Kelindah is a resident facilitator of Gender Expression and Identity workshops and Social Justice Drama classes through BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange and beyond. They work with parents and families, educators and administrators, and students through in-school residencies using drama as a vehicle for building empathy, engaging in conversations across difference, and embodying expressions of identity with the goal of building inclusive, respectful communities.
BAX’s Gender Expression Programming, which Kelindah co-developed, uses dramatic play, structured improvisation, character and script-devising exercises to deepen understandings of gender identity. These classes invite innovative ways to explore and express our fully liberated selves and empower students to be up-standers against experiences of discrimination and bias.
Through their teaching, Kelindah intends to foster brave spaces of expression beyond gendered expectations, creative problem-solving about societal dilemmas, imagining new possibilities about ways to be and how to liberate us all from bias.
Youth Drag Classes
Through a weekly residency at BAX and guest workshops at youth theaters such as New England Youth Theater, Kelindah offers Drag Performance workshops for youth, pre-teens, and teenagers. In these workshops, students explore drag performance’s rich contemporary cultural context as they begin to develop their own performance persona. Through group games, writing prompts and discussion, solo and collaborative movement exercises, we give ourselves permission to express the full range of who we are and can be while releasing narratives about how we “should” move, express, or dress based on gender norms we’ve inherited.
With playfulness, we experiment with the tools of pantomime, clowning, lip sync, caricature, structured improv and intuitive movement to build towards in-process drag character introductions. While these workshops are focused primarily on performance skills, we touch upon what goes into making a drag act including costume and makeup design. These workshops pay homage to queer and trans drag kings, queens and performers between and beyond binary genders and are open to young artists of all gender expressions.