Melting Pot featured artist Climbing Poetree

evergreen_web_banner.png

KBOO is open to the public! To visit the station, contact your staff person or call 503-231-8032.


Produced by: 
KBOO
Program:: 
Air date: 
Tue, 03/22/2016 - 8:00pm to 10:00pm
Melting Pot featured artist Climbing Poetree
This week on The Melting Pot Radio Show we spend time wtih Climbing Poetree. They are coming to town this Saturday March 26th to Sun Gate in Portland Oregon. Tune in 8-10pm for an interview and to hear some tunes throughout the show.

Climbing PoeTree is the combined force of Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman. Over the last 11 years, Climbing PoeTree has been at the forefront of social and environmental justice movements by harnessing their art as a tool for popular education, community organizing, and personal transformation. Their award-winning performance is composed of dual-voice spoken word poetry, hip hop, and multimedia theatre that dissolves apathy with hope, exposes injustice, and helps heal our inner trauma so that we may begin to cope with the issues facing our communities.

Climbing PoeTree has independently organized 29 national and international tours bringing their performance to thousands of people across the U.S. and abroad from Mexico to the UK, South Africa to Cuba. Their soul-stirring performances have been featured alongside visionary leaders and artists such as Angela Davis, Cornel West, Alice Walker, Erykah Badu, Alicia Keys, Saul Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Naomi Klein, Danny Glover, and The Last Poets, among others.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Alixa and Naima created the award winning multimedia theater production Hurricane Season:The Hidden Messages in Water and traveled over 11,000 miles across the U.S. on a bus converted to run on recycled vegetable oil, merging theater and activism by creating a national network that gave voice to local organizations addressing and healing the effects of unnatural disasters in their communities. Climbing PoeTree’s artistic and organizing work can be found on the walls of galleries and museums through projects such as S.T.I.T.C.H.E.D and Shadow Boxing, the latter created by Garcia, and in the streets of Haiti Ayiti Resurrect, Co-Founded by Penniman.

Innovative educators and performers, Climbing PoeTree’s work appears in high school and university curricula. In that last year alone, they were  selected to present and keynote at the New Story Summit, Scotland; Bioneers National Conference, California; and at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, MA to name a few.  They have lead hundreds of workshops in institutions from Yale University to Rikers Island Prison. They are currently developing a multimedia curriculum derived from their celebrated production, Hurricane Season, that employs art and culture to help learners analyze systems of oppression and resistance, and builds critical consciousness and imagination essential for fundamental social change.

Audio by Topic: