Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Healing the Waters
Full text linkIn this paper I put forward the African and Shamanic belief of the Daoist tradition that ancestors and their memory are real, passed on from generation to generation. This memory includes the trauma memories of enslavement, and post slavery.
This understanding becomes important in the field of trauma and grief healing, as the transmission of ancestral trauma and grief memory, from one generation to another is not fully understood. This has wide implications for those of African descendants who have suffered from ancestral, historical and continuous trauma. And for all who have suffered harm to the body, mind, and spirit resulting from loss of land, home, culture, and torture in its many forms.
I examine the images of Kwame Akoto-Bamfo Memorial Heads installed in water, as a visual way to guide and lead this discussion. Understanding the transmission of ancestral trauma especially in relation to African descendants is like climbing the Mount Everest of the Trauma field. If this trauma can be understood more fully, recognition that such trauma exist can open the field of trauma to profound exciting ways on how to effectively shift these sort of trauma memories up and out of the memory of the waters of the body. Above all, we give dignity to those who suffer from ancestral traumas of this magnitude by acknowledging their trauma is real
Wounded Objects: Mexican and Global Contexts of Disposable Life
Full text linkThis article proposes the concept of the wounded object as an approach to perceptions and representations of disability, wounding, and death, and in particular to ambivalent separations between the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, the singular and the multiple, the identified and the anonymous. My reading is informed by the unequally distributed proliferation of violence in our contemporary global landscape, through which some bodies and populations are designated as more disposable and closer to death than others. The asymmetrical processes of making-disposable take place in regions impacted by war as well as in many settings shaped by racism, economic exploitation and precarity. In this analysis I focus on the juxtaposition of two specific scenarios from Mexico and from the Mexico-US borderlands. The first of these is the statistical display of mortality rates produced by the Mexican government in the COVID-19 era. The second is a lithograph by contemporary artist Linda Lucia Santana, depicting the skull of Joaquín Murrieta, the nineteenth-century outlaw and lynching victim. While the first instance refers to a biopolitical model through which numerical data perform the obscuring of death or damage, the second suggests the enactment of sovereign power through the spectacle of a targeted killing, and thus performs a more explicit encounter with destruction. In each case, the wounded object, a troubled conjuring of past and continuing violence, offers evidence of diverse representations of damaged life, and a framework for the denunciation of both tangible and ephemeral injustices.
Noticing Grief in the Body
Full text linkIn this time of political uncertainty, many of us are striving to create ways of being that will generate more care, compassion and equity in the collective. However, it can be hard to sustain this work when we are weighed down by untended grief. In the West, numbing or distracting ourselves when we feel discomfort or grief is very common. How can we reclaim our ability to be with grief, as part of the rhythm of our lives? I sense that we must re-learn to identify where our bodies are holding grief, to make space to be with it, when this feels supportive for us.
Once we can notice where grief is sitting within our bodies, we can choose how to respond. This is a practice, not a one-time event. Grief is not limited to the death of a loved one; we can grieve the loss of our homelands, the loss of former versions of ourselves or the pain of war and state violence. Untended grief can linger, smothering our creative capacity and ability to vision, until we give it space to be acknowledged. This exercise may support you to touch into grief that might be present in your body. After the practice, you can decide how you want to be in relationship to what arises
Not All Lateness Is the Same
Full text linkThis contribution is the result of a collaboration between a movement and performance practitioner, researcher and educator; and a dance historian. It takes as a starting point the circumstance of ‘being late’—be it for a dance class or for keeping up with choreographic trends—in order to explore how Western dance practices and theoretical discourses about dance perform, reflect and reinforce power-laden concepts and enactments of spacetime. ‘Not all lateness is the same’ is a dialogue between dance history (conceived as researching, writing, teaching and learning) and dance practice (conceived as learning, doing and watching). We explore these fields as situated within specific epistemic frameworks that define modes, limits, and values of knowledge production. Our engagement with the notion of lateness probes and pushes these frameworks—as well as the wider capitalist frameworks of production in which they are embedded—considering how dominant Eurocentric, modernist dance historiography places dance in a linear temporality of periodisation and a centre/periphery spatialisation, thus creating a hierarchical dynamic whereby peripheralised scenes, practices and even peoples are in a constant state of ‘lateness’ (typified in the 2000s with the expansion of Europe). In an interwoven way, our engagement with lateness simultaneously confronts dominant modes of practicing and teaching dance in the Western tradition which posit lateness—to the dance lesson, to the beat, to the rhythm of expected progress, to the conformity of a synchronised group—as a flaw, despite improvisational and somatic practices’ acknowledgement of, and even desire for, the open-endedness of immanence in the ongoing-ness of doing. Expansions of dance practice, provision (conditions, education, funding, infrastructure) and research, seen for instance through counter arguments to its prohibitive ableism through notions of crip time, have questioned forms of duration but not erased the dominance of setting timeframes of events that define and separate. Investigating these negotiations, we propose that some lateness can be reclaimed in a multitemporal and decentralised epistemic-practical framework.
The Politics of the Dead Body
Full text linkWhy have our political arrangements become dependent on the accumulation of dead bodies? How can our responses to the dead body reconstitute performance philosophy and political praxis in the present? Performance Philosophy’s special section on ‘the politics of the dead body’ considers how untimely, preventable, and politically induced deaths around the world inform ongoing struggles for collective liberation and care. The five essays collected in this special issue excavate what it means to seek solidarity with the dead to bring about radical change. Remembering bodies subjected to forms of lethal violence seeking to erase them, even post-mortem, these essays refuse the dominant economies of power through which the value of some comes to depend on the normalized devaluation of others.
The Person Holding the Phone: Mobile Phones and Mediated Grief-Work
Full text linkIn this paper, I present a personal case study centered on my experience of attending my grandfather\u27s funeral virtually in 2023. This event serves as a lens to explore broader themes of mediated grief work and the integration of digital media into experiences of death and mourning. Drawing on Bruno Latour\u27s actor-network theory, I analyze the formation of temporary digital mourning assemblages, examining the ties that connect participants both on the ground and online. A key focus is the role and impact of the human actor within technological and media interfaces. The person operating the phone, capturing images, and managing the technical aspects of a Zoom call is often overshadowed by discussions that prioritize the technology itself.
On Grief At The End Of The World: A Black, Disabled, Queer Ritual For Personal And Global Apocalypse
Full text linkShedding is personal process, an interpersonal practice, and a guide map to societal and structural justice. Guided by the wisdom of creatures who shed their skin, On Grief At The End Of The World is a reflection on a moment of personal apocalypse and a ritual or practice for liberation: A snake doesn’t hesitate when it’s time to shed. She doesn’t try to cling to something uncomfortable but familiar, she doesn’t worry what lies on the other side of shedding, who she’ll be, will others recognize her. She simply sheds because her body knows it is time.
Listening to the Vultures
Full text linkThrough this text, I will share the path I threaded starting from an individual one-to-one practice of mediation between a person deceased and a person alive, the Landscapes of the Dead, and arriving to a collective performative practice of noisy listening titled To know the vultures so well. This path has led me through intimate in-depth research on the different sensorial and imaginal relations we can establish with the dead. How did I relate to them as invisible entities that accompany the living? How was their apparent absence made present through different bodily practices?
The research was developed in response to the apparently “disenchanted” western context where I have been residing for almost 20 years, in which death is something that needs to be dealt with as quickly and as silently as possible. Certain places in the world get to forget about the killings that sustain their lives, because they have been made to forget that they too will die. Within my practice, loss is acting as an amplifier of connections with the world. Seeing death as part of life does not stop the grieving and the mourning, it does not dissolve the fear of death, but it does mean that we can inhabit the affective places made of the discomfort of loss and the discomfort of not knowing.
Dramaturgical Potential: Is It Necessary?
Full text linkThe essay’s title question (“Is it necessary?”) offers a kind of manifesto for thinking through the appeal of and to dramaturgy in performance making, exploring conditions of translation in which this question may be explored in its manifold potential. Informed by my own teaching experience, this concern is both practical and conceptual, reflecting on the translatability of the very word, dramaturgy, where the resonance of the Greek—in its vernacular assimilation—lends a canonical aura to its (being) thought. Distinct from the Greek philosophical resource in European languages, how might this resonance change when translation also concerns thinking through the theme of potential with a Chinese source such as the Tao Te Ching? It is in this context that the question of necessity in my title broaches that of its own potential in (and as) the work of translation