Where We Meet explores themes of resilience, healing, connection and transformation with movement and visual storytelling through aerial and contemporary ballet. This is an exhibition from Nashville artist Omari Booker taking place at Oz Arts Nashville this Friday through Sunday. It’s also a collaborative initiative between Healing Housing, a recovery housing program for women, and FALL Productions, a Nashville-based nonprofit performance company  with a mission to create high-quality, multidisciplinary work with depth that is by and about marginalized communities.
“Our entire concept was born inside a prison,” program director of Healing Housing Keisha Pyle said. “Our founder, Olivia Smith, would do courses and meet with women, and there was a woman in there named Stacy, and she was looking to parole, and she said, ‘I have nowhere to go, Olivia. I’m going to go right back to the same place that made me sick, and it’s hard to believe that I could ever get better there.'” Olivia created this idea and our mission has remained the same, to serve the underserved, to find the woman who has no financial resources and that is, for lack of better words, forgotten, the outcast. We want to find her, and we want to give her the chance that she couldn’t afford, maybe financially or spiritually.”
 ”It is not a linear narrative, we’re more looking at zooming in on various aspects of the experience of the average Healing Housing resident,” said Founder and Executive Artistic Director Rebekah Hampton Barger. “We really pulled a lot of input from the women of the program. We’d had a couple of different writing workshops. We did several movement workshops with them. We’ve gone and visited their morning meditations and gathered quotes from them in a variety of things to see and understand what are the aspects of their story that they asked to shine a light on. We pulled from all these things as direct input for the movement and the choreography.”
 ”The overarching point of this project is to build empathy,” Barger said. “Whether it is women from within the community watching the performance and seeing themselves depicted, seeing their experience reflected in a way that maybe hasn’t been seen or felt before, that gives them maybe a release. As well as for people who have no experience with addiction or maybe haven’t been touched by it and hopefully come away with a better understanding of what these women go through, their strength, their resilience, what it takes to choose to go on a recovery journey.”
Additional event opportunities start tonight (Aug 5) with Souls of Mischief is at City Winery and on Thursday night (Aug 6) Pond takes the stage at Brooklyn Bowl. Also on Thursday, The Black Keys begin their two-night stint at The Pinnacle. On Friday (Aug 7) and Saturday (Aug 8) the 23rd annual Tomato Art Fest is in the Five Points district in East Nashville and also on Saturday The Weird Sisters take the stage at the Basement East. Back at the venue on Monday (Aug 10), WNXP presents Clipping & Open Mike Eagle.
