Your Healing Is Killing Me
By Virginia Grise with additional writing by Florinda Bryant
Directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury
A performance manifesto
When a health system based in capitalism meets a Queer, Chicana body, its full limitations come into sharp focus. The result is a manifesto full of clarity into the revolution that must come in order for our society to truly care for its most vulnerable.
AGE RECOMMENDATION
This show is not recommended for those under 18.
RUN TIME
Approximately 80 minutes. No intermission.
TICKETS AND SHOWTIMES
| APR 24
7:30p |
APR 25
7:30p |
APR 26
7:30p |
APR 27
7:30p |
APR 28
2:00p |
Call and Response
In twist on our usual “second act” of conversation, Virginia Grise has invited a variety of interesting and interested speakers to offer a short “response” to the “call” of each performance. Stick around to add to the conversation.
(click to expand)
Wednesday—A DEEPER LOOK INTO ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
- Susan R. Delaney, ND graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a registered nurse and practiced for 8 years in various clinical settings. She then completed the four-year, full-time residential post-graduate naturopathic medical program at National College of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, one of the eight accredited schools of Naturopathic Medicine in North America as well as an international residency with a Homeopathic physician in India, where, like in many parts of Europe including England, Germany and France, homeopathy is an accepted medical system. Returning to her native North Carolina, Dr. DeLaney set up medical practice in Carrboro where she has been treating patients since 1987. Dr. DeLaney uses centuries-old natural, non-toxic therapies and modalities informed by the most current advances and research in the study of health and human systems.
Thursday—TURNING THE PAGES OF DIVERSITY IN MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES
- Ariana Vigil, PhD is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she teaches and conducts research in the fields of Latina/o literature, militarization, and gender and sexuality. She is the author of War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production (June 2014, Rutgers University Press). This scholarly work examines U.S. Latina/o responses to military intervention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Iraq. In her work, she brings to the forefront issues of Latina/o ethnicity and identity and gender and sexuality as they arise within both anti-imperialist revolutionary movements (e.g. the FSLN) as well as neo-imperial and neo-colonial occupations (the occupation of Iraq). Born and raised in the suburbs of Ohio, she attended The Ohio State University – where she earned a BA in English with a Minor in Women’s Studies in 2001. She then pursued an MA and PhD in English from Cornell University, from which she graduated in 2008.
- Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from South Texas. Her five books include Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. As a correspondent for The Odyssey, she once drove 45,000 miles across the United States, documenting its history. She has won a Luce Scholarship to China, a Hodder Fellowship to Princeton, a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize. Currently Associate Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed on five continents in capacities ranging from a Moth storyteller to a featured author of the International Writing Program.
Friday—CLOSER LOOK AT PERFORMATIVE ART
- Monet Noelle Marshall is performer, creator, organizer and consultant based in the Triangle of North Carolina. She creates immersive and interactive performance experiences such as the Buy It Call It Trilogy, she’s the Founding Artistic Director of MOJOAA Performing Arts Company, and she organizes locally for equitable cultural resources and access. She has choreographed for groups with over 150 members and performed for incarcerated women in New York. She co-created Black Joy PopUp, a multidisciplinary public art program that brings the Black community together to create joy in public on purpose. She has worked with trained artists and artists who are performing for the first time; from age 3 to 73. Her work has been seen at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York, high school gymnasiums across the East Coast, a mountaintop in Hawaii, Carnegie Hall, PSI Theatre in Durham, Open Eye Theatre in Minneapolis, her mama’s kitchen, Triad Stage in Greensboro, and Manbites Dog Theatre in Durham. She is currently working on the second draft of a Stevie Wonder musical, As: A Tribute to Wonder, as well as a project on porn and shame Sex (Shame) Sells.
Saturday—SOCIAL JUSTICE ACROSS FIELDS
- Vimala Rajendran has been cooking in the south since 1985. She is the chef and founder of Vimala’s Curryblossom Café in downtown Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her restaurant has been bringing homecooked Indian flavors from her home state of Kerala, her beloved Mumbai and other parts of India since 2010, when it was voted “Best New Restaurant in the Triangle” by INDY Week. Since then, Vimala’s has been voted “Best Indian Restaurant in the Triangle” for eight consecutive years (2011 through 2018), and Vimala herself was awarded Best Chef in 2018. A longtime activist for progressive causes including environmental justice, grassroots media, farm- and restaurant-worker rights, Vimala believes that delicious, wholesome food is a human right. Operating under the principle “Vimala cooks, everybody eats,” no one is ever turned away at her restaurant.
- Amy Weil, MD originally from New York City, is entering her 20th year at UNC. She is a Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina, as well as Medical Co-Director of the Beacon Child and Family Program. She received her BA in History and Psychology at Yale College, and her MD at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. She did her residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine at Yale, where she also served as Chief Resident. She is passionate about gender based health issues and social justice and has been able to bring these concerns to bear on patient care, teaching, advocacy and advising. Over the years, Dr. Weil has worked with colleagues to expand offerings designed to sustain empathy and humanism among students and faculty and has been fortunate to collaborate with Katherine Hunter Williams via Hidden Voices, the Ackland Art Museum, Carolina Performing Arts and Playmakers’ Jacqueline Lawton to help students reflect on patients’ experiences of health and illness and the meaning of the work they do together. After college, Dr. Weil worked as a counselor for survivors of sexual assault and with patients living with psychiatric illnesses and has extended these interests into her career, teaching about Trauma Informed Care locally and nationally and serving as Clinical Supervisor for UNC Internal Medicine clinic’s Depression and Anxiety Programs. Most recently she has been an advocate of student ‘hotspotting’ as a way to engage learners to meet patients where they are and ally with them to solve the problems that are most pressing to them. She also loves to spend time with her family and friends, traveling, reading, writing swimming, hiking, watching birds, cooking and doing yoga.
Sunday at 2:00pm—THE ART OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM
- China Medel, Ph.D. China’s research works at the intersections of Latinx Studies and Media Studies using critical, ethnic studies frameworks and new materialist interventions. Specifically she focuses on the role of art and media in imagining and generating new modes of political recognition in the Americas. She teaches courses in film and media studies, performance, border studies, and women of color feminism. Hailing from a rural community in Idaho, she is a first generation college student and proud Chicana. In addition to her scholarship and teaching, she is also a SONG (Southerners on New Ground) member working on local anti-criminalization campaigns. She received her B.A. in English from Portland State University and her Ph.D. in Literature and Feminist Studies from Duke University.
Sunday at 7:30pm—LEARNING ABOUT THE HEALING
The Creative Team of Your Healing is Killing Me
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Virginia Grise’s one-woman piece "Your Healing is Killing Me" may be hitting the PlayMakers stage next week, but don't call it a play. It's a performance manifesto.