This Brain Café series is part of Everett Company’s research and development process in creating a new work, entitled Good Grief.
Good Grief is born from Everett’s work with groups of middle schooled students suffering from trauma. Everett explores how emotions live in the body and how we access them for healing. Humor is often an invaluable lifeline. Good Grief interweaves social justice, the science behind emotions, and human contentedness in multimedia dance theater that brings the hidden to light. Everett artists grew up in the same neighborhoods and share similar experiences of trauma as the middle school students they are working with. The company members draw upon their own childhood experiences as material for this work. This is a process of a community embodying its stories of trauma to foster healing and transformation. By sharing this specific local reality, the company creates art that more broadly depicts the human condition.
Select a button below to view videos of our Brain Cafés!
Brain Café: Alleviating Trauma in our Schools
April 12, 2018
This Brain Café includes a presentation by Vanna Phrommavanh, a school-based clinician at the Providence Center. Vanna grew up in war-torn Laos, escaping to a Thai refugee camp before coming to America. Drawing on these experiences, she now helps trauma-impacted youth in Providence’s most challenged schools. In addition to Vanna’s presentation, Everett artists will perform personal stories of their own trauma. These stories help youth in schools gain the courage to share their experiences. These short presentations will be followed by a dialogue with the audience around the issue of trauma in schools.
The evening shares the work of the Building Trauma-Sensitive Schools initiative (BTSS). A partnership between the Providence Children and Youth Cabinet, the Providence School District, the Providence Center, RI Student Assistant Services, and Everett, the initiative is designed to improve outcomes for trauma-impacted youth in our schools. Clinicians and artists work together, incorporating theater into an evidenced-based clinical trauma program.
Brain Café: Secrets & Silence
May 10, 2018
One out of four girls and one out of six boys in the US will be sexually abused before they turn eighteen. 90% of the victims will know their abuser. The topic of child sexual abuse is fraught with taboos in our society and the fear of addressing the subject is part of the problem. In this Brain Café, two women will share their stories of overcoming these experiences. Angelique Webster, a filmmaker and educator, will share her short film Respect and Love, in which a survivor of childhood trauma sits down with her mother 30 years later to gain insight on how those experiences have shaped her mother’s life. Kiara Butler, the Chief Executive Officer of Diversity Talks, will share her inspiring story of overcoming childhood abuse and how her experiences as a survivor have led her to become a role model for others.
