Scientific Literacy: Health Disparities

This course focuses on origins, implications, and solutions to health disparities within the United States and the larger global community. We will spend the first quarter covering the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on health disparities and writing policy memos; the second quarter we will cover sea-level rise and its effects on health disparities, as well as role play a stakeholder simulation; the third quarter we will study medical racism, sexism, and homophobia and the ways that poetry can be used to expose historical inequities; lastly, we will learn about creative nonfiction and the ways it can also be used to elevate historical inequities.

Nikki Ummel is an educator, editor, writer, and comedian living in New Orleans. They currently teach at The Living School and UNO. They just completed a pilot of the course they are proposing at Xavier University as part of their SOAR X Summer programming.

Begins Saturday October 30 at 12:30 pm. Runs for five weeks, available online as well.

Purposeful Play (online only)

Purposeful Play is a course for the inner creative that exists within all of us. The realities and responsibilities of adulting often cut us off from this sacred part of ourselves. The inner child that longs to test limits, resist authority and express who we are and what we need to thrive. While centering Black and Brown femmes, this course is for any adult who feels disconnected from their playful, creative self and seeks to deepen that relationship in community with others. Through guided meditation, journaling, movement and games, we will rediscover who we are beneath the titles and achievements and reconnect with our innate sense of freedom and play. There is no experience necessary. Any movement work will incorporate modifications to ensure the comfort and safety of all bodies. This course will take place online. This is a 6-week course. Each class is 1 hour long.

Monique Marshaun is an actor, writer and director who was born and raised on the southside of Chicago. Her work is influenced by magical realism, her own healing journey, sacred texts, the legacy of her grandmothers and all Black women learning to love ourselves in a world that doesn’t love us back. As a healing artist, Monique uses her experience in the theatre arts and dance to create sacred spaces for Black and Brown femmes who are constantly striving and rarely be-ing. Through meditation, creative movement and play, she gives femmes of color the tools to reclaim their inner child and relearn what it means to be alive. Monique is a graduate of Northwestern University and Roosevelt University.

Short Film Screenwriting Your Story and Soul (online only)

Online only. Tuesdays beginning November 9 @ 6 pm CST

This is a screenwriting fundamental workshop that highlights the importance of self-reflection and explores how the writer’s personal experience can be detrimental to the storytelling process. This five week workshop will involve 10 to 12 POC individuals (16 and up) who will be active participants in learning how to write a short screenplay that encompasses a personal experience that has affected their creative soul. As much as this is a screenwriting workshop, this is also an intimate healing workshop that welcomes aspiring screenwriters and anyone open to exploring their innermost joy and pain. Each workshop will involve a practice mediation and writing in addition the art of screenwriting will practice from beginning to end. This goal for this workshop is to teach participants to “write what they know” to know screenwriting not as an industry practice for big blockbuster movies, but also an intimate art that can show how our environment and movement can affect us all. The workshop is for people to understand that screenwriting isn’t torture or only for a certain type of people. In fact, this class will display that screenwriting is for everyone and when practiced it can be fun even therapeutic. At the end of this workshop, each participant will have finished an 8-10 page screenplay that will be read and possibly acted for the class. In addition, this class aims for each participant to feel healed, relieved, or at peace with whatever subject they chose to write about.

Justice Maya Singleton is a writer, director, poet, and stand-up comedian, born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Justice observed storytelling and film making as a rigorous process of storytelling through the mentorship of his late father director, John Singleton. Upon noticing how both education lack true depictions of black culture, history and experience as well as rarely empowers social justice narratives. In 2018, Justice took it upon himself to create a bi-monthly workshop, Justify Writers Room, that mentors woman of color and individuals to process the injustices in their writers’ experiences. The workshop now inspires literary artists to let the truth in their art justify themselves. By 2020, Justice moved to New Orleans to continue his pursuit of filmmaking and screenwriting. During 2020, Justice teamed up with Andrea Heard and the Tupac Shakur foundation to create "Pandemic Diaries" a series of creative writing workshops that explored the pandemic and its effects on the youth community.

Thoughtful Trust & Estate Planning Just in Case You Don't Live Forever

Participants will get (1) a general understanding of the technical components of a Trust & Estate Plan; (2) stories of relevant legal cases; (3) reasons why Trust & Estate Planning help to minimize family conflict and maximize intergenerational wealth; (4) the opportunity to share personal stories regarding court successions, probate, powers of attorney situations, and (5) participate in a collaborative Question and Answer period. Class is fine for beginners; no experience needed. The teaching method will be a short lecture followed by a longer collaborative Question & Answer session. There are newspaper articles regarding entertainers who recently died (Casey Casem, DMX, Prince, Aretha Franklin, and others) whose estate is a mess that we can also use for discussion.

Okyeame Haley is a Louisiana attorney who helps families complete their Trust & Estate Plans and transfer wealth (including Real Estate) to the next generation after a Loved one has passed away. He graduated from Xavier University in Finance. He obtained a law degree from Howard University School of Law and a masters degree in tax law from Washington University School of Law. He is the son of local civil-rights pioneer Oretha Castle Haley. He worked as a legislative aide to United States Congresswoman Maxine Waters and as a law clerk for recently retired Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Bernette Joshua Johnson. He was an adjunct professor at Xavier University where he taught Business Law, Tax Accounting, and Education Law. He lives with his family and has a private law practice in New Orleans.

Sunday 10am-12noon November 14 & 21 at the Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp Street, New Orleans

Belief in the Brief: A Foray Into Flash Fiction

A three-week dip into the world of flash fiction and prose poetry (because we love a genre-blur). We will read some shining short shorts, all under 1000 words, by masters like Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and Sam Shepard. Then we'll try our hand at writing some with a choice to workshop one piece at the end. Writers and readers of all levels welcome! I hope this class will serve as a jumpstart to folks who want to get back into their reading or writing habits, to start new ones, or to sustain the ones they already have. Come one, come all: discover the strange and beautiful, bite-size literature!

Heather Hasselle is a local writer and educator from Mississippi and Other States. She is a lover of books, music, goofing, and dancing.

Mondays November 1, 8, 15. 6:30 - 8 pm, 614 Gravier.

Developing Daily Practices & Cultivating Creative Attention

a four week journey in shedding distractions and discovering what feels real.

We will use the tools of self reflective writing, story sharing, mindfulness practice, and habit tracking to reveal what is already happening in our lives so we can give more space to the things that matter

@rey_hope is a dancer, ceramicist, filmmaker, church group leader, singer, cook, and writer. They have been based in New Orleans for six years and plan to be here for decades more.

Tuesdays 2-4pm at Fourth Wall, 614 Gravier, beginning October 26 .

Altered States: experimental embodied explorations

With DARA BRAM

What are altered, or non-ordinary, states of consciousness? What are they altering from, or unordinary compared to? This class will engage with altered states as creative practice through experimental embodied explorations; we will move, discuss, read, write, and (way) beyond. Each session—focused on a particular state i.e. dreams, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, substances (nothing illicit required)—will be curated collaboratively and serve as an interdisciplinary, exploratory container.

3-5 PM October 17 - running six weeks - Location TBA

The Portrait : Empathy and Photography

registration closed

With CAMI LENAIN

What is a portrait? How can a single photograph reveal the essence of a person? Who are you drawn to portray and why? How does the photographer’s gaze translate into the image? 

In this 6 week class, we will focus on portraiture with a documentary twist and deconstruct its different possible approaches. We will discuss how to photograph what is close and what is far, how to collaborate through portraiture, the ways in which it can be healing, the ways it makes the viewer feel, the ethics of photographing strangers and the dangers of misrepresentation. Students will have optional weekly assignments to bring their images in class to share and discuss, and we will also be looking at historical and contemporary work, with an emphasis on women, queer, BIPOC and non-Western photographers.

5-8 pm October 18, 25; November 1, 8, 15, 22.

300 Camp Street, New Orleans.

Turning Art Into Commerce

with NESBY PHIPS

a class designed to simplify the leap of taking your idea from a creative space to an asset.

10 am October 13, 20, & 27.

Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, & zoom room 504 614 2020

(*postponed*) Embodied Poetics: A creative writing & movement series

with TT KOOKEN

Embodied Poetics is a somatic creative writing course exploring our interactions with our environments, the capabilities and complexities of language, and the various methods from which to draw inspiration and craft in written form. We will practice noticing, observing, describing, and most of all intuiting and feeling from the body. At the end of our sessions together, we might hold a deeper connection between our bodies and our language-ing. In our embodied-living-together, we will be involved in various activities including but not limited to: writing, drawing, movement, meditation, breathwork, & play.

1-3 pm Monday October 18, 25; November 1, 8

Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans

The City of Spectacle

with JAVIER MARCANO

This course is a dynamic and multidisciplinary exploration, where participants can expect to reflect on the epistemic, aesthetics and educational relationships between architecture, the built environment and its inhabitants. The sessions will be open discussions about the overlaps between architecture, poetics, cartography, anthropology, urbanism and activism. The goal is to provide an introductory level to theory of architecture, urbanism, technical notation and diagramming with emphasis in making. Participants will engage in learning about and producing ‘Geo-histographies’ and ‘Psychogeographies’ that reflect their interests and express multilayered graphic compositions as a reaction to the content that will be covered in the different sessions.

6-8 pm Tuesday October 19, 26; November 2, 9, 16, 23.

Location TBA & zoom room 504 614 2020

MISSION: The Beaubourg School is a tuition-free school that creates space to share and learn. We connect people interested in transforming our community through self exploration, knowledge sharing, and creative action.

The Beaubourg School is a community for developing ideas, experimenting, research, educational resources, creative networks, scholarly opportunity, academic exchanges, and more. Our goal is to host a range of practices and share a variety of knowledges across multiple disciplines with our course offerings. We welcome applications from seasoned educators as well as first-time sharers. 

We are committed to enacting our values of diversity, mutual aid, social equity, and amplifying marginalized voices in curating our class catalog. We are excited to offer classes that do not fall into easy categorization. Programming might range from physical movement, writing (for the screen, the poem, the stage, the self), the building arts (a history of modernism in New Orleans; Native modes in the present day), improvisation, actor training, field recording & its composition, music theory, vocal training, drawing, holistic wellness and more: our programming is bounded only by the imagination of our fellow citizen-sharers.

All attendees participate for free and Beaubourg offers teachers a $40 stipend per class.

Classes take place primarily at 614 Gravier Street, in an air conditioned / heated room with a concrete floor whose dimensions are approximately 50 ft x 19 ft. There is also a small courtyard with an 8 ft x10 ft stage where classes can take place. We are also partnering with the Contemporary Arts Center, which has generously offered space to host classes. If your proposal is beyond these confines, please do not abridge your dreams: we are committed to finding ways to make the space work for our practitioners, or if needed, working with our partners to find a satellite location that will serve the needs.

To apply, please complete an online application describing the class, workshop, lecture, or experiment in education you would like to lead.  We welcome applications from seasoned educators as well as first-time teachers. 

Support for this tuition-free educational program is provided in part by the Beaubourg Theatre and The Mellon Graduate Program in Community-Engaged Scholarship.

Last year we interviewed former Beaubourg School teachers and collaborators to find out what the school was all about, here’s what they said: