Jasmine Hearn and Jo Stewart

The Sound of the Bell:
Dance as Call and Response with a Living World

August 10 – 16, 2025

In this cross-disciplinary workshop, we will practice moving, writing, and listening for the human and non-human voices of our living world. As writers, we will carefully take stock of where we are, where we’ve lived, and where we come from. We will look closely at Bearnstow’s rich landscape, then look again. We will shore up the descriptors we use to portray places made special by everyday appreciation and explore how our language might become material for dance-making. 

As movers, you will be asked to source your imagination and memory as we navigate recipes to move, make sound, and rest. This workshop holds space for listening and responding using dance, movement, rest, and embodied sound. We will warm up and delve into sequences of movement that reference dialects and techniques rooted in flight, Jazz, “modern” dance, and somatic lineages. We will move, improvise, and collaborate. We will sort the material that surfaces from our practice and make performance recipes together. 

Pc Myssi Robinson, Jas Jo Mr. James

You will be asked to:
Take care of yourself
Rest
Move
Write/Draw/Speak
Spend time outside

Day Outline:

Breakfast 
Write 
Morning Movement 
Lunch 
Creative Process (a blending of writing and movement)
Break
Dinner


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Jo Stewart (they/them) is a poet currently living on Narragansett ancestral land. Their poetic works diverge from linear storytelling traditions—narratives unfold via visual rhymes and poetic devices acquire concrete dimensions: em-dashes are rendered as barriers, enjambed lines as windows. From the architecture of each story emerges spaces of captivity and the possibility of self-recovery. They look to the dead, unborn, flora, and animal life as guides and protagonists in these stories. By asking these beings to speak through their work, Jo strives to sow disorder in a language and social order for which “wholeness” relies on the exclusion of a non-being Other or antithesis. Jo holds an MFA in Cross-Disciplinary Writing from Brown University and was a recent member of Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, rehearsing and touring “Cellular Songs” from 2017-2019.

Jasmine Hearn (they / them), raised on occupied Akokisa lands, is a two time Bessie award-winning performer, choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, teacher, doula, and organizer. Jasmine gives gratitude to all the mothering Black people who have supported their moving, remembering body. A 2022 Creative Capital Awardee, they currently lead Memory Fleet. They have collaborated with Dream the Combine, Bill T. Jones, Saul Williams, Solange Knowles, Alisha B. Wormsley, Vanessa German, Okwui Okpokwasili, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Tsedaye Makonnen, Holly Bass, Bebe Miller, and with dance companies, Earthen Vessels, Urban Bush Women, David Dorfman Dance, Helen Simoneau Danse, Staycee Pearl dance project, and Dance Alloy Theater performing at the Metropolitan Museum, BAM, New York Live Arts, Guggenheim Museum, Getty Center, Venice Biennale, Ford Foundation, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, and Danspace Project.

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If you have questions about the Workshop please reach out to Jasmine and Jo for more info

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