by Jaz Papadopoulos

Pick something. Something you can do with your body. Something easy.

Something easy you can do with your body.

Something easy you can do with your body every day.

drink a glass of water say hi to yourself in the mirror look out the window and count to
ten do you favourite stretch for five breaths read one page of a book sign a song light a
candle light two candles light three candles light four candles and say your
grandparents’ names say your own name say all your names learn all your names so
that you can say them every day

For the first week (or so),
Your body will learn the thing.
You will remember to breathe while you’re doing it.
You will feel cool air in your nose and warm air on your lip and growing and shrinking
space inside your chest and back and stomach and diaphragm.
You will see your hands move or you will hear your weight pushing out of your feet.
You will learn where your floor creaks and where the dust in your home hides.

For the first week (or so),
Try to do the thing the same way every time.
You will wonder which hand you use
or which way you hold the glass
or which candle you light first.
You will notice patterns:
Where you focus your eyes,
and the rhythm of your breath.
If the floor creaks change, you can’t control it.

After the first week (or so — I’m no expert),
All of those first week noticings will become old hat.
They are easy now, and they just happen that way.
That same way.
Now you will notice new things.
What is the shape of your spine?
When you breathe, your shoulders move too.
You have so many more muscles than you realized.
You can slowly learn where they live and what they answer to.

Something easy you can do with your body every day.

It’s still not always easy.

Tape a piece of paper to the wall
and on the days you don’t want to do the thing,
write on the paper why not.
(Then, you will be free to do the thing.)

After some weeks (or so),
Think about:

• all the other times you did the thing
• all the other people who do the thing
• all the other people who have ever done the thing

Think of the thing like mycelium
All of the enactments of the thing that have ever happened anywhere on this earth over
millennia —
they can communicate.
Your thing secretly knows all those other things.

And,
secretly,
you do too.

September – November 2017 Research Series Visual Essay

by Michelle Panting

Davis Plett with Rachelle Bourget

Alex Winters with Warren McLelland

Kayla Jeanson with Alex Winters and Brianna Ray Ferguson

Self Portraits inspired by research

Michelle Panting is a writer and lens-based artist living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 2013, she
founded FULL, a website dedicated to documenting art, culture, and travel. Through FULL,
Michelle interviews artists and cultural influencers as well as capturing their work through
photographs. In her personal artistic practice, she uses both still and moving images to explore
issues of identity, mental health, and trauma. Michelle has exhibited her work at aceartinc. and
Parlour Coffee. She is currently enrolled in the Cartae Open School at aceartinc.

by a. charlie peters

2015-2016 Research Series

how do i get my body to let me take a dance class? this sounds like i’m invested in the mind/body split. I’m not, but i slide into it as readily as the next person born after René Descartes started thinking he is because he thinks he is. some believe that Descartes’s famous seventeenth-century statement, “i think, therefore i am,” founded modernity. right up to the present day, many people regard the mind or brain as the boss of the body. dualisms such as mind/body, man/woman, adult/child, good/evil all feature one term that is privileged over the other term. in the mind/body pairing, the mind is usually the one on top. a friend of ours is writing a play about cryonics. in cryonics, they sometimes freeze whole bodies, but you can also get someone to cut off your head and freeze it after you die so it can get reattached to another body when they’ve figured out how to fix what killed you. that’s how much some people value their bodies, apparently. in my case, though, when it comes to taking dance classes, anyway, it feels like it’s my body that’s calling the shots. it feels like i have an anarchic body, one that doesn’t want a leader or a mind thinking that it’s the boss.

anarchy means “no leader”: this is the literal translation from the Greek. i’ve been in a university environment for much of my life, so i’m used to leaders and to having my mind disciplined by them. for many years, i’ve had professors, advisors, employers, and department chairs telling me what to do. i might not like the hierarchical, top-down structure of so many of our school and work environments, but where the life of the mind is concerned, at any rate, being directed is something i can handle, even enjoy. and my body comes along for the ride.

disciplining my body, though, is a bit different. there are limits to what it’ll put up with. for years, i attended yoga classes, but, with yoga class, you don’t have to be all that disciplined: you can go or not go. it’s not like you have to be at a particular class on a regular basis. and because i have this somewhat hypermobile, disorderly body, yoga teachers would tell me to do the opposite of what they were telling everyone else to do or to do what felt right in my body. so i wasn’t exactly getting bossed around in yoga class. plus, half the time yoga instructors are making exactly the same shapes at the same time as everyone else so it feels like you’re all in it together. and moving to music at home or in a club or in free-style dance classes such as the Isadora Duncan workshop that Jolene Bailie arranged are experiences that i really enjoy. (Isadora freed dance from many of its restrictions, and i learned about her contributions when i was really young, so participating in this workshop was really wonderful thing for me!) no, it wasn’t these experiences that tested my limits; it was when i tried to learn a classical Indian style of dance named Kathak with Ian Mozdzen that my body rebelled.

the Kathak teachers were awesome, the people at the India School of Dance were super nice, and Kathak is super beautiful and interesting, but however much i thought i wanted to learn Kathak, my body just didn’t want to go to the same place at the same time every week and be taught to move with the kind of precision required by a classical dance form. having to move my arms or legs up or down or in or out several inches so as to mimic these ancient postures—however beautiful and charming these postures are—ended up being the proverbial straw, in terms of my physical training. Ian continued with Kathak lessons; in fact, he will be moving to India at the end of summer to learn more about classical Indian dance. and me? i dropped out. and i really wanted to learn Kathak, too.

the Hunger Games series of books and films features Twelve Districts filled with poor people who supply the citizens in the wealthy Capital with all that the well-to-do citizens need to thrive. it’s a lot like the relationship between the body and the mind of a scholarly type person: the body is like the Twelve Districts: it supplies the food and circulates the blood and the oxygen and then it has to just sit there and keep working at supplying the whole body with stuff while the mind—which resembles the wealthy citizens of the Capital—satiates itself with books and films and lectures. in the Hunger Games, because a Thirteenth District had tried to overthrow this unjust system sometime in the past, each of the twelve remaining districts has two of its young people selected to fight to the death in the annual hunger games while the citizens of the Capital get “entertained” by this blood sport. importantly, in each annual hunger game, there is only one winner. eventually, the people in the Twelve Districts rebel, inspired by the heroine, Katniss Everdeen, who refuses to kill all her opponents and become the sole winner of the games. trying to learn Kathak has taught me what i’d only suspected was true from all those years in yoga classes: that my body has a mind—many minds! entire districts!—of its own. perhaps a more egalitarian relationship among all these body-minds and my mind-mind (which no doubt has its own bodies, too) might make it possible for me to take a Kathak class sometime.

and this is precisely what anarchy is all about: egalitarian relationships. anarchy often gets a bad wrap. it’s frequently compared with chaos or nihilism, concepts which no doubt have their up sides, as well, although we seldom hear about them. in fact, Elise and Jasmine Allard, in their performance on January 16th, demonstrated that chaotic movement can be a safe and welcome expression of intense feeling if someone you love is there to catch you. i’ll talk about two separate moments from this performance: in the first, Jasmine holds Elise around the waist while Elise moves her arms and legs intensely; in this first instance, intense movement is enabled by Jasmine’s grasp. in the second of these two moments, Jasmine dances around like crazy until Elise can’t stand it any more and stops her. each sister is the ground that supports the other’s wildness. love both enables and disables chaotic movement.

researching this paper, i learned that contemporary theorists of anarchy embrace wildness and that they are concerned about oppression and the abuses of authority. authority tries to convince us that the few are more forceful than the many. no one in their right mind,—or maybe i should say “in their right body”! or, “in their right body-mind”!—would believe this for long, would they? Isabell Lorey is one of the scholars who is currently theorizing anarchy. Lorey writes about the 2011 Occupy Movement, the writings of philosopher Jacques Ranciére, and the idea that real democracy—by which Lorey means direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy—is anarchic. what Lorey wants us to do is to practice democracy, real, anarchic democracy, all the time. she calls this “presentist democracy” (59). fill all of our presents, all of our nows, with real, egalitarian democracy, that’s what Lorey advises. And, if democracy is what we actually want, this recommendation makes a lot of sense, for, as literary theorist Jon Clay puts it, “the equality of beings is not imposed … [on us] from ‘above’ … but is rather … [our] own”; it “is assumed among … [ourselves]” (15).

image: Sasha Amaya

Lorey’s recommendation about being present involves having a different kind of relationship with the past and the future, a relationship that is perhaps more distanced, or more occasional. instead of thinking about the past or the future a lot, might we choose, instead, to think about them only when we really need to. rather than “intending” to do a given thing, might we “carry” an idea “with us,” instead? would this be a substantially different way of doing things? how do we “get out of” dwelling in our pasts or in our futures? i think that Brenda McLean and Brittany Thiessen demonstrated a way to do this in a sequence of movements accompanying an apology. during their rehearsal of “Dinner,” a vignette from Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, Brenda flippantly, insincerely apologizes to Brittany before following this up with a sincere, heartfelt apology. during the flippant apology, Brenda turns her back on Brittany and moves away from her. but during the sincere apology, Brenda wraps her entire body around Brittany, who is seated on the floor. apologizing addresses feelings of guilt, grief, or regret about an event that happened in the past. an insincere apology will keep this past event in play and maintain the distancing effects of estrangement. in contrast, a sincere apology can collapse this distance, assuage troubling emotions, and bring people together in the intimacy of a present moment of reconciliation. and Brenda’s and Brittany’s movements demonstrate how collapsing space collapses time, too. the direction and orientation of their bodies in space encode the temporal dynamics of the sincere and the insincere apology and bring to life the presentist politics recommended by Lorey .

these days politics has been largely reduced to policing people who are barely able to eke out a living (91). this perspective about contemporary politics is associated with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault and it is a perspective that is also shared by a theorist named Mick Smith. while writing about how we might stop dominating what he calls “the more-than-human world,” Smith celebrates wildness. he calls wildness innocent, “ethically anarchic” (92), and “synonymous with creative freedom from social restraint” (94). Smith’s “more-than-human world” played a significant role in classes offered during the Young Lungs Research Series. on January 24th, facilitators Ali Robson, Janelle Hacault, and Sasha Amaya asked those who attended the classes to become sand, water, gulls, and trees! French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari see all earthlings as interconnected, as assemblages that are always becoming with the things that they—we!—come into contact with. this is true in the most basic and fundamental way. when we eat mushrooms, melons, or mango, we become these plants and they, in turn, become human beings. our interactions makes us assemblages of human and non-human parts. we breathe in what trees exhale—and vice versa! other kinds of becomings took place during these classes, as well. Sasha asked class participants to move around the dance floor with different body parts doing the leading—first the pelvis, then the ribs and the feet—people were even asked to let their bodies be led by more than one body part at once! in becoming-led by pelvis-minds, rib-minds, and feet-minds the leadership of the thinking head was disrupted, although it, too, was given its chance to take the lead! on another occasion, in a rehearsal exercise featuring one person mimicking another person’s everyday gestures, dancers Freya Olafson and Lise McMillan were asked by creator Treasure Waddell to become one another!

these types of exercise ask us to engage in a certain wildness, or in what Mick Smith calls “creative freedom from social restraint.” in this phrase, Smith celebrates freedom along with wildness. i would sure love to celebrate both of these ideas, too. but while celebrating wildness has many fans among anarchists, there are some thinkers, though, who argue, and very convincingly, too, that the concept of freedom is just another tool in the massive toolbox of those who police us. in fact, a theorist by the name of Nikolas Rose argues that governments invented freedom! as Rose explains it, governments convince us that certain behaviours are reasonable and normal. then governments convince us that we freely choose these very behaviours that they have conditioned us to adopt! Rose suggests that we think the way our governments want us to think, including and perhaps especially when we think that we are free. and thinking that we are free when, in fact, we are being highly disciplined and rigidly policed by those who govern us may be one of the biggest problems, in Rose’s point of view, that we moderns face.

Seeing Rachelle Bourget in rehearsal really brought home to me the visual dominance of the thinking head and its companion, the expressive face. for the first part of the rehearsal, i’m sure i spent as much time looking at Rachelle’s face and head as i did observing her dancing body. and even as i write this i realize: there i go, participating in the mind/body split again! i’ll start over. at first, i spent as much time watching the top eighth of Rachelle’s physical form in rehearsal as i did watching the other seven-eighths. then Rachelle wrapped a red scarf over her head and almost everything about my viewing of her movement changed. Rachelle’s head became another part of her moving body, an eighth of her body as opposed to the head of a body. lots of other interesting things became apparent, too: many of her movements were directed sideways; in other words, they were oriented towards the horizontal plane. (poststructural theorists, much like anarchists, are very interested in collapsing hierarchies, and they talk a lot about collapsing them by putting things side-by-side. poststructuralists are all about the horizontal, the lateral, the sideways.) to return to Rachelle’s dance: with her head covered, Rachelle’s limbs—pale in contrast with her black clothing and red scarf—came more into focus and the way she moved one arm as if to fit her elbow into the curve of her waist came to seem like an exercise in self-construction, something i might not have noticed had Rachelle not donned the mask. at the same time, Rachelle’s other arm was angled such that the space between this second arm and her core became a hole that drew my attention to the air within which she moved, air that was shared by everyone else in the place. also, Rachelle’s body made curves where one would not expect them and straight lines where i would never have thought them possible; for instance, at one time, Rachelle’s arm and shoulder were angled in such a way as to point straight down at the floor while the rest of her figure remained erect. i’ve put a slide of the “Russian feminist punk rock protest” (wiki) group Pussy Riot up on the screen because the effect of Rachelle’s dance, on me, anyway, was very political in a horizontal, egalitarian way. the other seven-eighths of our bodies offers so much!

in the introduction to his book Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, André Lepecki explains that, “Rethinking … [what it means to be human] in terms of the body is precisely the task of [dance] choreography” (5). Lepecki has his criticisms of choreography, however, due to the “commanding voices” of its masters and the extensive discipline it requires of dancers who must nonetheless maintain a posture—and the imposture—of spontaneity (9). Lepecki goes on to talk about how dance is supposed to be all about movement. movement is the ontology or beingness of dance, as, since the Renaissance, at any rate, dance has been understood to be the art form that is all about uninterrupted, unceasing, rhythmic, flowing, movement. modernity, itself—that is to say, the period that stretches from the time of Descartes’s famous statement, “i think therefore i am,” all the way up to the present day—, is said to be all about movement, too, by some theorists; and Lepecki agrees.

but Lepecki is something of a rebel, as well. while he agrees with those who argue that modernity is all about movement and that dance, since the Renaissance, has been all about movement, he rebels against the idea that dance needs to be defined this way, preferring, instead, an expanded definition. Lepecki would have dance appreciated as a dynamic political force that embraces the body’s movement and its stillness, as well as the contributions of the philosophical, theorizing mind. now, what Lepecki says about dance being an art form that is predominantly about movement makes a lot of sense. i wonder, though, about his suggestion that movement is, as he puts it, “the kinetic project of modernity” (my emphasis 3). another way to look at it would be to think of modernity as being about people coming to terms with the fact that everything is always already in motion as well as the fact that the earth isn’t some still point at the centre of the universe, the way many Europeans apparently thought it was before Copernicus. dance, making use of both movement (and relative stillness), may be the art form that can help us the most as we come to terms with the fact that movement and change are the only constants, the only things that don’t change.

Mark Franko is another theorist who is interested in dance’s political contributions. for Franko, dance need not be the traditional, choreographic product of a student who mimics a teacher; it can also be the incorporation or becoming-embodied of the gift of dance. he makes this claim in “Given Moment: Dance and the Event,”a meditation about how dance, post 9/11, can help us come to term with events, especially traumatic events. Franko foregrounds the teaching methods of a Balinese dancer and teacher named Mario who transmits dance moves with his own body by “position[ing] himself behind his pupil whose arms and torso he manipulates into positions” (119). as one pupil puts it, the person being taught is like a tree whose branches are being arranged. Since the dance moves are not being “transmitted across a mediating space of observation and interpretation” (120), Franko characterizes this kind of teaching as a gift. this teaching is the giving of “self-force”; it is “the communication of dance as gift” (120).

The Young Lungs Dance Exchange Research Series has foregrounded the gift of dance and genuine spontaneity, too, particularly in the form of improvisation and collaboration. during her show, Treasure Waddell used improvisation to include the audience in the collaboration. the Research Series was itself an extensive network of collaboration. in fact, i wonder if the degree of collaboration during this Young Lungs Research Series might even address a criticism that some theorists make about gift economies. some theorists suggest gift-giving necessarily creates debt. if you give, there is the expectation that the person you give to will give something back, which is the debt part. in the Young Lungs Series, the creator of one show was a dancer in another and a dancer was also an administrator and on and on! so, in a situation with this degree of collaboration, where people are giving and getting all the time, finding someone who could be experiencing a lack of a reciprocity that could be called debt might actually be quite difficult! there is no doubt in my mind-body district that there were masters of dance involved in the processes of these past months, but the degree of reciprocity among the participants has made hierarchy virtually indiscernible.

collaboration may be another way to think about anarchy. if we (and our body parts) are always taking turns leading the way, are there still people whom we might characterize, in total, as leaders?

theorists of anarchy are frequently theorists of utopia, as well. and, like the word anarchy, the word utopia uses negation to make meaning. whereas anarchy means “no leader,” utopia means “no place.” put another way, the word utopia suggests that there is, in actuality, no fabulously wonderful place, no place in which we all might want to be and become together. but maybe, if we were to practice the kind of presentist democracy that Lorey recommends and if we were to have a revolving leadership such as the one demonstrated in this Research Series, we could have anarchy in both senses—in the dual sense of direct democracy and in the sense that there is no one person who is “the leader”—and maybe we could have utopia, too, here, in this place where we live. which would mean we’d need to coin a new word, a word for utopia achieved. how about the Cree word “ōmatowihk,” which means “in this place”? we could say—here’s a sample sentence—the Young Lungs style of dancing and dance-making is “ōmatowihk,” or the state-formerly-known-as-utopia achieved “in this place.”

oh, and i think i’ve learned a way to get my body to let me take a dance class! maybe i need to stop disciplining my mind quite so much; maybe this way my body can handle a little more discipline!

Co-founder Natasha Torres-Garner introduces a. charlie peters.

Works Cited and Referenced

Franko, Mark. “Given Movement: Dance and the Event.” Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Ed. André Lepecki. Middeltown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2004. Print.

Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Rutledge, 2006. University of Winnipeg eBook. 21 Nov. 2014.

Lorey, Isabell. “The 2011 Occupy Movements: Ranciére and the Crisis of Democracy.” Trans. Aileen

Derieg. Theory Culture and Society 31.7/8 (2014): 43-65. SAGE. Web. 22 December 2015, Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.

Smith, Mick. “Primitivism: Anarchy, Politics, and the State of Nature.” Against Ecological Soveriegnty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World.

By Praba Pilar

I dedicate this talk to Glamdrew Andrew Henderson. I am honored to have been a part of his process with Eroca Nicols and collaborators Carly Boyce and Mars Gradiva. I am grateful he took my secret to the grave.

Life, vida, biome, biotic, creation – always a process, never a state. Whether its biopoiesis, abiogenesis, or that great big bang, maybe its terrestrial, extraterrestrial, artificial, augmented, extended, simulated, telepresenced, ectropic or extropic – we don’t REALLY know if it comes from intergalactic primordial gas or just plain subatomic play. Which brings me back down to Earth.

What is life as we enter the 6th extinction? Can we stay with the trouble?

Can we confront the necrosis at the core of our contemporary CULT OF THE TECHNO-LOGIC? Can we crawl away from the cult of necrotic egocentrism oozing over the world in globalized neoliberal capitalist crapdom?

I am a twinned larvae, segmented by distributed intelligence into rejecting the egocentric unitary self-recruitment of the failed human project. Naming the homo sapien as the human ignores our microbiome, our 90% of our DNA that is not human. [LARVAL SCREAM] In the segmented paramythology of LARVAL ROCK STARS, my twin Anuj Vaidya and I find many historical precedents that have led to necrotic civilization, in which severe damage to one essential system leads to secondary damage to other systems, causing a “cascade of effects”. Necrotic civilization is an ugly show. It arises from ossified states of domination of the Anthropocene, it is based on a lack of proper care, and as it spreads, it releases harmful effects that damages everything around it. As larvae of a post-human era, we effect care, to remake ourselves in the biotic ecocentrism of the larvalscene. Death is not the opposite of life. Many deaths have passed, and many are to come, deaths of more of our languages, of some of our identities, ways of life, comforts, hopes and ideals, of our embodied selves, our non-human kin, our planetary world and world-ed planet. But astride this destructive necrosis are other possible deaths, occurring as a disruptive poesis and an infectious refusal – deaths of unitary truth and stasis that deny our perpetual becoming outside of reason and rationality. These are the deaths we can risk to generate a biotic ecocentrism beyond necrosis.

This brings me to the Young Lungs Research Series – a laboratory providing funding, space and support for research and exchange. Research, for artists, is rarely funded, at least in my experience. But research is critical to an artistic practice, it is in expansion, not product, that a practice grows. The four artists groups in this series intermingled challenges to norms of social relations and dynamics – themes interrogated from different positionality by Frantz Fanon, Erving Goffman and Elizabeth Grosz. Fanon focuses, in Black Skin, White Masks on the oppression, forced masking and destructive alienation of Blackness in a white supremacist world designed for the benefit of others. Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, focuses on the dramaturgical perspective of social scripting and impression management in everyday life – which in contemporary techno-culture, multiplies exponentially online – Instagram anyone? Or are you too busy photoshopping your feed? In Volatile Bodies, Grosz challenges dualistic binaries by interweaving the internal/external through the model of the Mobius Strip. All of the artists spoke of going beyond technique and training, false authenticity, curated interactions and illusions of control.

Carol-Ann Bohrn’s project was done in collaboration with Madeline Rae, the two met in Ace Art’s Cartae School. The work centered on dichotomies between the subjective inner self and the performance of self in the social sphere. Through this research, Bohrn shared deliberately clumsy articulate and inarticulate embodied and verbal dissonance that demanded: where does the social front negate or support internal subjectivity, where does it mirror, and where does it reshape interiority while risking intolerable alienation?

Sometimes concordant, other times discordant, her movement and speech rode the Mobius Strip inside to outside to inside to outside as a continual loop, because rather than being dichotomous we are pluralities. But it’s painfully hilarious isn’t it – to witness your own shameful accommodations rendered materially visible. We live in sociality, managing varying histories of trauma, and if you thought Bohrn and Rae were going to provide some neatly packaged resolution of the resultant complex conflicts that arise, think again.

Zorya Arrow began with an exploration of intimacy by experimenting with 1 on 1 performances to explore the relationship between performer and audience. But for her this raised antagonisms of expectation that proved to be unproductive. How else to find out, how does who is there, in the how is there, determine the outcome of what is there.

But the difficulties of entering the unknown by not doing the same doing that threatens to become a pattern or a predictable trajectory, led her to instead invite the audience literally behind the curtain to witness her disposition.

Delf Gravert shared WALRUS, I AM, which arose during time he spent in the North. His research raises pressing epistemological questions of what is valorized in ways of knowing – the oral, the textual – and beyond those binaries, the physical, the sonic and other senses? What is a staged work, what is the structure, why do you behave as an audience and who is there to see it – is it the embodied presences in the room, or can we operate multi-dimensionally and recognize we are multitudes of generations of relations that are always, already, in the room.

Delf comes at the questions of affective states and emotive reasoning relentlessly, with uncanny idiosyncratic physicality and humor that at one point explodes in his scream – “I don’t know fuck all!” Well how about that, neither do we.

Andrew Henderson and Eroca Nicols, close friends and co-creators, faced the life altering moment of Glamdrew Andrew’s terminal diagnosis with beautiful courage, bringing Eroca’s study and practice of death rituals to create a Living Funeral as a queer monument to an embracing of that which for most remains shamefully unspeakable.

With collaborators Carly Boyce and Mars Gradiva, they created a joyful and inclusive space challenging cultural denials of death, creating magic in an atmosphere of loving generosity that opened public conversations around death, not only in the performance but broadly through extensive media coverage. It is from our conversations of delusional denial, of how it is ‘A Big Mess,’ that the title of this talk came to be. Andrew Henderson died on Wednesday October 26th.

We are a mess, in a big mess, and current sense-making makes no sense as it forecloses possibility. Creativity unconfined can provide artists the platform to disrupt necrotic sense making, to displace the self and selves, to reinscribe our bodies and then infect others with a refusal, so creation can live aside so much cessation.

I end with the work of Andrew Henderson, Eroca Nicols and collaborators Carly and Mars because they created a performance of consummate generosity – and I think it was covered extensively in the media as it provided a broad and enticing invitation to bring forth a self beyond ordinary sense-making, reaffirming the profound place of love and care, where our shameful secrets and living deaths can go to the grave and we can begin again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carrington, Damian. “World on Track to Lose Two-Thirds of Wild Animals by 2020, Major Report Warns.” The Guardian, 27 October, 2016.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Larval Rock Stars. Chrysalis. Praba Pilar and Anuj Vaidya. < https://larvalrockstars.wordpress.com/>

Mooney, Chris. “What the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first.” The Washington Post, 14 September 2016.

Pilar, Praba. Photographs of performers taken in Winnipeg, Canada. 2016.

Sarson, Janet. Photograph of Praba Pilar in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. 2010.

Stanford University. “Sixth mass extinction is here: Humanity’s existence threatened.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 19 June 2015.

Zalasiewizc, Jan. “The Earth Stands on the Brink of its Sixth Mass Extinction and the Fault is Ours.” The Guardian, 21 June, 2015. < https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/21/mass-extinction-science-warning>