Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation Program (CAST)

Anna used her grant to support her capstone project, a two-day, multi-event program, "Voices of Comedy," which brought standup comics from diverse backgrounds with different comedic styles together for a show at Brandeis, featured a standup workshop by professional comics – free and open to all students – the following day, and included an open mic evening during which workshop participants could test out their craft. This project broadened the Brandeis comedy community by providing training and an opportunity to practice comedy skills, and by prioritizing stories and perspectives that are often not present in the local and national comedy scenes.

Rasheed used his grant to support his capstone project, a video titled, "At the Heart of it All." The video is a musical piece-highlight reel-slideshow-monologue hybrid, and it includes a personal reflection of Rasheed’s work as a storyteller.

Zoë used her grant to support her capstone project, "Zoë Rose Spills Her Guts," a one-woman show about exploring identity, which she performed for the Brandeis community. Told in multiple iterations, the play is an immersive, participatory theater experience that has given audience members a chance to hear new stories and to share their own, some of which Zoë then incorporates into the next iterations of the piece.

Rachel used her grant to support her capstone project, in which she gathered and presented stories on how people change their thinking about controversial issues, while using frameworks and methods from Theatre of the Oppressed. With these submissions, she created an exhibit to encourage viewers to keep an open mind and not to be closed off to the possibility for change. 

Maggie used her grant to support her creation of the installation "Look Up, Look In, Look Again," which also served as her capstone project.

The Spring 2016 Intercultural Center Featured Artist, Marcelo Brociner '18, used his grant funding to create an installation combining photography and his personal illustrations. For the project, he photographed nine Brandeis students from different countries and arranged their portraits in a rectangular shape. Each participant held a piece of a frame, and when combined, the portraits created the illusion that all nine students were holding a unified frame together.

In the center of the collaborative frame were five cut-outs of different shapes, sizes, and colors, that together formed the phrase: "Let us join as one."

The cut-outs spoke to the importance of inclusivity in the world and that humans are beautiful regardless of their shape, size, or color. Brociner created this installation to show that it is the people of the world who hold together the framework required to join as one and to celebrate the diversity found at Brandeis. The installation was displayed in the Intercultural Center. 

Ashley Simmons '17 put her grant funding towards the production of an African-American/Black Cultural Show. Co-hosted by the Brandeis Black Students Organization, the show aims to showcase a wide variety of performance styles and themes particular to the African-American/Black experience. The show was meant to embrace and uplift the African-American culture and acknowledge the historic and ongoing injustices faced by the community. The show invited Brandeis students, faculty and staff to celebrate the nuances of cultural variation and resist its oppression. Simmons created the show in hopes that the process would allow her to tap into the core of what rests within her heritage and identity.

Featured performers included the Brandeis Step Team PLATINUM and the Brandeis Majorette Dance Group TOXIC. Performances included live Jazz, spoken-word, a showcase celebrating various black hairstyles, a fashion show of hip-hop over the decades, and three skits about #BlackLivesMatter, the Prison Industrial Complex, and black women written and directed by Simmons. Soul food was served following performances.

Identity is perceived and often constructed but the self has an identity that may be detached from the public opinion. Based on this Hauke Ziessler explored personal identity and how this identity changes or stays constant through an ever-changing society. He studied this through an independent study course exploring "the fluidity of identity and the role it plays in peacebuilding through the arts," which laid the foundational theoretical structure to begin work on his own art installations that will explore the topic of perceived and imposed identity.

Together with other students and their artistic input Hauke presented an art exhibition that stimulated salon-style discussions on identity in an ever-changing, polarized and ever more globalized world and how identity can be preserved and restored in a dignifying manner. The key of the exhibition was to establish an interactive experience where the viewer would become a part of the art presented and be able to explore identity further through various works of art.

LaShawn Simmons invited women within the Brandeis community who identify as Black to contribute poetry to an e-zine, Ebony Axis. The publication showcased the beautiful and varied narratives of Black women on campus through poetry. In addition to the zine, LaShawn hosted a coffeehouse event in fall 2015, at which participants engaged in critical conversations and dialogue with Black women, while also creating atmosphere of encouragement and empowerment. 

Read the Brandeis Now article about LaShawn's e-zine.

Sarah McCarty and Brontë Velez recognized that the concept of listening has long been insufficient in working towards critical transformation and progress in the world. They believe that listening is the beginning of learning, critical thinking, challenging, creating, producing, and transforming. Active listening in creative transformation and arts praxis can lead to the facilitation of space for all humans to know themselves as creators and to in turn recreate and reprioritize what is valued, appreciated, read, experienced, and understood in the world.

With the support of the CAST grant, the pair traveled to the Venice Biennale, a major platform in the art world for creative discussion and evaluation. The Biennale aims to curate more spaces of dialogue that will question and challenge the elitism and inaccessibility of the "art world," though Sarah and Brontë believe that its social, economic, and geographical isolation prevents the event from reaching this goal.

Based on their experience, Sarah and Brontë created "soundmapping" works -- focusing on sound, movement, performance and video -- to critically examine and respond to the historically exclusive and inaccessible institutional spaces of the art world and the historical Western art canon. They believe in the concept of artist as cartographer, choreographing new routes to arrive at a listening that leads to activating and implementing real social transformation.

They presented the "Sound Mapping – Listening for Change" project during the residency of Syrian musician Kinan Azmeh and MusicUnitesUS at Brandeis University in the fall of 2015.