Practice Progress
YEAR
Practice Progress is a relational commitment between Kai Hazelwood and Sarah Ashkin to practice, embody, risk, and learn with you; to commit to lifelong anti-racisting together.
Kai and Sarah are a Black lady and white lady, and they are in a caring personal relationship, a professional collaboration, and they also make public facing creative work. Their own racial experience, the racial dynamics, both racist and toward anti-racisting, present in their partnership, is what they feel into, make art about together and apart, and invite others into unruly learning with them.
For Practice Progress, anti-racisting destabilizes white supremacy through the cultivation of sensation, where racism and anti-racist possibilities can be felt in our bodies, relationships, and social systems. With more feeling, will come more choice, with more choice, will come more care, with more care will come a way to be with ourselves and each other that we have always deserved.
However, interracial collaboration does not mean symmetry. We are not the same, and becoming the same is not the goal. Kai and Sarah share anti-racisting values like troubling inheritance, slowing down, listening, and honoring grief, but operationalize those values in different ways. Practice Progress shares this way of working with others in the form of the BIPOC Rest Circle and the White Working Group, as well as our concurrent research partnerships with more-than-human kin, called Shedding and MUD MOVES.
Anti-racisting is somatic + material. Practice Progress works to redistribute the discomfort of racism and responsibility for destabilizing white supremacy to white people, and moves the material benefits of racism, like money and rest, to people of the Global Majority. They see their LLC as an opportunity for an anti-racisting business model, with a reparative split in pay between Kai and Sarah, a commitment to moving money, leadership, and rest to queer, disabled, BIPOC through curation projects, institutional interventions, and participant fees, and a focus on hosting as a luscious accessibility practice.
What Kai and Sarah share with others, is made possible by the trust they have built together in their interracial interclass interable relationship. They go to therapy together. Practice Progress is care work as change work.
Practice Progress is currently accepting partnership in dual-pedagogy fellowships and research appointments, semester long programs, performance residencies, guest artist offerings, writing opportunities, and more.
