Image by Kalyn Jacobs.

Healing the Black Body is an offering to create, build, and practice healing and liberation in Black Communities through performance art, Black Feminism, and movement. We offer performance rituals, youth leadership cultivation, and cultural organizing to make worlds and create futures of Black Freedom. 

Healing the Black Body envisions a world with freedom at its center, where all Black people live free from oppression and have abundant practices of intergenerational healing.

OUR VALUES

Healing Justice Framework:

Our work is informed by the Healing Justice Framework, created by the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. Healing Justice seeks to confront and transform illness and disease that does not rely on a western based medical model. Healing justice centers collective safety and healing as integral to political liberation. We use this framework to center our modes of healing as collective and beyond western definitions of health, therefore including systemic oppression as an ailment to heal from. 

Black Feminism Praxis:

Our work is informed by centering our experiences, and moving intentionally through those experiences. We use Black Feminism as the intersectional research on the experiences of all Black women. Black Feminisms, according to Black Feminist Future is An ideology or belief system that explains how power and systems of oppression are both interconnected and systemic, and provides us with a blueprint for our individual and collective liberation.

Black Feminism praxis supports our intentions with tools to create self determination, prison abolition, pleasure, and freedom. 

Ritual:

Our work uses the development of rituals to achieve a state of groundedness. The development of  creative practices is essentially ritual making, through movement and performance. With ritual making, we create tools that directly address the need for healing and liberation. 

Community Research as Community Building:

Our work uses our bodies to conduct community research as a form of creating collective knowledge. By building, growing, and sharing knowledge in our communities, we build Black communities to tap into power and properties we already have within us. We believe that research on the community inherently builds and produces knowledge for the community.

Our Story

Founder, CEO, and Executive Director Nana Chinara was 19 years old when she first discovered that other Black queer people like her existed: the moment she discovered Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde, a “Black Lesbian Mother Warrior Poet”, and her texts left a profound influence on Nana to determine herself, her power, and her self-preservation. Audre Lorde’s work had then gone on to inspire and inform Nana at 21 years old, in making her first evening length solo choreographic work, to Bare the Rose ||| a visual memoir which debuted at Dixon Place in July 2018. It was in this moment that Nana founded Healing the Black Body, previously known as Chinara Rituals, after sharing her first performance ritual with her community members.

Healing the Black Body was officially founded in the spring of 2019. It began with a 7 week fellowship for 5 Black queer and trans youth between the ages of 16 and 21. During the 7 weeks, these young people studied Audre Lorde, developed creative practices, defined healing and liberation for themselves, and built ten minute solo performance rituals to process, determine, and practice their own liberation.

We continue to survive all kinds of violence and oppression. Violence and oppression that is systemic. Violence from our own Black communities. Violence from white-dominant queer communities. Economic, educational, housing, racial, gender, health, medical, carceral, state, and police violence and oppression. With the blessings of our ancestors, we are using performance and Black Feminism to design our futures towards all that frees us. We are defining healing and liberation on our own terms. Join us in placing the power of liberation in our own hands, and in our own bodies.