Re-Storying the Ramayana:
A Role-Playing Game
Join us to reimagine the Ramayana using performance, poetry, gaming, and collaborative storytelling, in celebration of Pride Month.
Be a part of bringing the Ramayana out of the past and into the future with the most recent episode of the speculative cinema project Forest Tales, a queer/crip ecofeminist retelling of the South Asian epic. In this interactive virtual event presented in celebration of Pride Month, artist Anuj Vaidya and poet and performer Jessica Stokes reimagine the story of the vulture Jatayu using performance, poetry, collaborative storytelling, and role-playing games. Instead of dying after losing a wing as in the original epic, here Jatayu is resurrected with a prosthetic wing, only to face the extinction of his kind. (In India, three species of vulture are currently facing extinction due to the use of a bovine painkiller.) Can we help Jatayu imagine an alternative future and find healing for our disabled ecologies?
Learn more about the project at Resurrecting Jatayu.
Happy Pride Month! In June, and all year long, the Asian Art Museum is proud to celebrate the LGBTQ community with programs like this one that uplift diverse voices and perspectives.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Anuj Vaidya is a teacher/student of performance, media, and multispecies thinking. Deeply invested in process and collaboration, he is committed to challenging normativity, cultivating joy, and building community with both human and more-than-human worlds. His works have been screened and performed at various venues both locally (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 3rd i SF International South Asian Film Festival) and internationally (KHOJ, New Delhi, India; Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan). His most recent publication is “The Unicorn and the Larva” (Camera Obscura, November 2020), a conversation with artist Tejal Shah about queer ecologies and artistic practice.
Jessica Stokes is a disabled poet/performer/educator/scholar pursuing their Ph.D. at Michigan State University and co-founder of the HIVES Research Workshop. They analyze contemporary poetry to “crip” methods for writing and reading. Stokes writes about disability poetics in Jacket2’s “Discordance” series and their work has appeared in Wordgathering, The Mayo Review, and “We Are Not Your Metaphor: A Disability Poetry Anthology.” Stokes has a purple wheelchair and too much red hair.
ASL interpretation will be provided.
Co-presented by the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability and 3rd i South Asian Independent Film
