Girl Power Hip Hop and Freestyle
Workshop
1.5 hrs
August 01, 2017 7:30 pm Tuesday
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I am an environmental educator, surfer, parkour practitioner, and hip hop artist. My father is from Hyderabad and I was born and raised in the U.S. I will be sharing some of my hip hop music and videos, which celebrate the power of women and girls in surfing and the outdoors. I will be inviting the audience to join in, via a participatory beginners workshop in "freestyling" the art of creating rhymes on the spot, usually to a beat. This workshop is meant for total beginners who find the idea of freestyling to be terrifying, and is ESPECIALLY FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS. We will do exercises to loosen ourselves up, release ourselves from judgment, and HAVE FUN!!!

The global image of U.S. hip hop tends to be of commercial gangster rap, however this is not the full picture. In the big cities in the U.S. local hip hop scenes thrive and musicians and artists (many of them women!) create work relevant to local issues and their community. I would like to share my own work as a San Francisco Bay Area hip hop artist as well as invite the audience to join in the participatory community based spontaneous aspect of hip hop through a freestyle workshop

Organizer
Mira Manickam-Shirley
Mira Manickam is an environmental educator, writer, musician, athlete, and the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Brown Girl Surf. She is the former Youth Program Coordinator at NatureBridge, and a recipient of an Open Circle artist grant, and an Audobon Toyota TogetherGreen fellowship for her innovative work with youth in nature, including the Green Guard intergenerational eco-hip hop collective and the Trees4Life urban forestry internship. She has also worked extensively in Thailand, telling the stories of a rural communities whose livelihoods are shifting in the face of rapid development and environmental change. She is the author of the book Just Enough, available through the University of Washington press. She has competed in American Ninja Warrior 4 times. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and a M.Env.Sc. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.