ROOTS Week 2018: RE/NEW!
Alternate ROOTS’ 42nd Annual Meeting & Artists’ Retreat
Tuesday, August 7 – Sunday, August 12, 2018
Lutheridge Conference Center; Arden, NC (near Asheville)
Download the ROOTS Week Schedule here!
It happened again: we sold out on-campus ROOTS Week spots during the members-only registration period! Our waitlist has also reached capacity. If you weren’t able to sign up before now, we hope to see you next year!
ROOTS Week Annual Meeting & Artists’ Retreat is a one-of-a-kind gathering – six days of performances, art and organizing workshops, visual art exhibitions, our famous Late Night cabarets, and ROOTS’ annual business meeting, in a retreat-like setting in the mountains of North Carolina. Artists, cultural organizers, and their families come from across the South (and beyond!), joining an ever-growing, ever-changing network of people committed to building a just world through arts, community, and activism.
This year, our theme of RE/NEW! inspires us to both RENEW ourselves and our community, while also moving towards the NEW.
In this political climate we need to RENEW: to pull the wisdom from the past forward with us, to make it – and ourselves – new again. We’ll gather at ROOTS Week to renew our spirits, recover our histories, revive our arts/organizing practices, replenish our Creating-a-Better-World toolkits, and re-vision the future that we are working towards, together.
And, we know that we have our individual and collective growing edges – places where we need to call in the NEW. Places where we need to grow like never before. Some of these were named last year in our UpROOTing Oppressions sessions: gender/queer liberation, decolonization, consent culture, youth leadership, and intersectionality. We’ll be making a special call for programming in these areas, and we invite performances, Learning Exchanges, and visual arts that speak directly to them. Alongside all this deep, rich newness, we’ll also be welcoming Michelle Ramos our NEW Executive Director. We envision a ROOTS Week that celebrates and courageously nurtures new people, new ideas, and new ways of building our beloved community.
We envision a ROOTS Week 2018 that nurtures new ways of being as we learn from our growing edges.
RE/NEW! draws on our year-long Renew Your ROOTS campaign, an invitation to our members and friends – old and new – to reflect on what ROOTS means to you, and what you mean to ROOTS. How, as artist-activists, does ROOTS RE/NEW you? And how do we, as a community, keep ROOTS RE/NEWED? Renew Your ROOTS offers many ways to engage in the work renewing Alternate ROOTS year-round, and attending ROOTS Week is one of them!
So please join us in August! We’ll sing, we’ll dance, we’ll share art and stories, raucous laughter and quiet moments. Together, we’ll call forth wisdom from our collective past and radically imagine our collective future. We’ll RE/NEW!
Nothing RENEWS quite like a ROOTS Week dance party. Photo: Melisa Cardona.
To whet your appetite for ROOTS Week 2018, watch the video from last year!