writing

On Healing, Joy, and Sovereignty as Pedagogical Practice

Published November 2021

Movement Research Performance Journal

"Franklin, drawing from a conversation with former teacher Tai Jimenez, reflects on her time becoming resistant to being taught and teaching within white-centric institutional spaces. These poetic rememberings are interspersed with gratitude for Jimenez, while also opening space for grief in wanting to learn and share, but feeling exhausted and shamed by traditional teaching methods."

Space Cadet: A Methodological Approach and Choreographic Experiment

Published May 2021

 "Space Cadet" investigates black and Asian women's slippery presence in performance through collaboratively devised solos. I am interested in the (in)visibility of lived experience and am curious about the residues of subjugation and erasure in the body. Through this process, I am working to activate a methodology of kinetic imagination that might serve in re-orienting marginalized and oppressed bodies towards new possible futures: I am seeking to activate the body as a living and reflexive archive and a futuring medium. How might we consciously and strategically tap into our kinesthetically stored and sensation-based memories and present realities and invite them to be generative in our making? How might we support each other in a practice of re-visioning, orienting the knowledge stored within our bodies toward futures that serve ours and our communities' greatest good? In this process, I will employ black performance technologies from dance, music, and theater traditions, exploring the space these make for embodied knowledge – what viscerally felt and experience - to act as a primary source. Considering the institution of academia's history of disavowal of black performance traditions and technologies, and the reality that this work will be created and produced within that same container, I intervene to ask the question: how might I return to the centrality of the body and its community as a site of knowledge, situating theory as a means to affirm and name practice.

Space Cadet: Process Archive

Published May 2021

Created in collaboration with artist Keren Alfred, the Space Cadet process archive weaves together the creation of Franklin's graduate thesis "Space Cadet". Featuring process notes, rehearsal photos, and annotated source material, this provides and intimate look into the creation a work at the peak of Covid-19, addressing pressing issues of identity and community in a moment of global sociopolitical upheaval and immense lonliness.