THE LIVING ART
Performance. Education. Culture.
WHAT WE DO
The Uhuru Institute:
Learning 4 Freedom
TUI is the UnSchool of Living Art, NFP. It is an innovative blend of best-practice Western and Eastern styles of educating the mind, body, and spirit. We have begun our beta-test year in 2014 and are planning to open with 1/3 enrollment in our first facility in Chicago, IL in 2015.
TUI is the best learning environment on the planet because, at TUI, the learner decides when, how, and what to learn.
Check us out here.
UnSchool Design & Curricula
In the beginning, there is curriculum.
Our UnSchool Curricula are designed to gradually fade into the background of the learner's educational experience.
The UnSchool Curricula are unlike others operating in the world today because they are crafted with the purpose of becoming useless as the learner progresses.
Our UnSchools are designed in exactly the same fashion. They are 'yana' or vehicles to be left behind once you, indeed, have learned all you can or wish to learn. This is an innovation to the learning/education process that is not new because its parts have been here all along. Yet, it is truly innovative because the parts have never been put together quite like this.
Performance Workshops for Youth
The Performance Literature Workshop is designed to combine text study, discussion, writing, and performance. The texts for this course will be chosen from works that are written for performance, including (but not limited to) plays, sonnets, poems, songs (folk and popular), folk tales, etc. Each year a theme or focus for the literature used is chosen, and each year a different type of performance literature is chosen. The workshop also focuses on the 'internal art' of meditation as a centering tool. This teaches a technique to prepare for the work of performance. This course has physical movement involved to aid the instruction of breath/voice work and improvisation skill. The students will also receive the 'soundtrack' for the course as well as a final video for their progress in the course and class highlights.
Poetry & Music
Our founder here at Living Art is a poet. She says that poetry was her first voice and is dedicated to propagating the music and magic of poetry. We agree with her and so a great deal of the work we do infuses poetry and poetic expression in all of our other workshops, programs, and projects. We are going to open a publishing house to serve poets in particular. Until then, we just keep writing.
We also find the sister - really the grandmother - of poetry to be music. It is proposed that human speech began as singing. We also use music to give vibrational foundation to much of what we do. There may be a production company coming from Living Art that joins our musical and poetic leanings and will be focused on producing music that uses poetry as its main lyrical form.
Performance Workshops for Professionals
The Performance Workshop for Professionals is designed to combine text study, discussion, writing, and performance for busy adults. It's about empowering and developing professional presence and poise through the arts of public speaking/oratory, debate, and theatre. The workshop culminates with participants delivering an original piece created during the workshop: whether it be a classroom lesson, deposition, sales pitch, or any number of other professional 'performances.' The texts for this course are chosen from works that are written for performance, including (but not limited to) plays, sonnets, poems, songs (folk and popular), folk tales, etc. Additionally, we employ the 'internal art' of meditation as a centering tool and a technique to prepare for the work of performance. This course has physical movement involved to enhance our breath/voice work and to build improvisational skill.
Creative Thinking Workshops
These are our pure mojo workshops. In them, you or your organization/company can select a team of our artists to lead you through breathwork and physical movement to open your channels of creativity in a physical and substantial way. We use the power of performing art rehearsal to gain access to the innate creative spark in each of us. Your facilitators then begin a Zen-koan-like questioning session to help illuminate avenues of thought surrounding your issue at hand. The rules of improv apply: "no" is not allowed, only "yes, and." The session concludes with a gathering and categorizing of the new ideas for you to package and take with you on your journey forward.