Sidore Lecture: Niki Tulk, Teaching to Trauma

This event is available online and in person.

Online information is available here: https://www.plymouth.edu/calendar/events-at-plymouth-state-university/sidore-series/

Free and Open to the public, tickets required.

Masks required for all patrons.

Unmasked presenter will be tested for Covid19 immediately before the lecture.

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Teaching to Trauma

Niki Tulk, Ph.D.

Sixty one percent of adults in the US have suffered at least one traumatic childhood experience, 81% women report being sexually assaulted, 67.8% of children in the US are traumatized by 16 years old. And this was before COVID. Given the extent to which trauma affects every element of society, devising a practice-based set of recommendations for performing trauma-related material and also teaching students is both an urgent and productive challenge for those who wish to express, and perhaps even begin to mend, the broken spirit of the world through art and pedagogy. This talk will address how, through centralizing trauma experience as normative—the order of things rather than a “disorder”— and by understanding the way our brains and bodies work together to keep ourselves safe and heal, we can create a paradigm shift in the arts (and society) that might assist in creating spaces that cultivate acknowledgement and healing without sacrificing commitment to truth-telling.

Dr. Tulk is an Australian experimental theatre-maker, performer/improviser, writer, poet and performance studies scholar, and currently Teaching Faculty in Theatre at Plymouth State University. Her research explores a feminist, embodied and ethical poetics around the performance of trauma experience, and her book, Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming will published by Routledge, U.K. in 2022. Her full length poetry book, O, won the 2021 Driftwood Full Length Poetry Prize and will be published by Driftwood Press in 2022. She is currently completing an advanced Trauma Certificate with the Trauma Research Foundation in Boston, and her pedagogy combines somatic, trauma-informed methodologies and a focus on utilizing the imagination to facilitate enhanced creativity and healing. Niki holds two separate doctorates from the University of Colorado Boulder: in Theatre and Performance Studies; and in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance. She has a Masters of Education from the University of Georgia in Language and Literacy, and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School, NYC.