelings. When I wake up, they come together into a movement that is meaningful for me. I am able to find that creative space within myself and share it with others.
-KARINA KEDANSKY
Anita's Gardening Project
WHY I TOOK ON THIS PROJECT:
During these months of isolation my personal life has changed drastically, but I am grateful to have moved back in with my immediate family and return to my childhood home. This has given me the opportunity to spend some quality time with my parents as well as help them with many home improvement projects that they have not been able to do themselves.
During the first few months of the pandemic, I kept myself busy by taking on tasks like painting the interior of the house, organizing old untouched book closets and storage places. As the pandemic continued, I became more comfortable taking on larger projects (knowing I would definitely have the time to finish them), and our back yard has been in major need of a face-lift for some time now! I wanted to give my parents a beautiful outdoor area so that they could stay isolated and protected from the coronavirus while also being able to have some fun. I created a vision for this unused area picturing a fresh vegetable garden fro my mom and a cool home theater for my dad, and with both of them on boad, I dove straight in!
RE-IMAGINING MY PARENT'S BACKYARD
Here's a list of everything I did to make this space habitable:
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I removed all the rocks, and replaced it with red baseball clay that I ordered online.
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I stacked the cinder blocks we had into a new garden arrangement and reused some old greenhouse plastic to secure over the top.
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I also moved a few of my father's rose bushed to hug the edges of the containing wall.
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Finally, you'll see our stack of firewood, collected and chopped from the surrounding mesquite trees.
This space is so much more serene, and I so enjoy spending time out here!
GARDEN PROGRESS!
One month after planting some lettuce and arugula that we bought from our local nursery, the plants have flourished! The lettuce grows in quick enough to harvest a full salad every week, and it is very delicious.
FINAL TOUCHES..
After two weeks of work, my family celebrated our new home addition by stringing a bedsheet across the trees to create a movie screen setup. We made a roaring fire and watched "American Utopia", a cinematic concert, and we danced to some great music.
I am so glad I took on this task to create an outdoor space that my entire family can enjoy together. Now that it is complete, I can tell that this was a project of absolute necessity; keeping that space tidy has helped keep us so uplifted through this trying time.
Curated Content
Articles
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How I Used Art to Get Through Trauma - The New York Times
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Healing Arts: Recovering from Sexual Assault through Creativity - Cronkite News
Books
Milk and Honey
by Rupi Kaur.
CONTENT WARNING - Processing Sexual Violence
The Sun and Her Flowers
by Rupi Kaur.
CONTENT WARNING - Processing Sexual Violence
by Guillaume Singelin. CONTENT WARNING- depictions of wartime trauma
Videos
by Anita Johnston
In this book, storytelling and myths are used to promote healing from eating disorders and trauma. Unfortunately only directed at cis women.
- Boost your Creativity + Inspiration 7 minute meditation - Kristen Martin
- Art Therapy Activity for Emotional Pain / Self Healing - Thirsty for Art
- How we use art as a vessel to heal from our trauma - Eva Woolridge
- Art Therapy Activity for Letting Go - Erica Pang Art
"Smile"
A Typography by Grace Rhyne
I am currently working on a BFA at the University of Arizona and was lucky enough to enroll in a photography course this past semester. I am so grateful that I am able to attend college during this time at home and to have a creative outlet to pour my energy into. Sometimes it’s a herculean effort to show up for myself and create art even when I’m struggling through the day to day of this shaky reality. Over time, I've found that I always feel better after working through a creative project, and this was no exception.
For our first assignment, we had to create a typography. A typography is a study or collection of things, usually with some sort of underlying similarity or quality. As I am first and foremost a dance enthusiast (surprise) I couldn’t imagine a better subject than to capture feet in motion as well as in stillness. I wanted to acknowledge the similarities and insecurities we all feel about our feet, and how we might evoke emotion with body parts other than the obvious. Lastly, to process life beyond the stage- especially now as we find our own dance company making movement so differently. I contacted a few dancers and asked if they would be willing to meet with me safely to photograph the beautiful instruments they use to jump, turn, twist, walk and dance with. I hope you enjoy looking at this series as much as I enjoyed making it!
(Big THANK YOU to those who lent their toes to make this project possible! I adore you!)
POEM OF THE MONTH
A huge part of what makes our performances so powerful is through the dynamic use of spoken word. Our dancers recently participated in a writing workshop to create new material for House of Hope. Each month we will be sharing a poem written by the dancers.
Creativity by Pancho
Imagine, with me, for a second, a minute;
Sitting in a meadow with nothing to do.
On one side a dog, energetic. You pivot;
The other, another, dog-tired and pooped.
Your choice today, be creative or not;
Easy decision ‘cause you’ve made it before.
Call on your pups to take a nap in a plot;
All your energy has been gone and no more.
Even if you wanted creativity is hard;
Especially now, everything going on.
So much easier to simply stop rhyming;
Or even stop following structure…
See, now we don’t have the nice little poem we started a moment ago.
The spark is gone,
It sounds flat.
Boring.
And I can keep going.
For as long as I want.
Or even just end it right here
And just stop…
...But this empty feeling.
Almost mourning.
In the absence,
Without creative spirit.
How do you stay creative,
When you find yourself alone?
You must resist the call of boredom.
Please don’t waste your time.
Don’t think too hard, I promise it’s easy.
And maybe, just maybe, end with a little rhyme.
You may think you’re alone, when you stare and you sit.
Creativity is still there and don’t be too sad for missing it.
Let's Chat!
We'd love to hear your feedback, your thoughts, and most importantly, how YOU are staying creative these days! Please join our private Facebook group dedicated to our EDPeeps. On this group page we will be able to communicate and share ideas and find inspiration form each other!
Know someone who would love this? Send an invitation to join Edpeeps here
