Choreographing Care (2016-2018)
A Project by Jody Wood
New York City; Kingston, New York; Charlotte, North Carolina
Choreographing Care establishes open workshops in which staff at homeless shelters are invited to reframe care activities into performative tableaus, and perform various warm-up and cool-down exercises drawn from actors.
A photograph of two people embracing.
Physical activities are used as a starting point to open space for staff to nonverbally explore difficult topics such as power dynamics, touch, and trauma, which can have profound transformative effects in increasingly bureaucratic care institutions that typically overlook sensory and corporeal experiences. Many care workers are conditioned to put their own needs last, and poverty support agencies typically do not have resources to prioritize them.
A fundamental component of Choreographing Care is to integrate group processing and community care into homeless shelter systems as a paid part of the work day. By reorganizing institutional priorities according to care ethics, the project considers processing and de-stigmatizing secondary trauma as integral to the labor of care in a care-valuing society.
More information:
Website: https://www.jodywoodart.com/choreographing-care-1
