The Anti-Racism & Cultural Diversity Office and the Sexual & Gender Diversity Office proudly invite participants from the University of Toronto community to join a Restore session with movement artist and embodiment facilitator, Saysah for a program welcoming folks who identify as two-spirit, queer, trans and gender-diverse with IBPOC folks being prioritized.

Contemplative Movement: spacializing grief and play

Over the course of the session, Saysah will hold space for a community-informed co-creation session in which the offering will centre around a multi-sensorial ode to our collective and self rest. There in an invitation to be present and playful, with no expectation but to show up as you are. We hope to offer a session full of witnessing, joy, movement-play and grief-space. This space is for us.

Session Flow:
● Rest + Download + Journal
● [ B r e a k ]
● Movement + Play + Embodiment
● Witnessing Circle: Somatics + Reflection + Witnessing

What To Expect
● no movement experience necessary
● trauma-informed practice
● community engagement
● access-informed
● play + intimacy
● ritual + ceremony
● activation of body-mind-spirit connection

What To Bring
● yourself (invitation to show up as your full self, be in joy, grief, care, etc.)
● water bottle
● open heart
● creativity
● comfy clothing
● grounding / comfort / sensory / fidget objects (i.e. blankets, chimes, pillows, ear plugs)

About Saysah:

Saysahs maternal lineage is Afro-Caribbean of the island of St. Kitts, and was impacted by the trans-atlantic slave trade, historically-likely to have been taken from Sengal, West Africa. Their paternal lineage is of the Oromo peoples (Arsi Clan) who are an Indigenous ethnic group within Ethiopia. As a queer-nonbinary, Black diasporic person born in tkaronto, Saysah lives and creates on the stolen land of Turtle Island; on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, Wendake-Nionwentsïo, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation – which has been the meeting place and land of Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island since time immemorial. They honour and are in reciprocity with their ancestors and  acknowledge that Turtle Island was never meant to be owned and the lasting legacy of the trans atlantic slave trade, and that no one is ever meant to be owned. We are acting to divest from the Euro-Expansionist global project of anti-Blackness. Their practice is rooted in trauma-informed somatic modalities as ways to tangibly support in decolonizing the body in pursuit of restorative healing and decarceral accountability. Within their community work, they are invested in decentralizing political  education by supporting the exchange of community and cultural knowledges within the tradition of Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty and anti-poverty. As a mover and maker, they use multi-sensorial mediums as a way to tell stories that centre spacializing grief and joy, ecologies of care, resistance and belonging.