Situated within the context of trans performance, my work grapples with ideas of indeterminate proximity, fluctuating directives and theoretical velocities (ie. memory, listening, understanding; the psycho-social superluminal). I embody multifaceted personifications of exile and return, excavating established forms and histories. I invite audiences to sort with me through autobiographical material, live persona building and/or divestiture. Together we present glimpses of a communally mended self-hood as if we were summoned unwittingly by a cynical, possibility-starved society.
I'm attempting to wedge my incongruous experience within a world of legend, myth and iconography, developing identities in the live act from moments of slippage and unexpected steadfastness. I am committed to reperforming the trans body within discarded frameworks. Through improvisation, surrealist poetry, risk-taking, intimacy and imperfect choreography, I'm bumping and benignly setting askew multiverse relationships of power and empathy where the micro-reverberations signify an overlooked yet active presence. I engage an audience to my Quixotic project, asking us fearlessly confront any notion of an envelope's edge. I utilize performance as a time-based compass which may dissipate borders through precision identity mapping. I suggest my body as an example of fringe but fathomable possibility.
In research, I'm working from my interest in trans/queer-specific roles within contemporary society, exploring narratives of living stealth, coming out, unwelcome exposure and awkward compromise. As a foil to capitalist and Marxist paradigms, I'd like to suggest a subconscious communal need, germinated within an increasingly materialist and reductive culture, for transformative narratives and transforming roles. Theatricality plays a key role in my critical practice, as the dramatic form offers opportunities for conceptual elucidation, contingent revelation and dubious resolution.
My own experience of affectionate re-embrace, following a prolonged period of alienation, within a traditional familial structure (i.e. daughter, sister), serves as central impetus to this investigation into the historically revered position trans/queer identities might claim within existing social frameworks. In short, I am discovering the usefulness of an anthropological context for destabilizing identities. In a world attempting to define itself exclusively through material concerns, ie. economies, politics, religion, science, visibility and access, where the smartphone replaces the sacred object and the internet a sentient universe, trans narratives thrive as sub-textual identities that, while exiled and radical, exist within positions of influence. The human body itself becomes the chant and touchstone.