Announcing: she's bouyant
Come see a show I'm directing! (and some things to read/watch/check out)
TLDR: if you’re in Seattle, come see this show Saturday, October 26 & Sunday, October 27, 2024 at BASE Experimental Arts.
It’s been five years since I directed a piece of performance. Like so many broken hearts before me, a hulking part of me thought I’d never do it again.
If you’ve hung out with me lately, you’ll likely hear me decry that I hate theatre but love performance. I’ll probably talk about how much I like going to see dance, how much I love abstraction, how I like letting my brain rove through what plays out onstage. I’M TIRED OF THEATRE’S NARROW DRAMATURGY! I might yell.
If you get me going, I might ramble-fantasize about having some kind of live performance practice whose specifics are fuzzy: performance but not theatre? Maybe it includes text? Idk...standup? Auto-theory but…onstage? Maybe dance? Maybe music?
After witnessing no end to this spiral, my friend Jackie (who I interviewed here last year) art-yenta-ed me with their collaborator, composer María Matienzo. At the end of the month, María is debuting her piece she’s bouyant. I’m so honored to be directing it. She describes it as…
a 75-minute post-minimalist aleatoric composition for violin, synthesizers, percussion, piano, tape, and voice by Seattle composer María Dolores A. Matienzo. Informed by 20th-century avant-garde chamber music, the work focuses on the exploration of changes in memory of queer sensory experiences. The work leverages a graphic score, ritual practices, and video projections to guide its performers and audience in navigating between individual and shared experience.
When I started somatic experiencing therapy (at the beginning of this long hiatus from theatre), I once said to my therapist that perhaps directing a play is guiding the somatic experience of an auditorium’s worth of people at once—creating the contractions and releases, moving the bodies and minds through something that might shift the nervous system. Sometimes these shifts are back to status-quo numbness, but sometimes they’re toward confrontation and discomfort, or to healing, or to aliveness (“We can spit on alienation through relishing in art”, writes
.)María’s piece is quite explicitly about sensation—it could be about a float tank or a concussion or queer sex. The piece is trance-like and quickly drops me deep and tenderly into the subconscious. Its recording is profoundly different when I listen alone in my noise-canceling headphones versus on the stereo in María’s living room (with good friends, lying on the floor, after chatting over salmon and tea) or hear it rehearsed live (in a dreamy house on an island, projections on the ceiling, with good incense, before roast chicken and fancy tobacco). This piece works differently in the collective. I can’t wait to experience it with 70 of you each night.
Working on it makes me so happy. I’ve been making performance since I was five—this might be the longest hiatus from a rehearsal room since then. I cannot overstate how good it feels to make good art again.
For those of you in Seattle, I’d be so delighted to share it with you. You can buy your tickets here.
October 26 & Sunday, October 27, 2024. Doors: 7:30 PM; Show 8:00 PM. Base: Experimental Arts + Space (6520 5th Avenue South, #122, Seattle, WA 98108)
Sliding scale: $5-$20; no one turned away for lack of funds
Here are also some things I’ve been reading/watching/consuming. Hope you’re all making and/or experiencing some great art.
Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha’s piece on creating a BIPOC disabled artist residency in honor of writer and organizer Stacey Park Milbern.
When Stacey died in 2020, I made a promise right there in my blanket snarl clutching my phone from where I’d just gotten the news that I would make a writing residency for disabled QTBIPOC happen, for her.
[Norcroft Artist Residency] also had this controversial policy that I loved- you couldn’t talk to anybody, or at all, til 4 PM. The founder said bc of sexism we would all feel guilt ridden and like we had to chat with each other, and she wanted us to ignore each other and write. I don’t know that she meant it in an ND way, but it suited me just fine.
I finished Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. This book is so rightfully a classic. This passage (which I might call “titular”?) is staying with me in particular:
He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered.
This moving and human panel on grief. It features some of my favorite writers: Eman Abdelhadi (one of the co-authors of my new favorite book Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072); Sarah Jaffe, who wrote the gorgeous and (ahem) relevant-to-my-dysfunctions Work Won’t Love You Back; and Kelly Hayes, who co-wrote the essential organizing primer Let This Radicalize You (and whose newsletter I read dutifully).
I attended Listening Against Genocide: Reparative Oral History through Workshops for Gaza—an initiative where people are offering courses whose tuition goes toward direct relief to Palestinians surviving the ongoing genocide. It was a deeply moving course; I’d suggest checking out their upcoming offerings.
As part of my research for a long essay on the complicity of arts organizations, I read artist Shellyne Rodriguez’s 2018 article “How The Bronx was Branded” on the limits and dangers of “community engagement” in the arts.
The Rubenstein [a developer gentrifying the Bronx] strategy is simple: build a planned community by planting “Trojan horse” businesses in the area to hold space. Artists in search of cheaper rents will inevitably flock to the South Bronx, where the rent is quickly becoming unaffordable for long-time residents but is considered affordable to newcomers who have been priced out of Brooklyn. Struggling artists will inevitably respond, and through no fault of their own set in motion the displacement of the people who live there, before they are eventually displaced too. Rubenstein’s shallow investment in local businesses and talent takes advantage of a people who have historically been locked out of pursuing creative business endeavors.
I’m pretty Sophie Lewis-pilled (as the kids say) these days. Her book Abolish the Family was likely my book of the year last year (whose citation led me to the aforementioned Everything for Everyone, my book of the year this year). I also loved her piece on the death of her mother (and its tender complexities for family abolition), her Lux Magazine essay on Bridgerton (“The torrid fantasy of a world where strong women make weak men into good daddies”), her half adulation/half takedown of philosopher Donna Haraway, her (funny) excoriation of the memoir Momfluenced, and her reflection on the utopian possibilities of grief circles. If you’re more of a podcast person, I valued her analysis of “enemy feminisms,” specifically relating to Israel (but also TERFS and SWERFS). And here she talks smartly and playfully about Love Island.
On You’re Wrong About, journalist Moira Donegan narrated the history of the Janes, a pre-Roe abortion collective. (Full disclosure: Donegan changed my life and so many others’. She’s paid dearly for her service).
This hologram protest, where the people look like holy ghosts.