The REACH Opening Festival at the Kennedy Center

Outside In will engage participants in an imaginative, performative, and narrative practice of embodied compassion through storytelling.

The work begins even before the participants arrive by engaging literary arts and performing arts organizations that currently engage with the DC-area adult and juvenile corrections system. The consensual offering of these stories (scrubbed of identifiers) is the centerpiece of this workshop. Giving these stories life through a deep dive writing workshop into a critical component of the select narratives, followed by a sharing through performance, takes the participant from a space of cerebral empathy to a place of embodied compassion. The resulting performances leave the participants with perspective as the product of a guided writing exercise that helps the participant personally access the subject (and/or subject matter) by weaving their own experience into the the resultant performance narrative.

As the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Albuquerque, New Mexico (2012-2014), Hakim Bellamy is a national and regional Poetry Slam Champion and holds three consecutive collegiate poetry slam titles at the University of New Mexico.