Notes from the Motherfield LIVE Online / May 8
Friday, May 8, 2020: 6pm MT & PT / 8pm CST / 9pm EST
This Mother’s Day special edition of Notes will celebrate in story, music, and performance. Join us for a new kind of listening session and intimate online experience. This event is ASL interpreted.
Ticket sales are now closed. Zoom webinar event access information will be sent to you in the afternoon of the 8th. Those with little kids might want to check out the FREE offering of a PJ and Story time with Coach Anna over at Playformance from 6-7pm MT/PT! We thank Anna for this gift so parents can attend the show.
Ticket sales are now closed.
You are also invited to add your voice to a collective Mother’s Day Video with your own 15-second video, sound file, text, or image. We will share this collaborative chorus on Sunday, May 10. Deadline to submit your Shout Out: May 8. Details here.
The Motherfield is a movement of radical mothers dedicated to building community by telling the truth and listening to womens’ stories. Story-coaching, knowledge, and event support is shared by storytelling alumni and staff to build larger communities of care.
Based on Kore’s online essay series and newsletter feature, “Notes from the Motherfield,” the LIVE series presents two sets by mamas telling their unique personal story in 10-minutes about the wild beauty, the thorny pain that doesn’t let go, the double-edged liberatory decisions, the stunning judgements encountered while mothering, and more. This online version on May 8 presents 4 stories, one performance, and music by composer-violist Vicki Brown.
Help us celebrate and listen in new ways (during COVID-19) to these superheroes’ on May 8, Mother’s Day Friday:
Travonne Smith fell in love with good stories and happy endings one hot Midwest summer in a cool basement. She was ten when she discovered her mother’s collection of modest romance novels. As an adult, she realized creating happy endings for the marginalized in real life takes more than a single hero. It takes a supportive community that works and grows together. Travonne is a proud member of the People’s Defense Initiative, Progressive Democrats of Southern Arizona, Dem Disability Caucus, and leadership team at Southside Presbyterian Church. From 9 to 5, she ensures the government works for the people by helping them navigate federal agencies. Her desire is to see positive, sustainable change in her community, where oppressed folx thrive. She makes her home with her wife, Vivian, and their two amazing teens, striving to make happy endings with them everyday.
Latrina Lewis was born and raised in Dallas, Texas and has two younger sisters (one is Deaf) and a brother, along with two nephews. Latrina graduated from Gallaudet University in Washington, DC with a B.A. in Early Childhood Education and an M.A. in Deaf Education with an emphasis in Multiple Disabilities. She interned at Miles ELC Elementary School in Tucson, later became a certified teacher, and worked there for 12 years teaching both Deaf/Hard of Hearing and Hearing students in a combination 1st-3rd grade classroom. Currently she works at the Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind as a 2nd and 3rd-grade teacher and is a Teacher Leader. She is a board member of two national organizations in Deaf Education, and has been to Kenya, Africa, China, Mexico, and 16 states in America. Latrina is known as the “Queen of Purple,” and is a proud mother of an amazing 12-year-old daughter, Ke’bralah.
Rameen Ahmed trained in architecture and currently works as a metal artist. She has been involved in the Tucson arts community for more than 25 years. She has taught art and design to children, teens, and adults in private studio settings, schools, and after-school programs for more than 15 years. As a metalsmith/jeweler, she creates small, wearable sculptures, exhibited nationally and internationally. Please go to her website, www.rameenahmeddesigns.com, for images of her work and her curriculum vitae. (photo credit: Dominic Arizona Bonuccelli Photography)
Jaime Schuhmacher is a free-spirited, nature loving, wanderlust-filled mama. Originally from Massachusetts, she and her husband packed up their kids, dog and drove out in their van to Arizona for adventure in 2015. Jaime has her BA in Spanish and is also a Registered Nurse. Before she was an RN she worked in San Francisco burn units providing bed-side emotional support, and has been a sex educator at a free clinic. Through this work her dream to be a Registered Nurse was realized. Jaime now works as a high risk Labor & Delivery RN and feels very privileged to support women and their babies during some of their most intimate moments. She especially loves supporting migrant and teen moms. Jaime also loves dance parties and paddle boarding and is proud to be part of the progressive and loving Tucson community.
Denise Uyehara (she/her/hers) is an award-winning, interdisciplinary performance artist, writer and playwright whose work has been presented across the U.S. and in London, Vancouver, Helsinki and Tokyo. For over two decades she has investigated what marks us in our migration across borders of identity through interdisciplinary performance. Uyehara’s work has been hailed as “powerful…intimate and elegiac” by the Los Angeles Times. She is a recent recipient of the MAP Fund, the National Performance Network Creation Fund and a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council (see complete listing below). A founding member of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, she conducts workshops for artists and a wide range of communities—LGBTQ, women, people of color—and is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities.
Vicki Brown is a violinist and composer based in Tucson, Arizona. Playing classically since the age of nine, she eventually went off the page and started performing and recording with other artists and groups. Her debut solo album, Winter Garden, was an exploration of sound, timing and melody, full of “lovely, cinematic instrumental mood music.” On her second album, Seas & Trees, she continued to weave loops and layerings that ended up being more fantastical and lyrical in nature. Music from these two albums appears in the Oscar-nominated HBO documentary films GASLAND and GASLAND II. In addition to her solo albums, Vicki has composed for films, theater, and dance performances and has toured and collaborated with other artists throughout Europe and North America. She earned her doctorate in Psychology and consults with international aid organizations with a focus on global food security and resilience.
Thanks to Lisa Bowden, Motherfield creator and composer; to the alumni story support team—Tina Howard, Molly Burke, Tenecia Phillips, Desiree Maultsby, Sarah Tarver-Walhquist, Charlie Buck. Thank you to Letty Moran and Maggie Johnson for their gifts of ASL interpretation skills. Thanks to Tenecia Phillips for emceeing.
Participate in KPI’s collective Mother’s Day digital tribute to Mother/s everywhere by contributing a 15-second video, audio, image, or written shout out. Connect across the geographic, built, or spiritual divides during this pandemic and raise our voices to mothers (and mentors, muses, matriarchs) everywhere!
We will share the collaborative video online on Mother’s Day. Find out how to participate and upload your contribution here.
You can listen to a recent interview with Lisa Bowden and Eva Romero on KXCI’s Artistories about Notes from the Motherfield LIVE here.
See more Motherfield info, bios, and links to videos are here: October 25 2019, August 16 2019, April 12 2019.
The term “motherfield” was used by Joy Harjo in her blog many years ago, and refers to the imaginal colliding that happens there––where truths that are hard to talk about exist—somewhere between grief and longing; the ineffable and mundane; wild beauty and numbing routine. It is a sacred and profane space that requires brave poetics to speak it.
In Notes from the Motherfield, we enter into these spaces and listen to one another’s unique stories in order to keep narratives about mothering complicated and multiple. To pierce the veil of perfection and silence, and to keep the often invisibilized labor and particular oppressions of women and mothers explicit. We see you mamas, we are listening with our ears, our hands, and our hearts.
You can support this powerful storytelling program and the intersectional feminist work of Tucson’s Kore Press Institute here.
KPI is a nonprofit working at the nexus of arts and justice dedicated to radically connected communities, to amplifying women’s voices, publishing, and social justice education. Kore Press is one of the four remaining feminist presses in the country that has lasted over 20 years. Kore’s award-winning work has impacted communities locally and nationally for 27 years.