[HOLD: Taka’s intro coming by Thursday, June 4]
SCORE I: choreographical arrangement of collision as method / i was lucky enough to feel the revolution before the blood
I was riding alone in an Uber late at night in Philadelphia returning home. This was a month after almost a year of travel and touring. I had been back only two weeks. My body still carried the residue of exhaustion and ricochet from touring for that long, which I believe was a condition that, in retrospect, primed me for what followed. After glancing down at my phone, an image flashed in my mind: a car tipping toward me. Almost immediately, headlights cut across my vision as a vehicle ran its red light.
The first impact came as a sequence of collisions: the plastic bumper weighted by the momentum of metal from the oncoming car, the steel door frame beside me, then the impact against my whole body. Each collided and rebounded in succession, redirecting the impaling force. Followed by my torso and head snapping to the left, being violently thrown by the rebound. Then the more strange collision came when my neck and armpit caught itself against the seatbelt, suspending me as the car spun out. Between the impact and stillness, time loosened and I was thrown into a state of liminality.
In that suspended interval, my breath left me and all sound collapsed except the dragging of burning tires and a ring of noise. I entered into a muted, meditative state through asphyxiation and temporary paralysis. I thought my life would flash before me, but instead I was brought back to a performance I had done the week prior in New York. It was one of David Wajnarowicz’s 35 Monologues at the Leslie Lohmman Museum, recounting a near death experience a teenage boy had near 44th St and 11th Ave while doing sex work. For days, I rehearsed these particular lines that came after describing the boy’s close escape. In various registers of cadence, the words looped “…you just get this feeling like…Man, it’s just that easy…like you can die that fast or simple or whatever…and you don’t feel no wiser and you don’t feel like you got a new start on livi—“. I repeated this like a recurring dream, thinking if this is God’s way of sending a sweet lil payout out for me, yep God is good (lol).
About a quarter of a second as the car spun, the airbags burst and dust filled the space, which enacted the second impact. I noticed my phone across the vehicle and wondered, absurdly, if it was intact. Only afterward did I check whether my body was. The partial structures of noise returned as a dense wash of scraping metal, the residue of burnt tar, and incoming ambulance alarms. I began to feel myself become aroused. The driver, in broken English, uttered “car”, and then “accident” but nothing more. I thought in response, “what the fuck kinda…”, and then followed by another quite cathartic “oh fuuuuuckk–”.
When the car finally came to rest, now three seconds after the first impact, the scene reorganized itself, initiating the third moment of impact cascading around me. An emergency operator’s voice burst through the speakers. A stranger ran toward the car to check on us. Another vehicle slowed. Sirens approached from blocks away. The two friends who sent me off earlier, arrived. Adrenaline surged through my senses, which briefly produced a clarity, strength, and loftiness that partially grounded me. In this moment, I noticed every person’s role was reassembled rapidly and unevenly between witness, helper, responder, victim, and observer. No one orchestrated this arrangement and yet everyone participated in it. The collision had generated a spontaneous ensemble that implicated this street corner as a grand stage, almost taking my life.
This keeps playing out in my mind: the moments of impact, the way my head whipped to the left, the spinning and inability to catch my own body, the phone being thrown, the moment of a car’s right bumper, headlights in my eye, the duration of the spin. The duration of the spin. The surprise I had that my body was not visibly scarred, impaled, gouged, and ripped open. The inability to have a better thought before the impact.
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SCORE II: a sonic score to usher in a black hole–
andthenDiscodiscodiscoitdowndiscoittothegrounddiscoitupsidedownandarounddiscodiscodiscoitdiscoitdow
ndiscodiscodisitdissitdissitdissitcodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodisc
odiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscodiscotothebassdiscobass
upbassupvassupbassupbassupbassildiscodiscountilitbecomesfucktofuckituptofuckituptofuckittofuckitfuckitf
uckititfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckittilitbecomesdiscodreamsdiscodaylightdiscodown.
DONNA SUMMERS ON REPEAT MAKES CASE FOR AN INITIATION INTO POSSESSION.
LIGHTING STAYS MINIMAL AND STATIONARY TO BEGIN AND GRADUALLY BRIGHTENS FOR EASTMAN MONOLOGUE. STRING PLAYERS ON THE BACK OF CHAIRS WHILE PLAYING, RACING AROUND CROWD. BALLOONS ARE ATTACHED TO BACK OF CHAIRS TO BE POPPED AT DIFFERENT TIMES BY MUSICIANS.
INFLATABILITY MUST BE A RECURRENT ANALOGY.
DEFLATING AND INFLATING. ONE IS POPPED.
BLOW THAT DICK PEGGY!
DURING GUERRILLA MANIFESTO OUTCRY, SECOND PERFORMER REPEATS AT DIFFERENT RHYTHMS “SPEAK! BOLDY SPEAK! SPEAK! SHE SAYS I SAYS THEY SAYS WE SAYS SPEAK! SPEAK! SPEAK! BOLDLY SPEAK! SPEAK! SPEAK! BOLDLY SPEAK!
and the noise is a procession into a state of being, in order to stay, you must lose your mind and burst from the sides
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SCORE III: \\ the spectacality of my masochism //
// the elasticity of humiliation, ritual, and practice \\
Collision is not only destruction but compositional artifice. It produces a momentary social choreography in which bodies, objects, protocols, and affects are redistributed. And in this temporal stream of consciousness, the situation propels and requests collective and uneven agency, full of emergent responses to modes like reproductive care, confusion, avoidance, urgency, and responsibility. Sometimes, it releases the steed of death to observe the site, the serpent of the subterranea that swims between offset beginnings, the instigator of invisible choreographies that moves a sonic beat to the next…No single person, or thing, or preliminary container meant to stage this grand scene although the stage organized itself by accident. Nevertheless, we were caught in the binds of this grandiose spatial configuration of a quantum choreographic composition–a black hole anomalous movement of convergence.
I’m reflecting on this as I was watching some videos on Instagram. A woman in high heels and a tight slim blue dress doing these strange, silent, repetitive movements in the back and hood of a car that’s been cut in half. I found it strangely compelling. Its mysticism and obscureness felt weightful as a strand of emotions that words and language can’t describe.
Having this moment of collision and thinking of the subtle, strange, unspoken relationalities of each “performer” to the car is oddly inspiring. What are the ontological origins of a collision? What does a collision ripple in space and time? Things were stretched and filled and emptied. This is what disruption feels like.
The car’s slickness has to come in like a collision, stretching itself across the planes of materiality and consciousness, dispersing myself, the “audience”, and the world into a long moment of pause. The end of the turbulence and subsequent whiplash is what allows conscious agency again, maybe finding those who were implicated to be reconfigured into a new being in its aftermath. Until then, a hypnosis occurs, a held breath is taken, pounding and guiding to one’s end. Blood is bound up in this offering, as the spirits for this momentous revolution need to devour something residual in its wake. Cause is then what guides its fate. Everything and everyone is changed, no matter how far or near, on this stage of an entangled performance—a rehearsal for moving through the tides of a madness, and coming out the other end alive.
>>>>I was swept in its hypnotic wet pulses straight onto the bass,
a carrier of crescending pulses<<<<<
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SCORE IV: To rehearse the descent into the turbulent thrusts of another world otherwise, or perhaps already in formation
I have been interested in how staged interventions in public spaces produce a particular kind of collision—one that ruptures space and time, and forces a liminal condition into being. It is through this collision that performance becomes a method for problematizing and disrupting colonial logics of capture. I see this rupture (collision) as a preparatory movement toward a “guerrilla manifesto” and performance scoring. I follow it as it does not only devour, but generates—reconfiguring social and structural relations by rescoring the compositions of architecture, objects, and bodies caught within its force.
I am thinking of the violent deportations and disappearances of undocumented citizens/ racialized population by the Trump administration, the erasure of transness, the ongoing genocides, the use of moral judgement in determining who and what is evil (villainess), of the unfamiliar or the other, who and what and where is subjected to becoming chattel or product, and what subsequently challenges ideological state control. These are structural relations that are kept suppressed throughout the Western colonial psyche in order to maintain some sense of selfhood and actualization. Therefore, they act as vulnerable areas that will make it burst. And I am especially invested in rendering what is often positioned as nonexistent or expendable—Black, Indigenous, queer, and feminist embodied knowledge and technologies. This negation organizes matter.
I describe my methodology as chaos force: a current that interjects and destabilizes the given equilibrium of matter into the void, toward endless potentiality. This movement mirrors what I understand as a black hole’s anomalous pull—an excess-generating force that devours (erodes), disorganizes, and destabilizes fixed positions in space. I use the concept of “current” to describe the path that I am in, similar to an oceanic wave, or like a current of a river. “Force” being the momentum, the pressure carried through that current. The surplus of unpredictable possibilities produced by moving inside this current becomes subversive material, capable of interrogating and undoing duality as a governing logic. In performance, chaos force manifests as movement- and vocal-based improvisational techniques and heightened responsiveness as a container for moments of elusiveness, slickness, and impact—exaggerating the social conditions of a site while activating refusal as an intimate practice.
To rehearse the descent into the turbulent thrusts of another world otherwise, or perhaps already in formation, is to take on an explicitly political and social risk. It is within this charged movement that performance accrues its organizing potential: that of embodiment. This is where I place my own body—inside the risky, ritualistic, and alchemical labor of performance—as a testing ground for such constructions, where ideas are tested in its survival through collision and contact. Where I can fall in love with the meeting force between the kiss of two beautiful worlds.
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SCORE V: on madness and perversion as a state of possession, oh doesn’t it feel good to always breathe fire
In my early twenties, I was at odds with the idea that I would go mad, fall between the cracks of my mind, anatomically split, or that it already happened. I was treading across what felt like slippages and balancing acts between this world and others. Although I have always revered myself for having skillful equilibrium in currents of distressing fields, I could feel the possibility of this catastrophic fall linger. I became obsessed with building the wholsitic durability of my body and mind to withstand this nature–with the idea that some of what I was experiencing was the friction between two planetary magnetic polarities dancing around me. I embraced the plunge into this subterranean world of distress to discover what underlying forces were at play in this oscillation. So I began sculpting my practice by disrupting this polarity and inserting myself (my body / my vehicle) between its cracks…to be thrusted between its gravitational counterforce, to be propelled, and to create a third current to an otherwise and unbecoming. This has become my exploration with and of chaos force.
To much relief, I no longer hold the fear of tipping over or the need to resist being of one world or the other. Due to this suspended liminality, that I find solace in, my most rigorous work can actualize and become legible (in all its non-legibility). It is here, in the depths of a subterranean logic that sits between death and life, of contradiction and non-resolution, of interrogation and danger, I find myself being possessed by the otherwise. This movement of swaying and being, of a kind of vulgarity, of a chaotic beingness, is of a force that is slick and unforgiving. It is where I linger and forage for the linings of dance and choreography that feels equally as dangerous as it is fugitive, subversive, unruly, and ruthlessly playful.
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SCORE VI: rearranging the vehicle, rearranging the theatrics
ALWAYS NEED A GROUNDED CURRENT IN CHAOS TO DIRECT IT SOMEWHERE. I bring the chaos, as I’m not glued to form, or lie within, and can offer the subtlety of hurting the FORM.
HURTING THE FORM.
HURTING A FORM.
THE SEDUCTION OF FORM.
Dance is death is life.
Eroticism in form is used to reveal only the decadence of difference. in our difference. it’s difference. the composure of words.
The car as body and vehicle offers an infrastructure that moves and gives stability, interjecting properties of the anomaly into spaces otherwise rejecting it. The Car itself is a container for ritualization, A CIRCLE, A BORDER, A PLATFORM, A CONTAINER TO BE WITNESSED. Then it breaks.
As this current moves through space (still referring to the car), it acts, ARCS, and moves like a serpent, cutting through a metaphysical presence and its phlegm that occupies said space. So it helps to think of the car as a SERPENT, and performers as its WINGS.
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SCORE VII: Finale
ACT I: UNBECOMING (STRIP TEASE)
*in silence…
Furry enters from anonymous place and walks around audience
And moves with cute silliness, almost disoriented
At some point, Furry walks over to camera set up with floor tiling and moves other set up in place IN SUIT
*Upright bass or cello comes in…
Furry kneels over bench or stool preparing to receive, or pray.
Furry begins to strip itself, first taking off head.
LIGHTS CIGARETTE and plays with makeup.
POURS HONEY OR SILICONE onto self.
Strips off rest of suit in front of magnifying glass and fog machine coats around them.
*Strings intensify…becoming more rapid…
Audio begins of deconstructed police and horse…
St Augustine is revealed from Furry and walks out into space. And begins
SINGING ACCAPELLA Bellini: Norma but with BLACK EMPRESS NEGRESS
ACT 1 OR ACT 2
[Act 1: “Casta dive” OR “Svanir le voci!”]
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Score VIII: where we began to continue…
Capeforce is my ongoing shapeshifting performance research that continues to change, develop, and grow across geographical and political realities, into an autonomous devouring substrate of its own. Or to become a hole, a mirror, a self-actualizing speculative drama, a trojan horse, a scapegoat, or even a fetish. The work wants to inhale this kind of social rupture that collision demands, harnessing it, questioning it, and toppling myself and everything else into its wake. Not only is this encounter questioning the emerging crises for the visibilization of otherness and diasporic alienation, terrorization, and policing across geographies, it’s also attempting to understand the roles, capabilities, and failures of performance as a strategy for rehearsing organizational potential under policing, surveillance, and its ramping choreographies. The slickness gives elusiveness, spectacality offers the flare, and the contradictions arise through its absurdities.
What happens when an anomaly appears in space?
What gestures, questions, provocations, and acts can initiate its appearance, and cause agitation?
How can I be possessed by it?
My performances of Capeforce have been exploring these gestures and moments through vulgarity, as its material and reflection. I want these performance happenings to trouble themselves: the desires for ensemblic guerrilla poetics to emerge in process and movement with others, to ignite agency and dialogue; erotics to strip and unveil our witnesses; and racial and linguistic frictions to fill the air. I want the form to almost tear itself apart and alchemize into a new being–to act as a score for a black hole, and allow for the surprise of what remains to carry me forward.
I’m also after something more subtle, more self inflicting. Maybe this attempt to throw myself into the tides of a collision is to confront my discomfort in this flesh and body, to unravel and embrace the poetics of difference with others. To interrogate the ironies within the American subconscious and the Western imaginary, along with its exports across cultural and social apparatuses–using feedback and noise to undermine it. To expand upon the invocations that Blackness demands in the public realm when its unpredictability and rowdiness becomes inescapable. Or maybe it is to continue being agile and comfortable with improvising through disaster, to find intimacy amidst the constant variable of change and survival, or simply to taste the sweet and fragrant rush of chaos.
