blood run performance

Here is the footage of blood run from my performance at Highways in June 2016!

password: "bloodline"

The Chinese Animal Zodiac for Aborigines

As part of the WGS Assemblages symposium (see my earlier post), I also will be doing a performative interaction with the audience over the course of an hour and 15 minutes.  There will be many things happening in the room, so I anticipate an ebb and flow of people.  I thought I would use the opportunity to try out a performance experiment idea I've had for awhile, based on Walis Nokan's poem, "Chinese Animal Zodiac for Aborigines."

My performative idea is to be a "fortune-teller."  Ideally I would have a semi-enclosed space, but probably the set-up will be two chairs with a small table in between.  I would interact with one person at a time.  I'll ask the audience what their zodiac sign is (I thought I'd put one of those cheesy Chinese restaurant place-mats down in case people don't know), then read them the section of Nokan's poem that corresponds to their sign.   I'm imagining sitting in front of a pile of rocks, with little scrolls for each section of the poem labeled "rat," "sheep," "dragon," etc sticking out of the rocks.  I would unfurl each scroll and read that part of the poem to the person.  I would end by giving them a little card or flyer, kind of like Christian proselytizers give out.  On one side there would be the relevant section of Nokan's poem, along with a bio, and on the other side, I would put one of my letters to a lost aboriginal ancestor (or excerpts thereof) and a bio that explains my mixed heritage and gives a little insight into the colonial history, but from a personal standpoint.  I would like to include Nokan's entire poem, but I think it would be too long.

Here is Nokan's poem:

Here's an example of a restaurant placemat I might use:

Questions:

(1) Should I have a sign announcing my fortune-telling?  If so, what should it say?  I was thinking of something like: "FORTUNE-TELLING: Chinese Animal Zodiac for Aborigines."

(2) Should I white-out or redact (black-out) the fortunes that are already on the placemat?

(3) How should I read the poem?  Should I read it from the position of an indigenous person, as it is written, from the position of a colonizer who is surprised and/or offended at what the fortune says, in the mode of an exotic Orientalist new age fortune-teller and/or charlatan?  Should my tone be sincere, theatrical/performative, flat, etc?  Should I try a mixture of performative styles corresponding to the various identities and stereotypes being invoked?  

(4) Along similar lines to (3), what should I wear?  Something "neutral" (ie western androgynous), something "Chinese," something "indigenous," something hippie-like?  A friend suggested having a different hat or head-covering for each character.  Would that be too much?

(5) I'm thinking of slightly rewriting parts of the translation to make it work better as English poetry.  However, I don't quite understand the "Dragon" section.  What do you think the "myth" refers to?   The "hand that unravels"?  In the "Rabbit" section, what do you think the "ripples that attempt to flee" mean?

Queering Abhinaya - Assignment #3

This assignment is inspired and informed by a talk I went to given by Professor Gayatri Gopinath at UCLA on April 17th, 2014 as part of Professor Anurima Banerji and Sue-Ellen Case's course "Queer Performance and Politics." Gopinath used queer theory as a tool of analysis (not as a term of identity) to connect diasporic communities and indigenous peoples as part of the same colonial expansionist project that among other things, attempts to contain and police racialized bodies (often literally i.e. low income housing projects and residential schools were mentioned). Gopinath analyzed the work of visual artists Tracey Moffatt (Australian Aboriginal) and Sehar Shah (Pakistani US) to develop a strategy that was termed as a "queer pairing" in order to talk about braided histories and non-normative bodies. For this assignment: 1) Choose an indigenous artist (the artist identifies as indigenous) that works with any medium - photography, sculpture, movement, performance, film, sound, poetry etc. I am most familiar with indigenous communities in North America so First Nations, Native, Aboriginal. However, please invite into this assignment what indigenous might mean in relation to places you have lived - Germany, India, Taiwan, Hawaii or other places. I am interested in this idea of home - who used to call the places we now call home, home? 2) Including abhinaya, however you might define it for this assignment, create an artistic conversation with your chosen artist/one of their works. 3) Similar to the last assignment, work in pairs. Cynthia and Babli Shyamala and Meena Due May 30th. Feedback June 2.