Making Time to Meet the Moment

June 9, 2025

An Interview with Sarah Ashkin and Kai Hazelwood about the Practice Progress UNtensive

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Sarah Ashkin and Kai Hazelwood are the duo behind the Practice Progress UNtensive, an annual virtual gathering in partnership with ARCOS Dance and Garden. Kai and Sarah share how they came to work together in anti-racist resistance and healing, how they have created a format for a white working group to practice and embody anti-racism practices and a people of color circle to facilitate rest and healing, and how remembering to make time to honor and learn from the resistance work that has already been done is more important than ever.

This year’s UNtensive will be held June 20-22nd. To learn more, visit arcosdance.com.

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Can you first tell me a little about yourselves and what shaped you as artists?

Kai: We have a practice where we introduce each other instead of sharing our own biographies. We talk about what we mean to each other and our relationship. I love to tell the story of how Sarah and I met. We were at a contact improv jam, and Sarah was dancing with a dear collaborator and friend of mine. Sarah ended up landing on her face, and I saw it happen. I joined her on the side of the room to check in and make sure everyone was okay, and Sarah and I started chatting while her black eye was blooming. She came to another movement event I was hosting two days later sporting her fully black eye! We started as collaborators making stuff in the studio, it grew into a friendship, and then about five years later Sarah came to me with an idea to collaborate in a different way. Practice Progress was born, and we had our first workshop at the end of 2019. We were excited about this new way that embodiment, dance, social justice, and anti-racism were coming together. Then the pandemic happened, and we decided we would take a step back and pause. Then the racial uprisings of 2020 began. We felt like we needed to do something, so we started offering a public working group called Listen In, where Sarah held a working group for white folks, and I held a rest and healing space for Black Indigenous people of color, and they kept filling up. We thought other people needed it as much as we needed it. That first year, we taught a tiny version of the UNtensive, and then it grew into a multi-day convening for movers and makers.

I like telling that story of Sarah and I because, at its core, what we do is less a business and more a relationship. I also like it as an example of what it means to be in an interracial interclass duo. We have invested in going to therapy at times. Anti-racism work is a relational process that requires bumps and bruises, trust and vulnerability. I’m grateful we continue to figure out how to do that for going on eight years.

Sarah: Love it, that was an amazing story of our work together!

I’ll give some bio details on both of us. Kai is from the Bay Area and began training as a ballerina very young. That took her to New York and The Kirov Ballet in Russia. Eventually the messaging that she was too tall and too Black left her looking for a new relationship to dance. She was clear that dance needed to be many more things than what it was for her up to that point in her life. She started Good Trouble Makers, a practice driven arts collaborative celebrating queer identities and centering d/Disabled and chronically ill QTBIPOC. Learning about leadership and self-care was a complicated process and has grown to the point where Kai does not identify with the word “dance” and has had to break up with the form that continues to replicate and repeat white supremacist able-bodied norms and oppressive practices. Now, Kai is about monkeywrenching. She is an artist, agitator, and troublemaker. She’s currently in a research practice inspired by reptiles called Shedding, a relational work as a Black, queer, Disabled person in relationship to change, transformation, failure, and letting go of what was before, and how unpeaceful, necessary, and vital that is. She also leads an embodied healing practice called HomeBody Living where she combines EMDR and Somatic Therapy certifications with her background doing embodied healing and her research into Shedding, following the somatic wisdom of our more than human kin.

I grew up doing the ballet-jazz-lyrical combo. I found myself as a high school kid feeling confused politically about how I was being put in sexualized costumes as a young person and that the best dancers were those who could follow what other bodies were doing as opposed to listening to their own. I was interested in what feminism and anti-war meant at the time. I couldn’t figure out how my dancing self and political self worked together. I was really lucky to go to Wesleyan University and meet most of my collaborators in GROUND SERIES, a dance and social justice collective I co-founded. I got exposed to site specific and land-based work, which changed my life, because my personal practice and political practice are linked to place. Then I was in dance classes with fat hairy people who had backgrounds in physical labor. I realized that dancing is the place where the world we want to be is created. I was given that huge gift, and then I had to interrogate it in the next phase of my life, because I realized how much white supremacy was being upheld in what the “right” body was for dance, what training was, and that it was a racialized training. That’s been my work ever since, alongside Kai, as well as Brittany Delany, Miles Tokunow, and Paolo Sperin in GROUND SERIES, wondering how we can be in right relationship with place and history using creativity and presence as anti-racist anti-colonial practice.

Kai: I want to shine that Sarah took that work to the UK at the University of Roehampton for an MA where she turned her thesis work into a self and institutional audit of White Supremacy in Dance Education in the UK, and is now a PhD candidate at UC Davis in Dance and Performance Studies. She quietly and beautifully embodies whatever role is necessary in the process of liberation. I admire that she always listens to find out what is needed and then steps into that role.

What is Practice Progress and how did it lead to the UNtensive?

Sarah: Practice Progress has public programs for anyone, and then private clients hire us to lead them through anti-racist facilitation. Because Kai and I come from the worlds of Western concert dance and dance in higher education, mostly as guest artists but also as a doctoral student in my case (Kai has been a professor in several higher ed spaces), that became a first home for Practice Progress change work and continues to be in a lot of ways. It’s where Kai’s troublemaking and my liberation practices are happening, so dance departments across the country and even internationally make up most of our clients.

Our facilitation is grounded in our body-based backgrounds, so we are using mindfulness, movement exercises, and embodied imagination practices.  We primarily work in race-based affinity groups. I lead a white working group, while Kai works in the Black Indigenous people of color circle. In the white working group, our wondering is about making more space for the discomfort of racism, as we’ve been trained through white supremacy not to feel racism. We check in with our nervous systems, find out where we are, and move into relational action.

Kai: In the BIPOC space, we focus on community building, rest, and healing. As any person of color will know, we don’t need the education; we are the subject matter experts. We focus on exchanging strategies of care that we practice in our own lives, we learn from scholars and healers of color, we discuss strategies to take care of our own bodies. I don’t identify as an activist because I’m attending to my own survival and the survival of others in these systems. Our lives shouldn’t require activism. We should be able to just be. I don’t say this to knock the lifesaving work that activists do or how grateful I am for what they do. But I see my work as smaller and quieter and, at this point in my life, more of a grounding in, claiming my ground, and making it home.

How is it organized? What can participants expect?

Kai: I want to name some of the people who helped the UNtensive come into the world. I can’t talk about the UNtensive without naming that it’s a communal labor. It started as a small-scale collaboration with ARCOS Dance in Austin, TX. The University of Texas Austin has also been a partner, specifically the Masters in Dance and Social Justice that has been led by Gesel Mason. Without that powerful nexus of folks, we wouldn’t have been empowered to have a multi-day virtual program. It’s always been important for us that it’s virtual; the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disproportionately harm the most marginalized, and the accessibility called for by generations of Disabled people still matters, and should matter to all of us.

Our newest partner, Garden, is an incredible virtual space led by J Mase III for queer and trans people of color practicing pandemic safety. They have made a gorgeous huge robust playful virtual world on the platform GatherTown, and have built us a beautiful digital playground. This will be the second year they have been an integral part of the UNtensive.

Sarah: We have a list of about 20 guest artists we have gathered over the past five years: Alice Sheppard, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Haruna Lee, Irvin Gonzalez, Alfonso Cervera, Rajni Shah, Antoine Hunter, Zahna Simon, Bernard Brown, Andrew Suseno, Miles Tokunow, Ehren Kee Natay, Cheyenne Dunbar, Sydney Rogers aka Miss BarbieQ, Rebecca Fitton, Alex Christmas, and Keegan Sarimiento Kloer. Those are the people who have helped us dream the UNtensive for the past five years and it has been a total honor to create worlds alongside them.

Participants can expect a three-day virtual gathering. Six years into facilitating virtually, we are pretty caring and skilled in what it means to be online for that much time. We gather in the morning into the race-based affinity groups in what we call EMBODIED ANTI-RACISTING. In the UNtensive, these groups are deeply creative, partly because the folks who attend are seeking creative liberatory community. It’s full of people who are engaged in liberatory work, people who are teachers, people who are making in radical ways, and people who invite us to bring our artist selves fully front as facilitators.

This year, because it is our five-year anniversary of the UNtensive, Kai and I took some time to think about a theme, as we do every year, and what was resoundingly clear was to remember that we already have the tools we need to survive, thrive, and care for each other through this administration, through this moment in climate change, and through this moment in global racial capitalism. This year’s theme is Making Time. In the second half of the day, we’re going to make a big juicy asynchronous world for folks to look back at the guest artist recordings from previous UNtensives, as well as readings and videos from past UNtensive curriculum, and make a magical living archive library ancestor altar. The second half of the day is spending time with those materials and making time to spend together and dream and remember what tools we have to survive, thrive, and create in this time.

How has the UNtensive evolved since it started in 2020?

Kai: A related thought: One of the things I love about the UNtensive is it’s where we try to bring through the threads of people we admire doing things with this thing we call Dance that are magical and radical and should be everywhere. Disabled, Deaf, fat, Black, queer, and trans voices are what shape the UNtensive. That’s just the water we’re swimming in. It’s not an add-on. That focus doesn’t change from year to year.

When I think about how the UNtensive has evolved, it’s about how we continue to deepen, double down, and embrace that ethos. It’s what we do in the world. We find more and more ways to make those values explicitly clear. As hard as we work to disrupt what dance means, it’s not just about the topic, it’s about who is in the room. There is always more work to be done in that direction.

Sarah: Each year, Kai and I feel like giddy summer camp counselors. We ask which incredible artists are going to co-host and help us wonder what anti-racism means in our bodies. We take that prompt with huge joy. We want to thank ARCOS and UT Austin for funding our joy.

The first couple years, we were both teaching a lot, so we had a program called Radical Pedagogy, a workshop for teachers where we invited educators to bring their syllabi and we blew it up in anti-racist ways. We still have that aspect to what we do, but it’s not in the forefront in the same way. We’ve had some years where we’ve had the idea of a conference where many different ideas are offered and people can “taste” different things, and then other years where we try to make the UNtensive one meal, so it became a compositional gathering to create a single choreography over our time together.

This year, within our terrifying political moments, the urgency of recreating the anti-racist action wheel is tempting to many white people who are witnessing the impact of these systems of oppression now, but it truly disregards all the previous labor, mostly by Black femme ancestors and elders who have always been doing this work. Can we actually remember what our legacy of action is? And then not demand that those people do more labor? Can we honor the work that has already been given to us, spend our time in reflection, and realize that we already have what we need at hand to meet this moment?

Why is the UNtensive important, perhaps now more than ever?

Kai: I always feel ready to talk about why this matters, because it matters so much to me. I’m going to speak from my positionality as a Black queer Disabled cis woman: It’s a scary time. I intensely feel the hopelessness of this moment. I want to lay my body on the line, and I feel frozen and don’t know what to do. The UNtensive for me is a deep act of faith that what this moment calls for is what I’ve already been doing. What this moment asks from me is to protect and fuel myself, and invite others to do the same, so we can commit to this lifelong. I need to survive this moment. My community needs to survive this moment. I need my community to survive this moment. The future needs us to survive this moment. I need to keep faith that I’m building a future with my community that we want to live in. The UNtensive feels like a delicious magical taste of that world. My work is to continue to taste that world, so that it can become the whole meal, and frankly so that I know what it tastes like.

Sarah: My work as a white person in this political moment is to recognize the power, the gates, and the privilege that my body holds and my position holds, and then move that power as creatively and with as much care as possible to those who are most impacted. The UNtensive is the place where I get to gather in community to do this practice. I’ll speak to the white people who might join this year and have joined us in the past: the work is not easy, fun, or comfortable. It gives us a taste of the world that we know we want to live in, where white people are engaging in the work and destabilizing white supremacist power. In the dance world, we talk about the body mattering. The body can’t matter if we are practicing racism in our dance classrooms, events, rehearsals, and choreography. If we want to get behind that truth, that the body can be a site of healing and wisdom, then we have a long way to go, and we need to start now. It’s our job as white artists to sensitize our bodies to the realities of race and racism so that we can scale the de-weaponization of ourselves, our practices, and our communities.

What do you hope participants take away?

Sarah: I hope that participants will join Kai and me in this radical slowness practice of making time together to reflect on the abundance of teachings and tools we have to meet this moment. We don’t need the frantic panic. We need the slow care that makes it possible to look each other in the eye and say, “Let’s do this.”

Kai: In the rest circle, I want folks to experience not being the only one in the room. It’s exhausting, but one of the things after doing this work for five years that I see is that because we’re isolated, often being the only person of color in white spaces, we don’t get the benefit of realizing that our stories are often the same, the harm is the same, the impact is the same, the felt experience is the same. There’s something deeply empowering and soothing to my body when I hear someone reflect back the same experiences I have. Then I realize it’s not me; it’s the system. It allows me to let go of that voice wondering if I was better or smarter, then I wouldn’t have these issues. Instead, I realize it’s by design, and part of that design is that my BIPOC colleague at the next institution is having the same worries and doubts. The power of being together is all of us taking a collective sigh, remembering we are not the problem, we are the solution to these institutions that desperately want to convince us we are the problem, so they do not have to change.

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To register for the UNtensive, visit arcosdance.com.

To learn more about Practice Progress, visit www.practiceprogress.org.