Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Rochester Pride 2019
Rochester Pride: UV Looking Back, Looking Forward, Part I
Bystander Intervention, Fragmentary Display, Highlight Rochester’s Most Recent Pride Event
by Desmond Homann, UV Contributor & Co-Director of Social Justice Arts Troupe
The last weekend of September was Rochester Pride 2019. Rochester Pride featured over 70 vendors and a wonderful collection of performances, including Unspoken Voices’ performance on bystander awareness. While this is not the first pride that Unspoken Voices has attended, it is always nice to be involved with similar events. Unspoken Voices as an organization appreciates any opportunity to perform and share information surrounding bystander intervention.
Rochester Pride was an all-ages event, and for this reason, Unspoken Voices was able to work with a wide range of participants. Because a wide variety were represented in the audience, the Pride event was a nice contrast to the in-school performances that the Unspoken Voices acting troupe has put on many times over the past few years. Of course, any chance to teach others about stepping up in the face of power based violence is very important and needs to be explored.
In addition to performing and making new connections, Unspoken Voices displayed the “Fragmentary” project that was started in the fall of 2018 at Slutwalk Twin Cities. This project, which you may read in previous blog posts, gave participants the chance to write on a ceramic plate to express something they feel has broken them. Subsequently, they smashed the plate to bits with a hammer, and put the pieces together into a large community mosaic. This mosaic was on display at Rochester Pride, and Unspoken Voices also plans to display these mosaics again in the future in a variety of different ways, as this was a wonderfully empowering and artistic project.
All of this was made possible by the organizers, the attendees, and especially Unspoken Voices’ talented volunteers. This volunteer troupe, made up of U of M Morris students, Morris community members, and a few Morris alumni and volunteers from other parts of Minnesota. All of the volunteers put in the work to make these performances successful. With such a committed group of volunteers, both performances went smoothly and hopefully gave the audience a new set of tools and strategies to reduce power based violence in the communities around them. All of us have the power to stand up, step in, and speak out against violence.