tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51496525454282909302024-03-21T13:23:43.221+11:00 not knowing, listening, quietnessrajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-43114438045425487452022-03-16T09:54:00.002+11:002022-03-19T09:41:57.428+11:00Mark Trezona (in memory and celebration)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj3-o1Snu_frbFdQVQ3eu8l30oOcvWlqDN4UxfNDY4o5jetpVNQXlFFvCxT9iZTyQ5G2AOvLxhPrZnlVzi_AgkZKS_Sn2LmbU_Idza3LQ0-9vU3-Wq4Yp94ZXdlEF6RuBzHZ-3wFZekPUabdIy6kdbSRgh4C1jffktdFyq647LcVQ3XtnIP28euGVNFBQ=s1024" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="578" data-original-width="1024" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj3-o1Snu_frbFdQVQ3eu8l30oOcvWlqDN4UxfNDY4o5jetpVNQXlFFvCxT9iZTyQ5G2AOvLxhPrZnlVzi_AgkZKS_Sn2LmbU_Idza3LQ0-9vU3-Wq4Yp94ZXdlEF6RuBzHZ-3wFZekPUabdIy6kdbSRgh4C1jffktdFyq647LcVQ3XtnIP28euGVNFBQ=w640-h361" width="640" /></a></p></div><i>photograph: the end of a lunch party -- colourful table with a cake, bottle of wine, and various plates, jugs, glasses, cafetiere. there are five people around the table, and they look relaxed and engaged in animated conversation. the lunch party takes place in a home, with a door open to a bright balcony behind the table, and pictures on the walls. the people in this photo are: Theron Schmidt, Lucille Acevedo-Jones, Helena Suárez, Mark Trezona (who hosted this lunch and is standing up in the photo), and Sheila Ghelani.</i><br /><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My dear friend Mark Trezona died suddenly at the end of last
year. His was not the only death that arrived with shock and sadness during
2021. Indeed, the news arrived at the end of a year that brought grief on so
many levels, repeatedly. But there arrived with his death something else – a
feeling that propelled me to write this. <br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
I wondered what this particular feeling of loss was, how to articulate it. My
partner suggested that it was the feeling of losing chosen family. And I think
that’s something of it. Mark was indeed part of my family, and an important part. But
there was something more to this loss: Mark, I later realised, was also part of my lineage
– one of those people who quietly and generously offered me the tools I needed to
survive, as a freelancer, as a listener, as a human.<br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
Though I haven’t seen Mark for a number of years, those tools he offered still serve me
every single day. I carry them with me now, and know them as mine. So I’m
writing this as a way to celebrate Mark, to mourn his loss, and to acknowledge
the strength of energetic resonance that remains with me from the many gifts he
offered. And more broadly, I am also writing this to acknowledge
what a great difference we can make for each other, to encourage each of you to
know how much you make a difference, and to celebrate those people in all of
our lives who gently have our back even when they might seem far away.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">*<br /><br />
Here are some things I can tell you about my experience of Mark. <br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">He
cared about care. He took the time to host beautiful lunches as part of
our working relationship, recognising that making and sharing food
should be at the heart of how we interact as humans. We joked during
those years that one of the foundations of our working practice was
cake (but we were also very serious about it!)<br /></span></span><br />
He didn’t care if his success looked like other successes. He really was
prepared to do things differently, and to lead with his heart. Sometimes wildly
impractical (and unafraid of figuring out what was needed to make the
impractical doable!) but above all committed to being present and generous with
those around him. He believed that humans could be happy, and he worked to
share this belief in a wide variety of contexts, always open to learning and
growing as he went.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
He taught me some really big truths about boundaries and generosity. He taught
me that there is a version of selfishness that is generous, that is about
inviting each person to take responsibility not just to show up, but to show up
with honesty about where they are at and what they need – and that knowing when
you can’t show up is a core part of this work. He helped me understand the flip
side to this too, that there is a version of generosity that is selfish, where
we spread ourselves thin, keep showing up without having the energy or
resources to follow through – and this version of generosity is pervasive, and can
be dangerous. Together, and later separately, we worked to create models of professional
practice based on these truths, inviting care and listening into the heart of
every meeting we had.<br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
Once, when I was in the height of striving for ‘career success’ as an artist, I remember
asking Mark about a piece of writing he was working on. I wanted to know whether
it was finished yet, as I was keen to read it. He said something that I found
extraordinary. He said that he hadn’t managed to finish it yet, in spite of
repeated deadlines and a desire to get it done, and that he was <i>trying
really hard to pay attention to his own reluctance</i>. At the time, I was surprised and slightly puzzled by what he said, but now it makes a lot of sense to me.
It is, among other things, a counter narrative to the vicious cycles of pseudo-efficiency
that dominate many of our worlds, distracting us from the things we care about.
Sometimes, we are procrastinating because our bodies are guiding us with
wisdom. Listening in, we can find what is needed. It’s a far kinder and more
interesting way to approach procrastination than the usual punitive approach
that many of us take on by default.<br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />These are just a few things that I learnt through my relationship with Mark – a
relationship that was clearly and explicitly always about friendship as well as
work. He helped me trust my instinct that work relationships could also be
heart relationships. And at the core of this was his ability to listen, to
really listen, to whoever he was with.<br /><br /> </span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> *</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I remember talking to Mark about loss some years ago, right
before we closed the performance company we ran together. It was during a
sweet, intimate gathering that marked the closing of the company but was also a
ritual for endings more generally. <br /><br />During the evening, Mark confessed to me
that he didn’t usually acknowledge endings. He said he preferred to keep living, to keep moving. He didn’t like saying goodbye. And in the moment
that we were having that conversation, he said that something shifted for him. He was emotional thinking about the ways in which he had avoided goodbyes in his life.<br /><br />I
wanted to end with this story because it is poignant to me. I wanted to end by
acknowledging that Mark found loss difficult to deal with, and he recognised
this. And in honour of this moment, I want to invite us to be with our losses, with
the feelings of holding on or letting go, and the feelings of moving on or avoidance, acknowledging
that these are all ways of being with our grief.</span></span></p>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-75088785493273499492021-12-02T12:30:00.001+11:002021-12-08T19:05:35.616+11:00this joy<p><span style="font-size: small;"></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8wigGAqNB1PWQeL3rK2ewhZvDFw29PTO7ClYBVqyhR80oQ20BTbRiG5NjSPl-aF9MHI3R0uDWNoDuYkLub1O__0yOcCfOdI8_iRTY1OP6POsF6nskOXr87SlfklY6FYledrdb0HBExQy3/s720/2021-12-02-12.03.04.jpg"><img alt="photograph of a drawing of a dragon-bat with a golden body and colourful wings, flying down towards the words of the blog post, with a golden sun to the left and small waves scattered around. there are bits of paper covering up writing around the dragon bat which contains personal information" border="0" data-original-height="514" data-original-width="720" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8wigGAqNB1PWQeL3rK2ewhZvDFw29PTO7ClYBVqyhR80oQ20BTbRiG5NjSPl-aF9MHI3R0uDWNoDuYkLub1O__0yOcCfOdI8_iRTY1OP6POsF6nskOXr87SlfklY6FYledrdb0HBExQy3/w400-h285/2021-12-02-12.03.04.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /><br />For a long time now, I’ve been wanting to write something about joy. Joy that is filled with ease and acceptance of self and other – and the strangeness that cultivating this joy and ease should feel like resistance work for many of us. <br /><br />Specifically, I’m thinking today about trans joy, the joy of living in a body that is in deep and intimate relationship with change. And I’m thinking about that phrase ‘trans joy’ and the fact that when I said it out loud for the first time to a dear friend, they whispered: “Why does that phrase feel … taboo?”<br /><br />Some months ago, I promised myself I would write this blog post the day before going in for a joyful surgery. So here I am, keeping my promise. Tomorrow, after many delays and obstacles, I’ll go into hospital for top surgery. It feels good to write this short post from this moment - not only as a communication, but also as intention, an energetic joy burst in itself.<br /><br />Having said that, the impulse to write this is not only to share a feeling of joy. It’s also to describe the shadow that accompanies the joy. To put it into words as a way of acknowledging it. And having acknowledged it, to dispel its power.<br /><br />The experience of carrying joy and shadow together is a kind of embodied dissonance. It’s the feeling of aligning with one’s own joy when that joy is deemed inappropriate or illegitimate. When we have maps inside us that tell us that the feelings of joy must be hidden, must be wrong. When the narrative of joy is less palatable to a general public than the narrative of suffering.<br /><br />It all sounds so familiar. I could be writing about any number of social categories of human life that are deemed less worthy right now. In this moment, I am writing about trans joy. But really, I’m just writing about joy. Joy as aligned with movement, breath, reciprocity, and spirit. Joy as the right to be fully alive in oneself, and accepted. And how stupidly rare it feels.<br /><br />From the moment I first thought about having top surgery, it felt like a thing of joy. It feels like a gift, a treat, a thing that is just for me.* And yet, when I use those words, I am shamed for them, because there is a social contract that says that trans surgeries must be narrated as arising from suffering: if you are suffering enough, you deserve to have the surgery. If you are tuning into the joy of what it will feel like to be more aligned with yourself, then your story is illegitimate and illegible.<br /><br />In telling you my story I want to be clear that I’m not attempting to speak for others. There are people who feel desperately unhappy, and who would describe surgery as a means of survival – and the language of suffering that they use is real - the suffering is real. But what feels clear to me is that the unhappiness they are describing doesn’t begin inside. It begins with the violence of gendering. It begins with disregard for listening cultures. It begins with the stifling illusion of fixed and binary identities. In other words, the unhappiness is rooted in the stories we tell.<br /><br />So I swim in the world like I have a right to exist. As if we all had a right to exist, in our bodies, changing, growing, learning, challenging what was and what we thought was fact. I recognise this joy as resistance. And at the same time, I claim it as real. <br /><br /><br />All for now.<br /><br />rajni.x.<br /><br /><br /></span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCfU1xg6RK0dtTbQSel6odTL-azVpJnlHv2qyhY7P0JNpyyGsmV91XSse8g4FMimeu2iLfPGgD_8mQ7mjAgNTbTyzJJnPispRnQ2Yzpve0pq3i3juquBo7on8fic260c2w3AZbTG2DZldA/s576/2021-12-02-11.51.jpg"><img alt="line drawn image on scrap of paper, of three animals, one is hippopotamus like, one is bunny rabbit like, and one is whale like, but they are each their own thing. hearts emerge from the mouth of the hippopotamus like, and text reads: everyone deserves love" border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="432" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCfU1xg6RK0dtTbQSel6odTL-azVpJnlHv2qyhY7P0JNpyyGsmV91XSse8g4FMimeu2iLfPGgD_8mQ7mjAgNTbTyzJJnPispRnQ2Yzpve0pq3i3juquBo7on8fic260c2w3AZbTG2DZldA/w300-h400/2021-12-02-11.51.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP5xvoqsKHDzCs8QGstkcI_KTgBuOL38PCospShQ7iILKG2bI8aRP17CMMKkJt0p77XsOezDI5EbctbBXMDB2t9R95dYdQO7hdpkdVa5gw0L9pL1wh9w1ppu00VMgicn6inEb7v5TKO0fe/s576/2021-12-02-11.52.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="another line drawn image on scrap of paper, tihs one has an arrow pointing from the drawing above down into this one. the image is of a bird with a bubble dropping from its beak, and in the bubble is something that looks like the inside of lungs or a kind of plant. text reads: therefore I deserve love" border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="432" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP5xvoqsKHDzCs8QGstkcI_KTgBuOL38PCospShQ7iILKG2bI8aRP17CMMKkJt0p77XsOezDI5EbctbBXMDB2t9R95dYdQO7hdpkdVa5gw0L9pL1wh9w1ppu00VMgicn6inEb7v5TKO0fe/w300-h400/2021-12-02-11.52.jpg" width="300" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">*I want to be absolutely clear here that I am not denying that trans surgeries are necessary or essential for wellbeing. I know that this language can seem like it renders the surgeries non-essential, and this is absolutely not my intention. They are essential, life-giving, and life-saving. And they could and can be joyful.<br /></div><p></p>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-39099297580830144442021-07-19T13:51:00.015+10:002023-02-09T19:56:19.683+11:00Going into the Difficulty<div><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>[<b>TLDR:</b> This blog post is a long and involved exploration of the complexities around having published a book that includes a chapter with focus on someone who has since been identified as an abuser. <br /><br />But perhaps you are simply here because you were looking forward to reading my book, <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538144305/Experiments-in-Listening" target="_blank"><i>Experiments in Listening</i></a>, but then realised it contains mention of Chris Goode, and are having second thoughts.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span> If so, here are some options for you!</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span>If you want to read <i>Experiments in Listening</i>, but would feel triggered by reading the part that mentions Chris, then you have two options. There are a series of five zines that contain preludes from each of the chapters, and are a friendly option for encountering the main ideas without going into the fine detail. These are available (free) for print-at-home from the <a href="https://www.rajnishah.com/A4-EiL-zines" target="_blank">my website</a>, and contain no mention of Chris or his work. Alternatively, if you want to read the book as a whole (thank you for your deep curiosity! please feel free to use discount code <span style="color: #118ebf;">RLFANDF30</span>) but you want to avoid the parts where Chris is mentioned, you could skip, or navigate with self-care, pages 169-219. ]</span></span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><h1 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitMfTIbRSSDFRPZXAHK2arXefuM4shOCztCdi0esIVtUlthvpi82iIEdFUiL79M5wQv_R63nrofHhz0L0e7OyWaeQsrrGdG50gE9rjhFZkw0nDQP61gEwD-eRydtaXK8QeAiENOde9HGOS/s670/Shah_ExperimentsInListening_cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="image of a dark landscape, with blurry trees on the horizon, from the cover of Rajni's book Experiments in Listening" border="0" data-original-height="294" data-original-width="670" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitMfTIbRSSDFRPZXAHK2arXefuM4shOCztCdi0esIVtUlthvpi82iIEdFUiL79M5wQv_R63nrofHhz0L0e7OyWaeQsrrGdG50gE9rjhFZkw0nDQP61gEwD-eRydtaXK8QeAiENOde9HGOS/s16000/Shah_ExperimentsInListening_cover.jpg" /></a></div><br /></span></span></h1><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><span style="color: white;">TW: brief mentions of suicide, child harms<br /><br /></span><br />This is a blog post that involves some detailed questioning around Chris Goode, his life and death, and my friendship with him. If you don’t care about those things, or if reading about those things will feel harmful to you, please don’t continue. This writing is part of my process of working through the complexities of the situation I find myself in, as someone who was friends with Chris for many years, and who worked with him on a project of my own fairly recently. I am sharing it in case it may be resonant and helpful for anyone else. <br /><br />Specifically, this writing comes as a response to the following situation.<br /><br />I have just published my first full-length book, called <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538144305/Experiments-in-Listening" target="_blank"><i>Experiments in Listening</i></a>, which I’ve been working on one way or another since 2013. It was supposed to go to print in 2019, got delayed, had to change publishers, and I finally signed off on it at the end of April this year. The book details some of the work I did between 2013 and 2016 in which I began to feel into my own understanding of the relationships between listening, performance, and being. Specifically, it details (in a slightly academic mode) my own journey towards understanding the ways in which human encounters always take place across difference, and the possibilities that being-in-audience (as an explicitly attentive mode of being-with) might offer as a form of resistance to dominant voice-centered, presentational ways of being.<br /><br />Between the time when I signed off on the manuscript, and the time of its publication, someone who plays a role in the final chapter of the book died by suicide. That person was Chris Goode.<br /><br />For those who don’t know already, Chris killed himself after he was arrested on possession of child sexual exploitation material. Since then, more and more of the story has come out, and the story is one of harm and abuse - Chris was abusive in his working relationships, groomed young men, and was addicted to watching pornography in which young children were being harmed. He never repented for these behaviours, and in fact consistently tried to justify them under the banner of queerness and within his own performance works. Now that he is dead, and a fuller picture of the harms he caused is becoming known, some people in the industry are calling for all traces of his works to be destroyed, in order for him to have no legacy.<br /><br />Chris was a friend of mine for about twenty years. In the fifth and final chapter of <i>Experiments in Listening</i> he is framed explicitly as a friend. Since the book was already at press when this news came out, there was nothing I could do to reframe this within the book itself. So this blog post is partly a working-through of what it means to publicily declare friendship with someone who is now known as an abuser. And it is partly a reckoning with this moment in time, asking the question: what does it mean to move forward from here? <br /><br />In some ways, this is a follow up to the <a href="https://autumnbling.blogspot.com/2021/06/seeding-solidarity.html">blog post</a><a href="https://autumnbling.blogspot.com/2021/06/seeding-solidarity.html"> I wrote when I first heard about Chris’ death</a>. It is written with deep faith that we can move forward from here, together. But only if we centre care, love, and slowness, for ourselves and for others. And only if we are prepared to embrace the complexities and challenges of doing that work.<br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span></span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><b>Experiments in Listening</b></span></span></span></h2><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>The backstory is this.<br /><br />In 2013, I had decided to abandon my career as a performance maker.* I don’t think I knew why exactly, but I understood that my relationship with something I had always thought would be core to my identity (making performance) was coming to an end. It was a long goodbye, and it felt deeply sad. But I knew it was important to trust the process that was unfolding.<br /><br />Before I had a chance to figure out what my new life might look like outside the constraints of being a career artist, something extraordinary happened. Someone showed up. That person was Gerry Harris, a professor at Lancaster University who knew my work as a performance maker, and asked whether I would consider doing a PhD as a way of reflecting on the work I had made over the past 14 years, and as a way of processing my decision to leave.<br /><br />I was very unsure about this invitation. I had already been to university as an undergraduate, and it struck me as the kind of place where I decidedly did not belong. I had also just walked away from one industry and wasn’t very interested in entering another. And yet, the idea of spending three years in dialogue with Gerry was appealing. And it was a funded position. So I applied. I was accepted, and got the funding. And I decided to trust that this was the path I was meant to follow.<br /><br />It was a ‘practice as research’ PhD, which meant that I would need to do some of the thinking through performance practice rather than only through writing. Initially, this felt like it would be in conflict with my desire to move away from performance-making. But I soon realised that this could be an opportunity to examine the parameters of what I had been calling ‘performance’. And this is how <i>Experiments in Listening </i>(the name of a project, which I later borrowed for the title of the book) was born.<br /><br /><i>Experiments in Listening</i> was a project that I had been dreaming in some form for years. It was about inviting two people who were friends to be together, in a state of listening, while being witnessed. It was about bringing together familiarity and strangeness. Today I would frame it as a project that was about bringing our internal and external selves into dialogue. The project relied on me working with performers who were experienced enough to be comfortable with ‘not-doing’ in front of an audience, and with whom I was comfortable enough to call ‘friend’. The three people I invited to work with me were Karen Christopher, Andy Smith, and Chris Goode.<br /><br />The project involved me spending a week working with each of the three friends, a week in which we attempted to do nothing more than be attentive – to each other, to the room, to what might arise when we were not prescribing it. Alongside us each time was a filmmaker, who was present in the room, doing their own listening with a camera. Later, I held a series of sharings during which audiences brought their own listening to the three films that had been made in those rooms. Each dialogue had a different filmmaker, and for the dialogue with Chris, Griffyn Gilligan (who Chris and I had at the time just recently met, but would go on to become Chris’ husband) was the filmmaker.<br /></span></span></span></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>*</b></span></span></span></span></h1><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Skip ahead. On the night of my PhD viva, I held a screening of the three <i>Experiments in Listening</i> films, for my examiners and a public audience. In that audience was someone who would carry me through the following years, someone who would later become part of my chosen family. At that time, we had only recently met, and were about to begin a creative mentoring relationship.<br /><br />Some days after the screening, we had our first mentoring session together. That day, this person asked me why I had chosen not to work with any people of colour for <i>Experiments in Listening</i>. I will never forget that moment. I was stopped in my tracks. I fumbled around for an answer. I said that it was because I didn’t have any friends who are also performance-makers and people of colour and who would be the right fit for this project, and this was because I had grown up inside a performance-making scene that was very white. To some extent, it was true. But another answer to this same question was: because it didn’t even occur to me that this would be important. The truth that finally came into view for me in that moment was that, although I had been interrogating identity politics at surface level through my work for many years, I had never taken the time or had the courage to work through my own internalised racism. In the years that followed, I began this work. It is ongoing and will last a lifetime.<br /><br />So why mention this here? Because this story, the story of how I came to confront my own internalised racism, and began to reorient my world, is part of the story of <i>Experiments in Listening</i> and part of the story of my friendship with Chris.<br /><br />During those week-long dialogues, during the screenings, and during the writing of the book, I was very slowly starting to understand the ways in which my lack of internal rigour had led to default worlds around me. I started to understand the extent to which it was structural racism that forced me to leave the theatre/performance industry. And I started to realise, too, that I have the capacity to create the worlds I live within.<br /><br /><br />Chapter Five of the book, the chapter that is about <i>Experiments in Listening</i>, begins with the following paragraph:<br /><br />“[I]f listening, as I am proposing it, is a gathering of bodies and of attention, then it seems at best inadequate and at worst dangerous for that gathering to happen without an acknowledgment of the histories and geographies that have shaped those bodies and their capacity for attentiveness. […]<br /><br />The main players in this chapter—Karen Christopher, Chris Goode, and Andy Smith—have all already appeared as writers in previous chapters, where, slightly uncomfortably but according to academic convention, I have referred to them by their last names. In this chapter, they come back on a first-name basis, as performers and friends. Somewhere in here, among the signs ‘friend’ and ‘writer’ and ‘artist’ and ‘audience’, are human beings with complex identities and emotions, meeting each other in many contexts, across time, and in different places. In this chapter, I ask what happens when we meet each other as complex beings in the context of performance.”<br /><br />This final chapter of the book includes the beginnings of my realisation that my relationship with Chris could never be reciprocal until we both did the work of addressing the ways in which structural inequities manifest through our bodies. <br /><br />In June 2019, just under two years before Chris ended his life, we had an email exchange, initiated by Chris, in which I invited us to re-examine default behaviours within our friendship. As part of this exchange, I wrote:<br /><br />“I have become aware (in part through the project of our dialogue during Experiments in Listening, or rather the beautiful film that Griffyn made) that our relationship has been one in which I bring myself to you, and enter into your world. I have never succeeded in bringing my full self to that relationship. This is on both of us, and I do not expect you to take sole responsibility. I feel we have both inhabited patterns of behaviour that played with power in ways I am no longer prepared to do. […] I am trying to change those patterns.”<br /><br />I invited Chris to join me in creating a new chapter of our friendship. Chris didn’t tell me directly that he was not prepared to do this work. He indicated that he had heard me, and that we were moving forward with respect and care for each other. I later found out that he had blocked me on twitter, and was spreading false information about me. It has become clear that this was part of a bigger pattern in which Chris was being asked to reckon with his relationship to power and privilege, and was not prepared to, or was not ready to, or was not able to do that work.<br /><br />I am not sharing this with you in order to demonstrate that I was or am morally superior to Chris, or anyone. These kinds of comparisons feel reductive, and dangerous. I am in a process that I know will last a lifetime, and my own understanding of how to confront these truths is boundaried, as we all are, by my own lived experiences. What I am trying to do is point towards what feels like an important piece of the puzzle – which is that this work happens somewhere between inside and outside. It happens between us, but it also happens inside of us. And those things are not separate.<br /><br />I draw a line between this story and the worlds within which it occurs. Which means that I am part of the story too. It is our story. They are our worlds. And we are the ones who make them real. <br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span></span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><b>What happens now?</b></span></span></span></h2><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>There has been a strong call from some people in the UK theatre industry to destroy all evidence that Chris existed, to write him out of (theatre-making) history. I understand where this comes from, and feel supportive of the need to re-examine and re-write at both a personal and systemic level. I also fully recognise the importance of showing up for survivors in exactly the ways they need. At the same time, I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community). And so this blog post, as well as being specifically about the situation I find myself in relating to my book, is also a call for complexity.<br /><br />I heard the news about Chris’ death in the same moment that <a href="https://www.aptnnews.ca/ourstories/kamloops/" target="_blank">other excavations were happening</a>, literally revealing bodily evidence of the many years of child abuse and genocide that have occurred on the lands that are colonially known as Canada. Evidence of histories that have largely been ignored, in spite of repeated <a href="http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf" target="_blank">reports</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/08/canada-indigenous-children-deaths-residential-schools" target="_blank">campaigns for justice</a>. The two stories arrived in proximity, and they felt utterly connected. They are both stories about harms that were happening and continue to happen within structures that are upheld by white supremacy. They are stories about what we choose to ignore. And they are stories about the tightly-wound relationships between power, hero-worshipping, and violence. These stories are not in the past. We can’t eradicate them by destroying the evidence that they existed. Our work now is to transform those narratives, and part of that work lies inside us. In recognising our own attachments to those narratives, in recognising that we are part of the stories we tell.<br /><br />Grappling with my own internalised racism, and other attachments to privilege, is at once the most challenging and transformative work I have ever done. I feel like I am late in starting this work, and I am clumsy as I try to work out what’s needed. It is often devastating, rendering me slow as I work through shame or grief, and it is most certainly not linear. Somedays, it feels hard to justify this internal work, in a world that demands evidence of productivity, in a world that demands immediate evidence that justice is being served. But ever since Chris died, I have felt more certain than ever that this work is important. That it is the most important work we can do.<br /><br />My book exists without acknowledgment of the series of events that would follow its printing. It occupies an awkward place in this narrative, a kind of strange innocence, of words written before things were known. But the truth is that all of us who knew Chris knew that he played with power. We knew that he was fascinated by harm. Arguably, anyone who was close with Chris for any length of time felt his capacity for harm, and held it together with the knowledge that he also had a capacity for great tenderness.<br /><br />In the book, describing a scene in the film that Griffyn made, I write:<br /><br />“In my recollection of this dialogue, Chris and I were caring, careful, and vulnerable, meeting each other on equal terms. Griffyn’s film reveals to me something that I already know in theory, but that is much harder to grasp in practice, which is that—while we might be caring, careful, and vulnerable—we never meet on equal terms, and this must be the starting point for any dialogue.”<br /><br />I, like many people, spent years filtering out, forgiving, or stepping away from the more problematic moments in my friendship with Chris. This was only possible because I was living and making work inside a system that itself was built through violence, erasure, and extreme gaslighting. Slowly, because slowly is the only way to do this work, I am learning to feel and to notice these patterns in all of my relationships, and to become braver in taking actions to reorient them. <br /><br />I am not trying to suggest that everyone’s work looks the same as mine. Of course it doesn’t. The whole point of this work is to recognise that we are all implicated differently in these networks of power, violence, and abuse. The call I am making is to recognise the seemingly quiet and internal work of learning to feel again, of listening to self, as part of our collective movement towards freedom. It is complex, confusing, and non-linear. It can feel slow, and it can feel invisible. It is sometimes painful, sometimes impossible, and sometimes, at moments, joyful. It happens at once within and between us. This, I believe, is how change happens.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">* I later realised that what I was abandoning was not performance-making or ‘being an artist’ but the uphill struggle of trying to make a career within an industry that upheld patriarchal, capitalist, colonialist values. Abandoning the idea of ‘career’ (i.e. a damaging fiction of linear progression) was the best thing I have ever done, and it eventually left me feeling more like an artist than ever before.<br /></span><br /><br /><br /></span></span></span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Reading list (some things that inspire me in this work)</span></span></span></h2><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><a href="https://www.akpress.org/we-will-not-cancel-us.html" target="_blank"><i>We Will not Cancel Us </i>by adrienne maree brown</a></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><a href="https://www.magabala.com/products/living-on-stolen-land" target="_blank"><i>Living on Stolen Land</i> by Ambelin Kwaymullina</a><i> <br /></i></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><a href="https://www.leannesimpson.ca/book/as-we-have-always-done" target="_blank"><i>As We Have Always Done</i> (and everything) by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson</a></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><a href="https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><i>Leaving Evidence</i> blog by Mia Mingus</a> <i> </i></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/311/311793/catching-teller-crow/9780241380079.html" target="_blank"><i>Catching Teller Crow</i> by Ambelin Kwaymullina and Ezekiel Kwaymullina</a><i> <br /></i></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/608716/love-and-rage-by-lama-rod-owens/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><i>Love and Rage</i> by Lama Rod Owens</a></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>also: <br /></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><a href="https://autumnbling.blogspot.com/2020/09/breaking-open-work-of-listening-in.html" target="_blank">(on this blog) 'Breaking Open: the work of listening in a racist world'</a></span></span></span></p></div>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-21005538700073373742021-06-05T14:23:00.007+10:002021-06-29T12:28:20.116+10:00 Seeding solidarity<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></p><p style="margin-left: 160px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>PLEASE NOTE: this short blog post is written specifically for the <span><span></span><span><span></span></span></span>community of people who knew and worked with Chris Goode.</b></span></span></span><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXio4g-v6H2CplGmOLuLEgCXQclvG_NA90cXejTJHa-LXmmwaVoN1UgtJS9rzJxZZM-Enz82ZBhlBR-uTNNmgXFpDU2O7k6kJoKILkvycYGa0yeWT3Kq0KK36xa8Bcv88A3-w9WG8XKV2t/s1024/2021-06-01+16.58.54.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="trees without leaves at an angle on a portrait photograph, against a sky that turns from white to grey to blue" border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="768" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXio4g-v6H2CplGmOLuLEgCXQclvG_NA90cXejTJHa-LXmmwaVoN1UgtJS9rzJxZZM-Enz82ZBhlBR-uTNNmgXFpDU2O7k6kJoKILkvycYGa0yeWT3Kq0KK36xa8Bcv88A3-w9WG8XKV2t/w480-h640/2021-06-01+16.58.54.jpg" width="480" /></a><br /><i><br /><br /><br />“What would be the pace of this process if healing were at the centre?” </i>*<br /><br /><br /><br />Dear friends,<br /><br />I woke last night, fearing an angry ghost. <br /><br />I wrote some things down. <br /><br />It won’t be for all of you. But it’s written from within my own grieving process, as one way for us to not be so alone.<br /><br /><br />I am writing this for us, those who are alive, grappling with this situation that is so full of impossibilities. I am feeling so many things, but one of them is the clarity of a community coming together as we make our way through the debris of this explosion, with so much love and care and compassion and carefulness, at completely different paces, but nevertheless, together somehow. So this blog post is about that feeling. I write it as a companion – in case these words can be companions to you as we find our way through this process.<br /><br />I am feeling so many things, unexpected emotions that visit with force, memories that I didn’t invite, seemingly opposing thoughts framed by love, anger, fury, distrust, and disbelief.<br /><br />This thing we are confronting, navigating, holding uninvited conversations with, it is bigger than we can grasp alone. <br /><br />So please know, as the sorrow slips to rage slips to distrust, slips between pasts and futures, please know that there is a steady heart somewhere, between us all, calling us. A steady hand that is our solidarity. <br /><br /><br />I find myself noticing a clearing. Perhaps it will come closer into view. I want you to know that I feel it is possible that we’ll find each other there. Those of us who are hurting and hurt, those of us who have been harmed, those of us who will never forgive, those of us who are heartbroken, those of us who remember with love,</span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"> those of us who can’t let go, and those of us who remember with woundedness. <br /><br />Those of us fighting and those of us crying and those of us cursing. We’re all there. <br /><br />We find a way forward. Our fear of monsters is done. Our trust in ourselves is arriving.<br /><br /><br />Friends - please keep some deep kindness wrapped loosely but surely around you, so it is there when you need it.<br /><br /><br />rajni.x.<br />05.06.21<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">* While I was awake, I listened to episode 7, season 2 of Prentis Hemphill’s <i>Finding Our Way</i> podcast – a conversation with Kazu Haga about Navigating Conflict. It resonated so deeply with the feelings I have around everything that has happened within our community, the harms caused, and the ways in which we might approach healing. This quote is from Prentis. Listen/read here: <a href="https://www.findingourwaypodcast.com/individual-episodes/s2e7" target="_blank">https://www.findingourwaypodcast.com/individual-episodes/s2e7</a><br /><br />** Also, one of my favourite blog posts, which I have probably mentioned to you already if you know me, is this one by Mia Mingus. It is about <i>Dreaming Accountability</i>. Again, it feels so relevant to what I hope might be seeded in this (wider and longer) moment. <a href="https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/dreaming-accountability-dreaming-a-returning-to-ourselves-and-each-other/" target="_blank">https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/dreaming-accountability-dreaming-a-returning-to-ourselves-and-each-other/</a></span></span> <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><br />ADDENDUM (29/6/21): Since writing this, I have been reading adrienne maree brown's 'We Will Not Cancel Us' (a timely birthday gift!) which has also been very helpful to me. <a href="https://www.akpress.org/we-will-not-cancel-us.html" target="_blank">https://www.akpress.org/we-will-not-cancel-us.html</a></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"> </span></span></p>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-80210120550293303822020-09-28T17:31:00.004+10:002021-04-28T11:05:39.067+10:00Breaking open: the work of listening in a racist world<div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img alt="image of dark landscape with sky and clouds - moody and blurry" border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifaujWe4lYzOVwLRG339Zvy7vGlyr3ldSPOCGEnI6T8qv8Qddqyyep9o0BhRRFrn5hujOtkqSPYhJsCH1OR96clqMfdIuYFDoyNUeybS0HQSa065PrHJsnhlzTCS5vxphQvyB23i9C7u32/w640-h480/Sky5+photo+by+Rajni+Shah.jpg" width="640" /></span></span><br /><br />This is a transcript from a talk I gave last week, to mark the end of my two-year postdoc at Concordia’s <a href="https://www.concordia.ca/finearts/research/labs/acts-of-listening.html" target="_blank">Acts of Listening Lab</a>. It was written to be listened to live with an audience, but I hope that something comes through from the written words.<br /><br /></span></span><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">To celebrate the International Day of Listening, join Acts of Listening Lab postdoctoral fellow Rajni Shah as they reflect on two years of research into the work of listening across difference. This talk will include reflections on Rajni’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/2431479660254966/" target="_blank">‘Listening Tables’ series</a>, as well as personal reflections from their own embodied experiences as a non-binary person of colour living on unceded lands. Those who identify as QTBIPOC are especially welcomed.</span></span></p><h3><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h3><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b><br />Start here:</b><br /><br />As a listener (including those who are reading) I invite you to begin by thinking about what it means for your listening to meet my listening, in this online meeting place. This is a slow, somewhat meditative talk. It asks you to bring your listening. So before you go any further, take some time to listen in to your own body. Ask yourself:<br /><i><br />What do I need in order to be able to listen right now?</i><br /><br />Do you need to be here, reading or listening to this talk? Is now the moment? Perhaps when you tuned in, you found that you need something else right now. If so, please honour that desire. <br /><br />If now is the right moment, please take one action to help yourself arrive into your own listening. This might be making a cup of tea, running a bath, meditating, changing your location, putting on music, or anything else that will allow you to feel just a little more arrived. <br /><br />When you’re ready, we’ll begin.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Acknowledgments</b><br /><br />I acknowledge that I wrote and recorded this talk as a visitor on Gadigal lands and waters. I offer deep respect and gratitude to Gadigal elders past, present, and emerging, and to all Indigenous peoples around the world who are doing the heart work of continuing and resisting.<br /><br />I acknowledge the kookaburras and the lizards, and the many other creatures who were close by as I wrote this talk, whose songs and dances teach me about time. <br /><br />I acknowledge the whales, who are making their passage south as I write this.<br /><br />I acknowledge my own heritage and blood family, who are from the Kumaoni region in present-day Uttarakhand, India. <br /><br />And I acknowledge and thank all the people who made the Listening Tables project. Luis, Caite, Andrea, MJ, and Alana at the Acts of Listening Lab. Guest listeners Ellen, Leo, Savita, and Eldad. The listeners who came back each time to share and grow this practice: Emma, Hanss, Seçkin, Victoria, and Ayumi. And all those who attended Listening Tables between August and November 2019.<br /><br />Thank you.<br /><br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>*</b><br /><br /></span></span><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h1><h4><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h4><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /><br /><span></span>I try to turn things right side up. <br /><br />Which is the same as to say, <br /><br /><span> </span>I turn things upside down.<br /><br />Which is the same as to say,<br /><br /><span> </span>I try to make sense of the world. <br /><br />Which is the same as to say, <br /><br /><span> </span>I tried to rearrange the room in order to rearrange our thoughts, <br /><br /><span></span>which is a way of saying, <br /></i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /><span> </span>I invited us to rearrange our minds and hearts by inviting us to rearrange the room, the table, <br /> and our listening.</i><br /><br /><br /><b><br /></b></span></span><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>1. Breaking</b></span></span></h1><h3><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h3><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />The first Listening Table. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. August 2019. <br /><br />I am nervous, and newly arrived back on to these lands. I came from unceded Gadigal lands, where I was not invited, and arrived on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, where I was not invited, into the University, where I was invited, but which itself is at the heart of a history of peoples and actions that were not invited. <br /><br />In any one moment, there are so many arrivals. <br />Harms done, that continue to harm. <br />Harms done that continue to be done. <br /><br />I am aware of this discomfort, the shame of mobility and the histories that enable or necessitate it, the shame of racisms, my own and others, the shame that pours through lineage into our bodies. <br /><br />On this day, same as most days, I am trying to find new ways to arrive myself.<br /><br />At the first Listening Table, I was nervous. 30 people arrived. They had, as invited, brought food to share. Their hearts were suddenly right there, beating, in the room, expectant, and to a greater or lesser degree, trusting me to hold their experience. And I was nervous, and this is how it began. <br /><br />I had arrived hours earlier, more than five hours earlier to set up the room. I like to give myself the time to arrive, see, here I was again, trying to give myself the time and space I needed to arrive. But when the people came into the room, I was nervous, I moved quickly. I remember myself losing the ground beneath my feet. I remember myself not yet feeling arrived from those lands, these lands, the bright sparkling waters and thick air of Gadigal country. Not knowing how to be arrived in that room. Not knowing how to be oriented.<br /><br />That first table, I had no idea how things would go. I had a plan, of course. The plan was this. During the first hour, in one room, the Acts of Listening Lab, are ten people around a beautiful table. Microphones at the table. Pretty light hanging in the middle of the room. Those people, the ten, mostly strangers to each other, are invited to sit together for a full hour and wait for words to arrive. Those people are invited to meet across difference through listening. <br /><br />A chance to be heard, and held. <br />A seat at the table. <br /><br />And in the other room, the one that is called the Sun Room, the room in which we would be meeting now, in which I’m imagining us all sharing this talk, in the Sun Room are the rest of the 30. There are papered tables, pens and pencils, plants, natural light, cushions, chairs, and headphones through which these people can listen in to the listening conversation that is happening between the ten in the Acts of Listening Lab across the hallway. Later, in the second hour, we will come together, and share food, and share words. <br /><br />This was the plan. And this is how it went. In some ways, it went exactly to plan.<br /><br />I began with an introduction. And as part of this introduction, I invited us to enter into a process during which we would, together, select who would go into the Acts of Listening Lab, to sit at the table, and who would listen in from the Sun Room. I said something like this:<br /><br />“The work of Listening Tables is about reorientation. It’s about the fact that how attention is distributed is political. One way of thinking about it is that it is about what happens when we centre the margins in order to problematise default behaviours. To this end, in considering whether you want to take part in the Table, please ask yourself whether yours is a voice and a body that you see represented in all its diversity in mainstream media, whether yours is a voice that is heard, that has agency in the world. If so, maybe it is your turn to listen in, to take a different role, in order for us to collectively reorient. If yours is a voice that you feel is unheard, unrepresented, placed at the margins, then you might consider stepping up, to take your place at the table, even if this feels a little challenging or takes some bravery.”<br /><br />I like to make invitations in this way, clear enough that there is an intention that can be heard, but open enough that each person can gather around that invitation in the ways that resonate for them. Rather than me determining which bodies need to sit at the table, the invitation asks each person to determine for themselves which role they will take on that evening. It was an invitation to both listen in and listen out, to place ourselves at the point where those things meet.<br /><br />What I didn’t say explicitly is that this is an anti-racist practice.<br /><br />I wondered, in the weeks and months after that first Listening Table, whether I should have been more blunt.<br /><br />Racism is a blunt tool that presents itself in blunt ways. The work of reorientation, of listening, of figuring out how we might even stand a chance of arriving in a room together, is at once subtle and blunt. It is careful, delicate, difficult work, and it is incredibly simple. <br /><br />*<br /><br />I’ve thought about trying to explain to you what actually happened during that first table. The complexities of the listening experiences that presented themselves over those few hours we spent together, and the many obstacles to listening that were present. I’ve thought about trying to explain how some people seemed so aware of their bodies and voices in relation to others, and others seemed not to be aware at all, and how these behaviours fell so devastatingly neatly along lines of racialisation and speaking privilege. But every time I try to put the facts of that evening into words, I get knotted up in the complexity of its emotions. It would take me more than the hour that we have to talk my way into that knot, and then I would have to leave us all knotted up. <br /><br />Knotted up is a place I’ve been and know. <br />But I’d rather focus on loosening the knots than recreating them.<br /><br /><br />What I will say is this. <br /><br />White supremacy was present with us in that room, during that first table, in all its hard armour.<br /><br />Unexpressed pain and anger and grief were present, and they obliterated the possibility of listening.<br /><br />Tenderness was present, as was warmth, trust, and desire.<br /><br />Harm was done.<br /><br />Hurt was felt.<br /><br />And in the midst of all this, solidarity was present, and listening was present.<br /><br />*<br /><br />After the first Listening Table, a dear friend asked me: why didn’t you make it a closed space? Why not make it a project for people who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of colour? My answer is that I love being in BIPOC-only spaces. I seek them out. I love leading for BIPOC communities. I love the places we are able to go together, the trust, the delicacy, the respect, the world-making that happens when we’re not dealing with the assumptions of whiteness. But those can’t be the only spaces in which we are able to express ourselves. They can’t be the only spaces in which we are seen and heard. And they can’t be the only spaces in which we are centered.<br /><br />What happened during and following that first Listening Table was <a href="https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/06/14/fragility/" target="_blank">shattering</a>. It was messy and hard and deeply felt for many people. And I changed things, of course I changed things as the project moved forward and evolved. But I also started to understand something about that shattered place.<br /><br />I started to understand that this is the work. <br /><br />I started to understand, to trust, that this is urgent work. <br /><br />I started to understand how much work it would take.<br /><br />It is hard work. <br /><br />It is heart and spirit work. <br /><br />It takes time and patience and persistence. <br /><br />It takes trust and vulnerability and not knowing.<br /><br />And it will always include breaking.<br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>2. Open</b></span></span></h1><h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />It is just over a year since that first Listening Table.<br /><br />Surprisingly, I am writing this talk from a place of breaking open. <br /><br />At first, I feel this as an opposition. The task of writing a talk and the task of being with my own breaking open feel at odds. But I am curious to know what will come from this moment of thin spirit, thin skin. So I invite them to be one. I write as one who is breaking open. I write from a place that is in close kinship with the unbearable, with the unbearables. Some humans would call this the work of decolonising self. Some would call it sickness, or failure. Some would call it transformation. And some would pretend really hard that it was not happening.<br /><br />But it is happening.<br /><br />I am breaking open.<br /><br />We are breaking open.<br /><br />For many years, I did not do this blunt work. I was more subtle, more refined, and more successful. I was much more pleasing to those who needed pleasing, and much more approachable, and much less sensitive. I did everything I needed to do in order to survive. Or maybe, I did everything I needed to in order to help others survive. Or maybe, and I fear this one is the closest to the truth, maybe I did everything I needed to do in order to help systems of oppression stay alive. I hated the idea of finding solidarity with other people of colour, because I did not want to see race. I did not want to see racism. What I didn’t realise was what is now so obvious to me: that I was holding racism in place, and it was destroying me.<br /><br />*<br /><br />My parents bet their survival on rationalising the world. I bet mine on feeling it. Such a risky strategy! It leaves me feeling the sicknesses of systems that I carry inside me and am a part of. It leaves me a weak player, a sad and angry player, and sometimes, oftentimes, a non-player. My parents feel contentment, and they wish the same for me. The other day, one of them said to me: “I worry that you’re too focused on the negative. You have to make the best of what is here.” <br /><br />What they don’t know is that the work I am doing is joy work. It is the work of making room for joy, and feeling joy in this body, as a world-making way of being. Sometimes, it feels like breaking open. Sometimes it feels like battle. Sometimes it feels like being a killjoy. Sometimes it feels like dreaming. Sometimes it feels like I am spinning away into other realms. And sometimes, the best of times, I remember that my joy exists right now, alongside all the other joys and sorrows. Sometimes, I remember that this moment isn’t one moment in a sequence of moments, but one moment in alongside and intertwined with many other moments. Sometimes I remember to unhook myself from the blinkered behaviours I have learnt for survival, and I live in alignment with my joy. Sometimes, this is the work. The work of feeling joy.<br /><br /><br /><i><br />what needs saying in this moment?</i><br /><br />I want to live in an expanded world where there is room for all of us. <br /><br />Do you want this too? <br /><br />But really? <br /><br />Even if it means destroying what you have built?<br /><br /><br /><br /><i>what needs saying in this moment?</i><br /><br />nothing needs saying. nothing more needs saying. nothing more can be said.<br /><br />stop trying to speak yourself into the future. <br /><br />stop trying to mend.<br /><br />your listening reveals your own boundaries. uncovers the earth. opens up the possibility that you might notice the moon.<br /><br />your own listening doesn’t even try to be separate from the vibrations of this planet.<br /><br />your own listening asks for surrender.<br /><br /><br /><i><br />what needs saying in this moment?</i><br /><br />no more questions.<br /><br />hold the moment open.<br /><br />break the moment open.<br /><br />and stay there.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>3. The Work</b></span></span></h1><h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />What does it mean to reclaim that phrase, “the work”? <br /><br />I take everything that I used to consider ‘not work’ and place it inside that phrase these days. <br /><br />So breaking open is the work.<br /><br />Taking rest is the work.<br /><br />Having a conversation that spills over from where or what I intended, is the work.<br /><br />Being held is the work.<br /><br />Saying “I love you” and feeling it is the work.<br /><br />Intimate friendship is the work.<br /><br />Saying “no” is the work.<br /><br />Holding change is the work.<br /><br />Attending to the pain in my body is the work.<br /><br />Crying is the work.<br /><br />Dreaming is the work.<br /><br />Listening is the work.<br /><br />*<br /><br />In my introduction to the first Listening Table, I said: “Let’s trust in the process, let’s trust we are the people who need to be in this room.”<br /><br />I do believe that we were the people who needed to be in the room. Even the person who told me afterwards that they had a horrible time at the Listening Table, that they hated not being able to talk more, that they felt constrained and attacked and disappointed that they had trusted me. And that they wished they had listened in to their own desire to say “no” instead of feeling compelled by my invitation to show up. I have to trust that this was their work on that day.<br /><br />I do believe that we were the people who needed to be in the room. I include in this my own inability to arrive, my own chaos and mess, my own desire to hold it all together, and my inability to do so. The ways in which things spilled over the edges and taught me from there.<br /><br />What fascinates me about attempting to listen with others is that it shows me things I could not see on my own. Or at least, it lets me notice things I have known but didn’t want to know. It is as if in the attempt to listen there is a surface-rising that takes place. Patterns, beliefs, assumptions, violences, histories, inequities float to the surface. <br /><br />And there they are, announcing themselves, very seriously and very lightly. <br /><br />“Here we are. Just as we have always been. But this time, you’re listening.”<br /><br />If we are listening, if we are paying attention, it is almost clumsy, almost funny, how these structural inequities play themselves out. Our histories, our assumptions, our held tongues and polite conversations hold themselves up to us. And we laugh or hate or cry or look away, but they are there.<br /><br />This is the work.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><br /></b></span></span><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>4. Listening</b></span></span></h1><h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />I think about the Acts of Listening Lab exactly as its name suggests: as a laboratory for listening, in which we conduct experiments in listening. In which we hope to come a little closer to understanding what listening is, and what it might be. In which we practice something called listening. The Listening Tables were conceived from this idea, that there was a place in which some people could come together to explore listening, to examine listening, to listen.<br /><br />But listening, as I understand it – a practice which some might call ‘being’ or ‘feeling’ or ‘attending’ – listening without already knowing what we are listening <i>to</i>, is a big ask. It’s a big ask in a world that revolves hard around short attention spans, around goal-oriented tasks, around doing and producing and declaring ourselves. In a world that moves fast towards naming, calling out, and acting. In a world that does not value slowness, or multi-generational thinking. <br /><br />So these attempts to practice listening are often met with resistance. <br />They are resistant and they create resistance.<br /><br />Each Listening Table had a guest listener. Someone who had been invited to listen, to bring their listening to the table. This was part of the experiment. Every time I told someone about this idea of a guest listener, they didn’t understand what it could mean. We are so attached to the declarative, to words and their meanings, that it is hard for us to understand what it might mean to bring a listening. When I told people about it, it was almost like I was telling them about a guest nothingness. “But what will they do?” people would ask, those people including some of the guest listeners themselves. “They will listen.” I would reply, but no one could grasp what this could possibly mean. Even after we had these conversations, most people assumed that the role of the guest listener would involve speaking. This tells me a lot about how we value listening and how we value speaking.<br /><br />A guest listener is someone who is invited to listen. <br /><br />Someone who is invited to bring their listening, in the knowledge that each person’s listening changes the room, changes the work that can happen in the room. <br /><br />In the knowledge that listening is work.<br /><br />That each of us is changing, creating, manifesting the world through our listening. <br /><br />That each of our listenings are linked.<br /><br />And indeed, each guest listener brought such a different energy to the table. And not only that, but the fact that the guest listener was different each time changed who was in the room, and how they came into that room. This was most clear when my mum was the guest listener. People came to that table with a desire to meet my mum, or with an expectation of what it might mean to have a parent, an elder, in the room. And my mum is blind, so her listening, her experience of what it means to sit quietly in a room, was shaped by her experience of blindness. And her blindness, and her relationship to me, shaped my own listening, and my own being at that table. At the end of the night, so many people thanked my mum for her presence, for what she brought. And she didn’t understand what she had brought, or what she had done, that had so moved those people. Because it wasn’t her. It was her in relation to all of us, and all of us in relation to each other.<br /><br />Each of our listenings are linked. In fact, to name them as ‘each’ feels inappropriate to the work of listening. We are creating each other all the time. We are creating our worlds all the time. We are listening each other into being all the time. It is how we orient ourselves. And it is happening, whether we acknowledge it or not.<br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><br /></b></span></span><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>5. A racist world</b></span></span></h1><h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;">[one minute’s silence - listen]</span></span><br /></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>6. A world</b></span></span></h1><h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />for the listeners<br />for the healers<br />for the seekers<br />for the killjoys<br /><br />for the guests and the hosts<br />for the spirits<br />for the ghosts<br />for the circles and the spirals and the mountains and the songs<br /><br />for stumbling<br />for tumbling<br />for shattering<br />for failing<br />for overflow<br />for being-with<br />for holding open<br />for breaking open<br />and for shutting down<br /><br />for saying no<br />again and again<br />until it is time to say yes<br /><br />for the circles and the spirals and the mountains and the songs<br />for the lizards and the whales and the kookaburras and the ants<br /><br />for saying no<br />again and again<br />until it is time to say yes<br /><br />for you, who need to hear this. <br />you know who you are. we know who we are.<br /><br />Thank you for your listening.<br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: right;"><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;">[end]</span></span></b><br /></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-57781017405490549732020-05-21T13:39:00.002+10:002020-07-24T10:29:30.494+10:00Arriving and arriving and arriving<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As you will likely know, I have spent the past five years in
movement. First a move from London to Sydney with my partner, where we
have lived on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people for what was
initially supposed to be three years and has now extended into an
indefinite time. Then in late 2018 I took the most beautiful opportunity
to work with Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro helping set up the <a href="https://www.concordia.ca/finearts/research/labs/acts-of-listening.html" target="_blank">Acts of Listening Lab</a> at Concordia University on the unceded lands of the
Kanien’kehá:ka Nation in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal – a position that should
have lasted two years but which I have (with deep regret) left early due
to the pandemic. During the time I was working there, I travelled back
and forth across the world more than once a year in order to sustain
both my job and my relationship with my partner. Now I find myself
suddenly back in Sydney; the apartment I have been calling home sitting
empty in Montreal; my (elderly) parents and sister in England; extensive
blood family in India; chosen family all over the world. I have been
living globally, dropping into communities and friendships, writing
letters and sending voicelets, but never staying long enough on the
ground to be counted (on). All of this movement that so many of us took
for granted has come to a sudden standstill. In my last blog post, I
reflected a little on the feelings of pain and confrontation that change
(actual, real change, as opposed to the kind of change I can experience
without destabilising my own privilege or comfort) brings. This one
feels more personal – a reflection on my own journey – a document of
what that kind of once carefree movement across borders has felt like in
these past months – and a record of the kindnesses and questions I have
encountered along the way. It’s a long read, I imagine only of interest
to friends who care to know how I’ve been going. If you’re up for the
long read right now, thank you for your companionship.<br />
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<b><br />1. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal</b><br />
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Mid-March. I’m in my beautiful sublet in Montreal, on the 21st floor, overlooking the city. My university has closed. All my work for this year has been cancelled. I understand that staying isolated is an act of love that I have the luxury to perform, so I go into my own early lockdown, avoiding any time in other people’s homes, and only going out when absolutely necessary, washing hands frequently and using rubbing alcohol to wipe down door handles and occasional grocery purchases. I already hate this social distancing, and I notice how much I appreciate the looks. Over the next two weeks I notice more and more human connection. People smiling under masks, so their smile is visible in their eyes. People leaving distance between us as we pass, but nodding, as if to say: yes, we are doing this for each other.<br />
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When the isolation began, I left a note for my elderly neighbours on either side, asking them to contact me if they needed anything, and offering to do groceries. It feels like we often make these kinds of gestures, but they are rarely followed up. This time, it’s different. We have to reach out. The lady next door calls me. She speaks french. I understand just enough to be able to communicate. She tells me that she is well but she is over seventy and has been advised to stay home. She asks how we would do it if I were to get groceries for her. We come up with a system. A few days later, she calls again to say it’s time. She leaves empty shopping bags, a detailed shopping list in careful handwriting, and some money in an envelope outside my door, knocking loudly before returning to her apartment. I go down and buy things for her from three different shops in our building. I wear a mask. I am careful with touching things. I wipe them down before leaving them outside her door, giving a knock, and walking away. She calls out, “Merci beaucoup.” She phones later to thank me for my kindness. It doesn’t feel like kindness. It feels like reciprocity. Reciprocity is what I have long been hungry for.<br />
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I make hot chocolate and cake for a small group of people who are living on the streets very near my home. I figure they must be suffering because of the social distancing. I am very careful not to touch anything or breathe on anything while I bake, and hand over the goods in a paper bag while wearing winter gloves. They are full of joy. I am full of joy. We chat a little, at a distance. I learn that one of them is called Lola. During this time as most of us have looked more and more harried and worried, this small group of people has continued smiling every day. I am so grateful for their smiles, and wish I had made friends with them earlier in my time living here. What is it that stops us from being kind to each other, or even noticing each other? The learnt behaviours of capitalism become easier to notice and more noticably absurd to me during this time.<br />
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Over these two weeks, the pandemic is declared, and things start changing swiftly around the world. It suddenly feels like nothing is a given. I feel into both the challenge and the possibility of this. I wonder about whether I should try and return home to Sydney, to be with my partner. I flip and flop in my decision, one day to the next. I am safe in Montreal. I have a beautiful apartment, and a good network of friends and chosen family who will take care of each other. I am seen and held. It doesn’t make sense to travel during a pandemic. I want to stay. And I also know that in wanting to stay I am holding on to a life that no longer exists.<br />
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At a certain point I realise that no one can make this decision for me. There is something profoundly liberating about this. I am used to looking over at someone else to check whether I am doing right or wrong, good or bad. And now? Suddenly there is no validation of right or wrong that comes from outside, because nobody knows, and nobody is even pretending to know. There is only a decision that I have to make and that I have to live with. So many of these decisions being made every day by each of us. Heart choices, hard choices that will determine whether we get to be with loved ones when they die.<br />
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I wait, feeling into the decision.<br />
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I know it will come.<br />
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And then, against many odds, I decide to leave.<br />
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<b>2. Travel</b><br />
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There is a narrative that starts to surface around this time: go home. It is a simple narrative, and a simplifying narrative. It says that everyone should return home. And for some people, it is more or less clear what this means. For some people, it is an easy decision. Home = one place. Family = one unit, or one location, or one person. For some people, home = safety or security, and returning is an option. For others, not. Many people tell me it would make them happy to know that I am with my partner during this time. I know that it will make me happy to be with my partner, and that I will be safe there. But I am deeply resistant to the idea that this is the only narrative, or even the most important narrative of this moment. I have many loves, many lives, many homes. Perhaps more importantly I feel that now, more than ever, we must connect with a wider sense of what it means to be family. I want to use this moment to open up, not to close down. <br />
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In spite of this, I decide to leave, and to travel during the pandemic, knowing that it might be a very long time before this kind of choice is available to me if I stay. I leave knowing that I cannot come back, that Canada has closed its borders, and so has Australia. It is a one way decision. I have spent the past years moving between worlds. I strongly believe that this is a role I have been born into – queerness fluidity not-knowing and inbetweenness are written into me at a very deep level. But I also know that flying in an aeroplane is not the only way to move between worlds. <br />
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In the moment I make my decision to leave, I understand that everything I need is within me. I am keenly aware of my privilege as I spend $2,000 on a one-way ticket to a country in which I have ‘permanent residency’ on unceded lands. I feel something that I have been lucky enough to experience only a few times in my life: that my movement is shaped by government policy, and my freedom is held in place by the decisions made at borders. And at the same time, something shifts inside me as I accept this reality. I trust something deeper, a history that is longer than those borders or governments, and therefore both longer and wider than my life.<br />
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At 7.15am on the morning of my scheduled (evening) departure, I check my flight status online, and find out that my flight has been cancelled and I have been rebooked onto a flight that leaves at 8am. I knew this might happen. We have moved into a world where getting a notification of a change or cancellation is rare. Airlines are barely functioning. I throw my clothes on, call a taxi, and head straight to the airport. I am lucky there are still taxis operating in Montreal. I am lucky that there are still just enough flights that Air Canada can re-route me that day. And then, without any goodbyes, I am on my way to Sydney, via Toronto and Vancouver, unshowered, hungry, my belongings shoved into all the vessels I could appropriate into suitcases on short notice. I contact friends and ask them if they can clean up after me. I left my apartment with dirty dishes in the sink, a half-eaten meal in the fridge, my bedclothes in dissaray from my rushed departure. Many of my belongings are still in Montreal, but belongings feel secondary in this moment. As I struggle through airports over the next 30 hours, lugging a cheap midi keyboard under my arm and three other bags full of stuff, I understand that being in this body is the only thing that matters. I feel like a human being, part of a species, struggling to survive, riding out this collapse that we have made and trying to learn how to plant seeds for a simpler and wiser future.<br />
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I spend hours waiting in Toronto airport, and then again in Vancouver airport. Both airports feel like an embrace between chaos and emptiness. There are no trolleys, barely any people, and almost all the shops are shut. Airport staff, airline staff, and travellers are dotted around in various levels of protective gear. A few people seem to have no protection at all, going about their business, gathering in groups, as if there were no pandemic. Many people, myself included, wear disposible gloves and masks. I see one person in a full body suit, with gloves, mask, and goggles. I am wearing a tailored suit and a silk shirt. I usually wear super comfy clothes when travelling long distance. But this time I wanted to feel glamorous. Glamour as armour, as safety, a talisman to get me safely across the world one last time.<br />
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During the flight, they don’t serve any drinks apart from bottled water, which is limited to two tiny bottles per person. There are no meal services on the short flights, and on the sixteen-hour flight they bring around pre-packed food, once in the evening, once in the morning. There are no ‘special meals’. When one of the crew members realises that I cannot eat the prepackaged meal they have brought around, he sends half of his meal to my seat, so that I have something to eat. I am bowled over by this gesture. Some of the crew members are, understandably, snappy and rude, their fear and exhaustion seeping through. But in this moment this person chooses to be compassionate and I am flooded with gratitude at his kindness. What used to be a transactional relationship within a service economy suddenly feels as if it has transformed into a reciprocal one. Throughout my experience of travelling during the pandemic, I have encountered people who are choosing this as a moment of connection and compassion. Every time it happens, I notice how much it changes me, how it feels like it changes everything.<br />
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<b><br />3. Quarantine</b><br />
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It was two days before leaving that I found out the Australian Government was going to make everyone arriving into the country quarantine for 14 days in “hotels or other accommodation”. I almost lost my nerve. The Australian Government is known for its xenophobia and racism. It sounded terrifying. And when we walked off the plane, and I saw the people from first class and business class, I smiled to myself thinking: we’re all in this together, <i>even the people who travelled first class</i>. I have to say this brought me some joy. It was only later that I realised this was going to work in my favour. Later I realised that because we were all citizens and permanent residents, we would be treated well, and because this ‘we’ included those who have power, financial or otherwise, we would be treated really well. <br />
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The hotel I am housed in is a four star hotel – somewhere I would never be able to afford to stay in for two weeks on my own terms. There is a desk, there are two double beds, there is a beautiful bathroom with a bath and a shower. For two weeks, we are served food three times a day, and can order snacks from the hotel menu. We are given fresh towels and toiletries every two days, and fresh sheets once a week. I can call the hotel staff at any time to make a request or ask a question. After a few days, they even introduce a grocery service, so that families can order extra provisions. At the same time, populations of less importance to the government – refugees, prisoners, the homeless – are denied safe accomodation.<br />
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During this time, people keep asking me if I’m okay – I mean, friends ask, but also mental health nurses call to check on me, the Red Cross calls twice, and medical staff call every day to see if I have any symptoms. One day, I get into a short conversation with the nurse who has called. I tell her I am grateful for the work she is doing, the work they are all doing to look after us. She says that my kind words have made her day, and that I am the only person who has said something positive to her about the work they are doing. I hear on the news and from friends that some people are complaining about ‘prison-like’ conditions in the quarantine hotels because we are not allowed to leave our rooms. I find their phrasing deeply offensive at a time when prisoners are at such high risk of contracting the virus. I dream about a world in which people in prison and others who are in vulnerable situations receive the same treatment as I am receiving. I have a deep hope that all those people who are struggling with their quarantine hotel experience will dedicate their post-quarantine life to prison reform.<br />
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I come to treasure the interactions I have with staff at the hotel, and even with the police. None of these are face to face. Each of our meals comes in a paper bag, and every night someone writes a joke or little message by hand on the bag that houses our dinner. This detail is amazing to me – in the middle of a pandemic, within a police operated quarantine, someone thought this was important. I start drawing little pictures and leaving them out with my dinner bag when I have finished to say thank you. About halfway through my stay, I receive a note form the police:<br />
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Near the end of my stay, I get a knock on the door, and am surprised to find that when I open it there are two people standing outside. Usually there is a knock and when I open the door there is food or towels. This time, two male-presenting white-passing Aussie policemen greet me and say they are doing a room check. They take my name, and my phone number, and then they leave. They are friendly and formal. I find myself longing to keep them there, to make some kind of chat that would mean we would stand around and banter for a while. But I am totally lacking the language of banter that would be appropriate for this situation. I hear others further down the corridor laughing. I close the door and feel a deep longing. Later, it strikes me that I am craving human to human connection. It doesn’t matter who the people are. I never thought I would feel fondly towards the police, or that they would thank me for my drawings. This is an upside-down state for me. It is an indication that things are not as normal, and that what was assumed can be un-assumed. Confusing as they are, these are the moments when I have felt grounded in all of this: the moments when I remember and live into the fact that care and compassion are all that we have.<br />
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<b><br />4. (always) Arriving</b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoqaxOxDRvwXbH5i-AbqD6xwWz5kUXCQW9EHyL-zXWRSJxWIh-ymnDKRJlvD0ydinFarO0s17kVjkIEwKH9gQNEiprjneXIPP7Im5uHpkIn7LA9o2r3cbQAdsp5_OCdFtpzrgh2uFfMkBh/s1600/DSC00734-001.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="1017" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoqaxOxDRvwXbH5i-AbqD6xwWz5kUXCQW9EHyL-zXWRSJxWIh-ymnDKRJlvD0ydinFarO0s17kVjkIEwKH9gQNEiprjneXIPP7Im5uHpkIn7LA9o2r3cbQAdsp5_OCdFtpzrgh2uFfMkBh/s400/DSC00734-001.JPG" width="400" /></a><br />
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Back in my apartment in Sydney. I wake every morning and wonder if I will be arrived yet. This question about arriving is a luxury. I have enough time and space in my life right now to notice that I am often expecting to wake into my childhood bed these days, that I don’t know which season comes next, that the timelines in my life are jumbled around. I know that these are ways in which my body is processing this moment with its own intelligence.<br />
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I have often written or spoken about things like kindness and difficulty, care and (dis)ease, or reciprocity. Now I come back to them as urgent matters. I feel more than ever that we need to re-learn for ourselves how to both give and receive, separate from desire or shame or guilt or greed. How to develop the skills to do this without going into a mode of protection and separation from each other. We are not our money, our love, our resources. But we have a choice to allow those to flow or not flow.<br />
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Turning this world upside down, in the small ways, can bring about change. Or rather, turning this world upside down allows for change. We can make that change ourselves, in small ways, amending the systems that used to be default in our own behaviours. I can make friends with my neighbours, inside and outside the building where I live. I can cook for someone who does not have that skill or cannot find the energy. I can ask my friends to be there for me. This is the work of reciprocity. It is complex, and it is simple.<br />
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Now I am trying to do the work of not returning, not going back into old patterns.<br />
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Now I am trying to feel my way into what reciprocity looks like at a deeper level.<br />
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Now I am looking for allies who are ready to turn things around, or are already doing this work.<br />
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Now I realise that the work of arriving and arriving and arriving I’ve been doing over these years was preparation for this moment of collapse. I am not ready, and maybe that is the point.<br />
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Becoming and becoming and becoming.<br />
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*<br />
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with heartfelt thanks to <a href="http://www.cifas.be/en/workshops/espace-public-confin%C3%A9-rajni-shah-ukaus" target="_blank">CIFAS</a>, who have supported me during this time without need for any outcome, allowing me time and space to process and write and develop the work of reciprocity <br />
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<br />rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-15958991887275375002020-03-22T13:23:00.000+11:002020-04-27T15:13:15.097+10:00Today everything changes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>These words will resonate so differently, even in a week. <br />But here are some thoughts, from where I am right now, <br />March 21st, a marker of Spring or Autumn in some places. <br />2020, a marker of change on this planet. <br />Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. <br />Alone in my apartment. <br />Falling through uncertainty.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6LChJn-W73qCRJeo6Q_-8wtpvJM9gq3IVOqcZGzotg5daCKhw03koowQx1bzeV_oDiUi97VD9KdR3dTFuYOB5LXGvc88IsDdIJ4yk-uekNr0JMxOhGrM5KWNyH7JNu7CkRa3ooegVUFy7/s1600/DSC00645.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="577" data-original-width="1024" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6LChJn-W73qCRJeo6Q_-8wtpvJM9gq3IVOqcZGzotg5daCKhw03koowQx1bzeV_oDiUi97VD9KdR3dTFuYOB5LXGvc88IsDdIJ4yk-uekNr0JMxOhGrM5KWNyH7JNu7CkRa3ooegVUFy7/s400/DSC00645.JPG" title="cardboard sign propped up against a sofa in an apartment. The sign says: TODAY EVERYTHING CHANGES written in marker" width="400" /></a></div>
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I’ll tell you a secret, something I’ve always been a bit ashamed of. When things fall apart, when projects fail, or plans – even big ones – fall through, a small part of me rises up. I feel excited by change, by the possibiltiies of thinking wider, of cancelling and finding another route at another time, of starting all over again. I think of myself as a good leader in these moments because even as I might feel challenged, I love feeling new futures emerge.<br />
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But this time, none of that. Just grief for a whole life lost. My plans this year – to deliver listening workshops and a beautiful <a href="https://www.performingradicalequality.com/how-to-think" target="_blank">symposium</a>, to celebrate my dad’s 80th birthday, to be with my family who live in other countries – all cancelled. Universities closing. Borders closing. Everything closing. I am left with some hard decisions about whether I can or should travel to be with loved ones. And even harder decisions to come.<br />
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When the wildfires raged earlier this year where I and others were living, I thought: this is a time of reckoning. I wrote the last blog post in response to that moment, while wondering how to write from what felt like the end of a world. At that time, I felt a certain horror that everything kept functioning while the world was on fire. But now I feel the horror of everything shutting down and breaking apart. It is this, it turns out, this virus moving very much like wildfire, that provides the moment of reckoning. And I am not ready for how much that reckoning hurts.<br />
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I have a cardboard sign I made for the climate march in Montreal last year. It says, "Today everything changes." It was the first sign I ever made for a rally. I felt so proud of it. I brought it with me to a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/109923429111295/videos/1001117226908355/UzpfSTI4OTE1NTg4MTY1MDoxMDE1NjQyMzc1NzMwNjY1MQ/" target="_blank">performance</a> I did that night, and then I brought it home with me. Ever since, I have looked at it and it has looked at me. A kind of daily impasse has developed. I started to wonder what it even meant. <br />
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But now everything has changed. <br />
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What I haven’t done yet is slowed down enough to really feel the changing rhythms of this city, this mountain, to know these birds. What I haven’t done, in a long time, is felt into the rhythms of sleeping and waking without electronic input. What I haven’t done is let go of my plans. Instead, I have postponed them in my mind, to carry on with later.<br />
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Some plans will get postponed.<br />
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Some plans will get postponed indefinitely.<br />
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I want to remember that I have everything I need inside me, now and always – not in a ‘my’ and ‘mine’ kind of way, but in the sense that we are universes. In the sense that looking in is already also looking out, if we let it be that way. In the sense that my inside is not separate from the world. And the world as I have known and lived it is breaking open.<br />
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Many years ago my friend <a href="https://about.me/marktrezona" target="_blank">Mark Trezona</a> gave me a pack of cards he had made. They were designed to help with running an Action Learning Set. Each had an open question that would help someone think through a problem they were confronting in their lives. I still use this pack, and treasure it. But there are two questions from the pack that I carry inside me:<br />
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What is the most radical thing you could do? <br />
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and<br />
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What is the simplest thing you could do?*<br />
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I wrote in my last blog post that I have been struggling to argue for listening in a world that needs action. I was thinking about the way that listening in a time of urgency sometimes feels inadequate or even silly. And I still feel it. I feel the trace of those thoughts in here, in this moment. But I also feel something different. I feel that listening is here, right here, urgently and proudly present in this moment. It’s not feeling ashamed any more in the face of activism. Today listening and being are activism. This moment, a deep acknowledgment that we are intricately bound whether we like it or not. That my touch, my breath itself, affect your breath, your capacity to live. The virus and its behaviours are us.<br />
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As we find ourselves in global shutdown, breakdown, and the sorrows that come with this collapse, I have a feeling that we must do what is at once simplest and most radical. Take to the roots. Know or trust that we have what we need within us. And listen in before we move forward.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*the actual questions are: ‘What is the most radical thing you could do to get what you want?’ and ‘What is the simplest useful thing you could do?’ but they have simplified in my head</span><br />
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<br />rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-71196163476014176392020-01-20T23:50:00.000+11:002020-03-03T09:34:34.242+11:00Listening / in a time of urgency<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It seems I have a tradition here of first signalling another blog post that has inspired me to finally sit down and write this one. Today it is <a href="https://tinyletter.com/sophiemayer/letters/umb" target="_blank">‘umb’</a> by So Mayer, which – exactly one month ago – flung me into the present moment, reminding me that writing doesn’t have to go somewhere else, be something else. That it can sit right in what is happening, even when that thing is unspeakable, hard to process, unprecedented, and beyond the confines of this language system I have found myself bound to.<br />
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So’s words don’t try to move beyond a state of (n)umbness, but to speak from it. The deep strong resonances their words create in my body remind me that the work I am constantly trying to make happen in the world is about just this: providing places and times when humans can come together and do nothing, move nothing forward. Places and times when we can be together without the need to also demonstrate that we are here.<br />
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It’s quite hard to say that out loud with conviction. The debate about whether this listening-gathering work I do has any worth goes around and around inside my head, as well as passing between me and brilliant others who do activist work that allies listening with politics in more obvious ways than mine. As I write it, now and every time, I feel ‘need for change’ and ‘need for action’ telling me that I should be doing something different. How can I argue that we should stay still, be together, without action, in a moment like this? The world is quite literally on fire.<br />
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“Numb. Succumb. A rhyme lost and found in the silence of an excrescent letter is a signal alerting us to be ready. To hold, open, even as we are going under. To let things echo in the hollow, however uncomfortable and hard – in their complexity, in their absoluteness, in their burden – to speak or to keep silent. </div>
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In that strange, held, horrible, heart-hollowing moment between the two – speech and silence – in the –umb, is listening.” </div>
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– <a href="https://tinyletter.com/sophiemayer/letters/umb" target="_blank">So Mayer, umb</a></div>
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The blog post I began writing back in September was about a series of events I recently organised called <a href="http://storytelling.concordia.ca/events/listening-tables-i" target="_blank">Listening Tables</a> – gatherings in which a group of up to 25 people collectively performs an act of reorientation, attempting to meet across difference from a place of listening, while taking on roles that we are not usually assigned within mainstream culture. In other words, an attempt to literally change who gets a seat at the table, who is heard, and how listening happens. <br />
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In a document about the project, I describe it as follows.<br />
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Each event will take place in two halves:<br />
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From 5-6.30pm ten people will drop into a place of listening, and collectively discover the words that arise from there. This is the Listening Table. Audience members who are not taking part in the Listening Table will have the opportunity to listen in via headphones from another room.<br />
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From 6.30-8pm we will enjoy a more convivial gathering in which everyone will be invited into a loosely held discussion together, shaped by the Listening Table that has just taken place.</blockquote>
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It sounds joyful, doesn’t it? That’s the betrayal of words. The reality of doing this work is that it feels like a full body encounter with the stuckness, stubborness, and confrontedness of human beings facing change. It is some of the most complicated and challenging work I have ever done.<br />
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As anyone who has attended a workshop or gathering that I’ve organised in the past few years knows, I like to hold space by proposing parameters that challenge default modes of communicating. Something like:<br />
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No questions. <br />
Silence and speaking are equally valid. <br />
Anything is welcome. <br />
Challenge your usual behaviours, so that those who are usually heard might find this a place in which to practise listening, and those who are usually unable to come to voice might find enough time and space to be able to speak. <br />
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These parameters always provoke relief/revelation and frustration in equal measure. By which I mean that there are always people who are frustrated by the amount of silence, who find the invitation to listen constraining, challenging, even violent; and there are always people who find the very same invitation a huge relief, a revelation. I have repeatedly been surprised that the ways in which people interpret the invitation fall so clearly down race lines: those who are used to being heard tend to find the experience silencing and oppressive, and are often the people in the room who pass as white and/or male; those who are used to not being heard are more likely to find it generous, and generative, even tender.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF9a2s29uAukA_NxARLGLR3DNCDEaqD_fchvVb-XVkJ1D2LXXc_dLALLF0RNys5yFXkSJecLHzEgK9LLv8l6Po_uied2Bz9xYhlBVcmTpu4jhQ-6OYHSNjJtlDZzP1j1mlvlrk-ld8UED_/s1600/DSC00241.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="902" data-original-width="1600" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF9a2s29uAukA_NxARLGLR3DNCDEaqD_fchvVb-XVkJ1D2LXXc_dLALLF0RNys5yFXkSJecLHzEgK9LLv8l6Po_uied2Bz9xYhlBVcmTpu4jhQ-6OYHSNjJtlDZzP1j1mlvlrk-ld8UED_/s640/DSC00241.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(image from Listening Table I)</td></tr>
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Listening has a relationship with the unspoken, of course. When a room of people are collectively attempting to listen, there will be things that are not spoken that might otherwise have been voiced. And there will be things that are unspoken because they cannot yet be voiced. And there will be silencing, of self, perhaps, or coming to voice. And these things will be felt in bodies with histories, threaded through with the resonances of other stories from other lives, before and after, and alongside: our peers, mentors, parents, siblings, lovers, friends, and those who we pass by without realising that they changed our lives. <br />
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And yet, the invitation to listen is not an invitation to keep things unspoken. For me, it is actually quite the contrary. When we attempt to listen, we can more clearly perceive the extent of what is not heard, what is not said, and how speaking or declaring are only a part of what we share, navigate, and negotiate together with other humans. The things that are unspoken sit in the room with us. In the act of sharing listening, a slower, more careful dialogue unfolds. Unless it is arrested.<br />
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*<br />
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Listening Safety Whiteness.<br />
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Already those three words, sitting next to each other, do so much work. And that work lands differently in our different bodies. What is obvious in seeing those three words together changes as they are read by different eyes or heard by different ears.<br />
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When I say that I’ve been surprised that people’s behaviours so often fall along race lines, perhaps what I mean is that I’m disappointed at the impossibility of the task. My goal is not to reorient spaces that usually centre whiteness. My goal is to do the listening work that becomes possible having performed this reorientation. But it is hard not to get stuck reeling at the apparent enormity of the first task. The reorientation is such a surprise for some that they seem to experience a strong sense of vertigo. In response to this sensation, they hold on tight. And it is hard, if not impossible, to hold on tight and listen. <br />
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I want to keep safe those who are usually harmed within those spaces. <br />
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But I also want to let go of the illusion that I can keep anyone safe.<br />
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During the time that I've been running Listening Tables, I have come back to those three words again and again. I've been forced to feel the violences that run through a room when they are brought into proximity. And I've been forced to confront my own limits, my own desires, my own hurt.<br />
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I’ve been living and working on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people these past few months, witnessing the immense fires that are beyond my human understanding (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/opinion/australia-fires-aboriginal-people.html" target="_blank">though caused by human, and specifically colonial, actions</a>) growing and changing every day. I have been trying to sit with the idea that there is no going 'back to normal'. That we are not okay, we are not okay, we are not okay. How is it possible to sit with these feelings without turning completely inwards with despair?<br />
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There have been moments in the last few months when I’ve felt <a href="https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/07/28/feminist-wonder/" target="_blank">shattered</a> by these Listening Tables, and wondered whether I have the capacity to continue this work. You might think that the recent wildfires would have me turn my back on this kind of thing in favour of something more on the ground. It certainly feels strange to prioritise sitting in a quiet room, listening for what might arise between a group of strangers, while the world ends violently around us. But as it turns out, I believe in this work. I believe that, if nothing else, it reveals the underlying structures that hold us – the histories and ignorances that we would like to think belong in other bodies, somewhere out there. And it asks us to to sit with those feelings, knowing that we are not okay, together. <br />
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Trusting that the change will come wider and longer with this pause.<br />
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<br />rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-10533882952678484132019-07-11T08:50:00.002+10:002019-07-11T08:51:49.396+10:00(Too many notes) on: armouring, smiling, wonder, killjoys, applause, racism, and reciprocityThis is pretty much a mash up of blog posts I’ve drafted and never finished over the last couple of years. Today, I decide they are all related. Today I publish this mix of thoughts, all joined up without the lines, differently dated and side by side. Find what calls to you. Make your own lines and alliances. Jump in and out. Or don’t. I share them for my own pleasure, and warmly invite you to be alongside me if it’s our moment.<br />
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<b><br />smiling </b>[06/19]<br />
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I was watching back some video of myself the other day. This is not something I usually do. The video was of me describing something quite painful, an incident that was bound up in racism. I was watching it back – listening, in fact – in order to transcribe my own words to help me prepare for a talk I was about to give. I was transcribing my words in order to understand something of my own language around resistance, invisibility, voicelessness, and my own shadows. But what I noticed most of all as I transcribed this video is that I smile throughout. Not a small smile, but a broad all-teeth smile. The one people often compliment me on. When I look back at it, I see that smile as a grimace, and as armour. It says: here I am, all armour in position, ready to make myself vulnerable at your pleasure. It’s disturbing. Always smiling, always ready to be in agreement, always the one to find a solution, never wanting to disrupt too much. The smile, I realised, is a pre-emptive way of being in the world. It foresees rejection, fear, and difficulty, and is underlined by shame. It offers protection. It says: I am already smiling, so how can you harm me? But the harm is already done.<a href="https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/02/02/smile/" target="_blank"> Smile!</a><br />
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<b><br />applause </b>[12/17]<br />
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I’ve always found the applause of theatre audiences troubling. I dutifully applaude at the end of most shows, but somewhere in me I have always had a feeling that I was in trouble. What I mean by this is that when I have seen a really powerful show, and then it ends, I often don’t feel like applauding, so when I applaude I am following along with a convention that feels fundamentally wrong in that moment. I’m troubled by the idea of what that applause does, and what it stands for. My experience is always that applause comes thick and fast, often moments before a show has finished or a final echo of sound has finished resonating. It is as if audience members want to leave the experience behind as quickly as possible – closing the door on whatever has been opened during the performance, to return to a more familiar terrain. The applause is closely followed by questions about what we all feel about the show we’ve seen. Did you like it? What did you think of it? Did we have a good time?<br />
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A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be in the audience for Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette.* The show was everything I have read about it – funny, devastating, painful, honest. And like many people, I would describe it as one of the best shows I have ever seen. But it also brought something into focus for me, about what it means to be in audience and how that is related to being alive in the world with other people. Because at the end of the show, after a standing ovation and two short bows, many of us in tears, Hannah Gadsby left the stage, and the house lights went up and everyone filed out of the theatre. And it kind of broke my heart that it felt possible for us to walk out of the theatre like that, to move back into sociality so easily, with a round of applause. Because the show had been difficult and confronting, and had opened up something so rare that I feel like it’s barely touched on in most shows I have seen. <br />
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And yes it was all the stuff before that led up to this moment, but I realised that this moment <i>always</i> breaks my heart a little. When we sit together and share something like that, something that is about what happens when we are in a theatre, and that is simultaneously about what happens when we look at each other in the world - how we make stories about ourselves and about others, how we cause violence to each other, how we are capable of so much more - when we see something like that, and then we are left sitting in a room together, I want to know that we are not capable of simply walking back out into our lives. I want to know that something like that changes us, that it allows us to relate to each other differently, that maybe we take a moment to see whether another person is okay. I want to know that we could sit together quietly before dispersing.<br />
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It told me so much about how we function as a society inside late capitalism [& the performance I saw was at the Sydney Opera House, fully resonant with a violent colonial present] that I had been sitting in a room with hundreds of people, and we had shared an incredibly moving experience, and many of us were weeping, and yet when the house lights went up most people went to the bar and made chat with the people they already knew, or travelled home. Transaction completed. There was no room for processing, no room for quietness or difficulty or awkwardness, no room for messiness, no room for being together across difference. It was almost as if the being together had never happened.<br />
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* I saw Nanette in the theatre, not in its later Netflix version, and I think these are fundamentally different experiences<br />
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<b><br />wonder </b>[10/17]<br />
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A few weeks ago I began a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/FeministKilljoysRG/" target="_blank">Feminist Killjoys Reading Group</a> on Darug land in Western Sydney. Each day we read a blog post from Sara Ahmed’s feministkilljoys.com and we talked about our own experiences in relation to the ideas in that blog post. On the second day, I introduced the blog post called ‘<a href="https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/07/28/feminist-wonder/" target="_blank">Feminist Wonder</a>’. In it, Ahmed writes about wonder as something that is not necessarily outside history, or outside politics, but that brings historicity into view as something made. Something that has been made and can therefore be unmade. And then she writes about shattering:<br />
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“I am interested in how consciousness of gender (say, as a way of directing human traffic) can be a world consciousness that can leave us shattered. But shattering is also what enables us to become alive to possibility. Becoming feminist can inject life into a world by allowing you to recognise not only that things acquire shape over time, but that this shape is not necessary or inevitable; that possibilities are not always lost, even when we have given them up.”<br />
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This is what it felt like to me at the end of Hannah Gadsby’s show, like the world had been exposed as made, in a moment of both horror and wonder. The show left me feeling shattered. I think this is a good word for it. And the theatre, as I have known it, is one of the places where I can experience this shattering feeling without needing to put myself back together too soon. A world made and unmade. Constructed through wonder. In the company of others.<br />
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And I ask myself: what do you need in order to feel safe enough to become shattered?<br />
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<b><br />racism </b>[07/18]<br />
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I recently published something that had at its centre my own experience of a racist incident. An incident that you might call ‘mildly racist’. But these are the ones that pull at my guts, and I have come to believe that while some racism can cause more immediate harm than other forms of racism, the idea that some racism might be ‘mild’ is misleading. The small things are perhaps the most poisonous. It is in the detail that the violence is rooted. <br />
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But you see the thing is that when I published this something, I knew the fallout would be too great, and I left it out. I left the word ‘racist’ out of the writing. Cowardly? Maybe. … because… it was minor / I did not want to deal with the consequences of calling this person out / my life has been filled with these minor incidents of eradication / they seem not worth telling. I am, finally, able to feel them deeply, but I have no idea what to do with them. They do not feel like they warrant attention from a wider audience. And yet, they have shaped me, held my body in place, and taught me to be very quiet for a very long time. And now I want to do something with all those moments, because they are gathering, and they are teaching me that it is not an indulgence but a responsibility to both feel them and share them with others.<br />
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<b>feminist killjoys </b>[12/18]<br />
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“If we think with and through orientation, we might allow the moments of disorientation to gather, almost as if they were bodies around a different table. We might, in the gathering, face a different way. Queer objects might take us to the very limits of social gathering, even when they still lead us to gather at the table. Indeed, to live out a politics of disorientation might be to sustain wonder about the very forms of social gathering.” – Sara Ahmed, <i>Queer Phenomenology</i><br />
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This is one of my favourite Sara Ahmed quotes. I come back to it again and again, finding myself differently in relation to it. I read it out loud at some of the first sessions of the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group. To set the scene. To say: you are welcome here. To say: we can do this differently. And to say: but it will take work – the work of sustaining wonder about the very forms of social gathering.<br />
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How attention is distributed is political. It is the most political thing.<br />
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Several years later, the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group continues. Now there is a core group of five who meet regularly and organise monthly events at which anyone is welcome. It is a growing community. And creating this community is one of the ways of saying: it takes work to be a killjoy, and we need each other in order to be able to continue doing this work. In order for this work to exist, part of the work needs to be the work of finding solidarity. And not parcelling each other up in the process.<br />
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The other day, I spent time with some of the killjoys reflecting on the work we have done so far. One of the reflections was: We have survived. We took this as celebration. Survival as celebration. We all knew what this meant. To have continued, to have survived, means we are doing the work.<br />
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<b><br />reciprocity </b>[05/19]<br />
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I keep having this conversation with friends, peers, people I’m mentoring. I find it is particularly something that comes up around people who have been raised as girls and women, and that it is particularly heightened in racialised bodies. It is an inability to receive. A difficulty in finding oneself worthy of receiving a gift, a kindness, attention, gratitude, or praise. It is an inability to perceive worth in self. But the conversation I keep coming back to is about reciprocity. What it takes to create/allow flow in the world, to create/allow community and conversation and belonging. That it takes both give and receive. The ability to be generous and to take a stand in one’s own body and belong there. They are always linked. To be able to receive what is being offered, to be able to both see and be seen. This work is transformative, and hard, and necessary for survival. <a href="https://feministkilljoysrg.tumblr.com/post/184516350001/feminist-killjoys-reading-group-open-session" target="_blank">reciprocity</a><br />
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<br />rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-18586483631277319012018-06-11T12:44:00.002+10:002020-03-03T06:56:15.036+11:00choreography<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>I want it to stand on its own, and in relationship to your reading as much as anything. But also, I feel I should let you know, in case you want this, that the writing emerges following <a href="https://www.artshouse.com.au/ourprograms/time_place_space-nomad/" target="_blank">these</a> </i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><a href="https://www.artshouse.com.au/in-production/time_place_space-nomad/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span> </a><a href="https://criticalpath.org.au/program/sharing-experimental-choreographic-research-residency-with-rajni-shah/" target="_blank">two</a> residencies that I have been lucky enough to spend time inside these past two months. It is also written in response to and alongside others, who are acknowledged at the end of this post.</i></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfiJZo5xEpfM7x7h7SkT8F42_bebyJgDIdVY8EwjsxY87_lEPcO9GPwfRIp7GFAAl7kFsEF7NQytr32NONoESJ_7S3ulVWFzqN8My80Z0dyInrKveKQ3lrKpCyT6L7l2SZaXhZO8uuiBdN/s1600/Artist-Rajni-Shah.-Photo-credit-Alexandra-Talamo-FOR-WEB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfiJZo5xEpfM7x7h7SkT8F42_bebyJgDIdVY8EwjsxY87_lEPcO9GPwfRIp7GFAAl7kFsEF7NQytr32NONoESJ_7S3ulVWFzqN8My80Z0dyInrKveKQ3lrKpCyT6L7l2SZaXhZO8uuiBdN/s640/Artist-Rajni-Shah.-Photo-credit-Alexandra-Talamo-FOR-WEB.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />Dear <a href="https://twitter.com/tr0ublemayer" target="_blank">So</a>,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Your letter* arrives and says to me: what are you waiting for?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> Your words begin to articulate my landscapes of</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> - what? -</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> well many things, one of which is,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> really, a deep deep fail.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />failure of imagination. inability to comprehend.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">not magic, not beauty, not flow.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br />And my question: how to write about this in words without describing a kind of success?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>**</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">My question, not yours. But perhaps in relation to your:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://tinyletter.com/sophiemayer/letters/dance" target="_blank"><i> Legs being words, in this instance. I forgot how to dance.</i></a> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">and</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://tinyletter.com/sophiemayer/letters/dance" target="_blank"><i> To know that we hold – as our inheritance from our families, our cultures, our relationships, our labour – inside us all that makes us, for each other.</i></a></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In response, I offer my own stories: <br /> of language, of forgetting how to dance, and of what makes us, for each other.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The language</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">an armour</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">but inside it</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">an arm.*</span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Saturday. I am seated with others around a bonfire. I am brimming with the knowledge that I must speak tonight. I clumsily stand in my power. In front of, say, thirty or forty people. Night time. <a href="https://www.gunditjmirring.com/nativetitle" target="_blank">Gunditjmara land</a>. This, I say, matters. Sorry, I say, for my words will not be articulate. I am speaking, I say, as a woman of colour. Sorry, I say, for the trembling in my voice and the rage and sorrow coursing through my body. Because I have not been trained to speak this way. I have been trained to keep things quiet.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So it is that I speak.*</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">[<a href="https://www.vividsydney.com/event/music/cat-power" target="_blank">Chan Marshall, in the concert hall at the Sydney Opera House</a>, to a wall of over-excited audience:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“There’s a lot more I could say.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> But I’m respecting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sorry … over-respecting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I’m over-respecting.”]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">and then</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Someone else speaks. <br />A direct attack on my words. <br />A comment made with all the love and anger and pain of another life, preparing for a different battle.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">- and lands</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">as intended</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">in my body</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">which is suddenly twenty years younger, and reeling.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />Time, in this moment, does not serve to heal, but jumps backwards to protect.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />My greatest protection has been to listen, and not to speak.</span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But this is just the setting / a prelude / to what I brought into the next room. The question.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The question relates to</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">or</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">is also</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">this question:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <br /> Is it possible to work with ‘choreography’ <i>the ordering of bodies</i> without making museums of ourselves?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br />The question lives alongside questions of ambition and voice and career and success. Which means it lives alongside the tantalising feeling of passing and moving smoothly through the world. Alongside the act of viewing and the act of listening. Alongside terms like ‘dialogical’ and ‘engaged’ and ‘interactive’ as segregators.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Alongside my desire to dance, to be danced, to be seen to be dancing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Alongside my desire to speak.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">or</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">To be read.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">To read a body onstage.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In my earlier shows, I have faced this as a confrontation. <br />I have played out vulnerability until it was real. I was very good at this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But this time, I wanted to see what would happen if I was my inheritance, my families, cultures, relationships, labour. <br />If I was my queerness and brownness.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I couldn’t. do it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Not yet.</span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**</span></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We could have been intimate. And sometimes we were.</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We could have been kind. And sometimes we were.</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We could have been dancing, and sometimes we were.</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i>
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It was not the solidarity I had imagined. It was harder than that. But it was solidarity, and it was trust. Deepest trust, to continue to show up. To continue to show up in full doubt. To continue to show up in anger and (self) hatred. And to mark it through, in conversations and movements, even if dull, even if far, even if terrifyingly absent.</span></span><br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="321" data-original-width="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib1yvZRUyTpjEDLAWWLOR9cj6OPeldihPTwKjfSmmNQpzxWbug1Rzzyqo1o5tgO1_tcbNaCa0oBOLc7neeiHTawcF98ZXTcXdGQuaaeO26xb8JOLMVVJJD43RzTbOb_sLJfwu7nziayU84/s1600/ropes-notebook.jpg" /></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>The idea</i>,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> <br />we wrote, </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <br /> <i> is not to make a coherent piece of choreography, but to interrupt, challenge, and contest the assumptions embedded in terms like</i></span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <br /><br /><br /> ‘choreography’ or</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> ‘innovation’ or</span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> ‘experimental’.</i>*</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />[It’s funny. I told a friend before we began the residency that I hoped we might give ourselves permission to make something that felt “abhorrent”. I had no idea that I was going to use that word until it happened. Now I feel my way into it differently. I feel my body trying to shudder away from its own skin. And I think:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The language an armour but inside it an arm.]</span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">An interviewer asks Arundhati Roy,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“Do you worry at all about comparison being made between the two books, or are you fully prepared for that?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Arundhati Roy replies that she does not worry.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The interviewer persists: “Okay let me ask that another way. Do you think this is a better book?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Arundhati Roy replies</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> “There’s no competition.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br />She replies</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> “It’s not about success.”</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br />She replies</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“It’s not about critics or bestseller lists. Because I know – I mean, sorry to say this but this is the truth – that when people read the book, and think they’re judging the book, Anjum and Tilo and the dogs and the vultures are also judging the reader … really truly, I mean … this is the truth.”*</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And in that one moment, without agression, I hear an act of decolonisation.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><i>It is not only about your way of reading</i>, she is saying. <i>It is a meeting place</i>.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Do not</span></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">(she says to me) </span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> make assumptions</span></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <br /><br /> about how meaning and value are constructed.</span></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br /><br /> <br /> There are always so many things happening at once.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">***</span></span></b></div>
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">NOTES of various kinds</span></span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">* image by Alex Tálamo and Rajni Shah<br /><br />*Since it arrived as if a letter, in my inbox. Since I received it that way. And since it is written on a platform called tinyletter. I receive your words as letters. - And to the reader of this blog post – know that its writing began as a response to <a href="https://tinyletter.com/sophiemayer/letters/dance" target="_blank">these fine fine words</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*I can’t help thinking about Sara Ahmed, whose words embolden my life. She has written many excellent words about arms and willfulness and feminisms. <a href="https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/10/19/a-feminist-army/" target="_blank">See here</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">* [thank you <a href="https://twitter.com/FugitiveImages" target="_blank">Andrea Zimmerman</a> for what you said in 2015. I have never forgotten it. you expressed disappointment that I stood on stage and spoke from script after <a href="http://autumnbling.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-we-are-seen-or-bananas-incident.html" target="_blank">the bananas incident</a>. you urged me to be braver in what I shared, not to be afraid of my own rage. you noticed that I was very good at providing the conditions for others to be vulnerable, but that I did not invite this of myself. and I have carried your words with me, now they are … (funny) … ripe.]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*Thank you is not enough. to Alex Tálamo and Victoria Hunt who were inside that process alongside me. the shell of which lies here: <a href="http://performancespace.com.au/2018-experimental-choreographic-residency">http://performancespace.com.au/2018-experimental-choreographic-residency</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">* <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2017/jun/28/arundhati-roy-on-the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-books-podcast">https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2017/jun/28/arundhati-roy-on-the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-books-podcast</a></span></span>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-29661377785487675022017-01-06T09:47:00.000+11:002019-06-10T03:32:16.452+10:00Some days air to hip.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUXcYBkGGaVQ8l3MPapaAZon7M4XwQCV-Wi3iRHuzXuop-RNzWySymaYYsIPngh29ZY3xZSNOomK4vsNAEF4BvCYNkq97B8JFG5rEo_7P4mKizJMzF6wdtehRL2z99838l4u5knB9hrorQ/s1600/2017-01-06+07.51.29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUXcYBkGGaVQ8l3MPapaAZon7M4XwQCV-Wi3iRHuzXuop-RNzWySymaYYsIPngh29ZY3xZSNOomK4vsNAEF4BvCYNkq97B8JFG5rEo_7P4mKizJMzF6wdtehRL2z99838l4u5knB9hrorQ/s640/2017-01-06+07.51.29.jpg" title="Some days air to hip." width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /><br /><br /><br />Some days air to hip. Some skeleton. Passage through the
body and the week. A fizzy head and shoulders on Monday. Some days the white
men in my life watch over me. They read these words over my shoulder. They tell me what is funny and what is not funny.
They tell me what to avoid, what is too much. They align me with a certain way
of being in the world: not the mainstream, but the alternative white scene I
suppose you could call it. The world orbits around whiteness so hard. I
understand early on that there is something to understand and that it is outside
of me. Meanwhile, I spend the morning sending good energy and breath down into
my hip, because I can soften it this way, healing myself.<br /><br /></span></div>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-12011744716717140022016-08-26T10:06:00.000+10:002016-09-02T08:46:46.519+10:00Inarticulacy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBQ1M-DdRamnz9g_ILbsv9xfOsnOckKu1PQCF5aiTMKQ6yD7t_VCM1MBZfwc9SX19QCDvNVqnPAAPGgKuG8XOEeg7sje03vn7Mm9ecB6wruXUuFksvpJwMTTFCZUvh27aYvWUzhpJIkoeI/s320/3+image+by+Rajni+Shah.jpg" width="240" /></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><br /><br /><br />I noticed today that I am becoming less and less able to be articulate on cue. It feels troubling, because I rely on articulacy for <a href="http://autumnbling.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/passing-phd.html" target="_blank">a certain kind of passing</a> - it is how I have managed to stay afloat thus far in life: by using words and voice to become convincing, accommodating, educated - in the way that I speak, the way I string words together. Losing a grip on this feels difficult, but I am writing this to remind myself that I also welcome it.</i><br /><br /><br /><br />1. <br />I am at a public talk in a town hall, a panel on feminisms. I am in the audience. I have something to say, something that expresses a frustration I feel, but I cannot quite find the courage to say it. Then two other women speak. They speak from a position of difference, and they speak about difference, about who is not in the room, about which writers are not being referenced, about alternative histories, and about how a simple inclusivity may not always be the best or most appropriate tactic. They speak from a place of power but they acknowledge that there is a lack of invitation for their power in the room.<br /><br />I hear myself in their words. I realise that this is the moment when I might be able to say something, so I raise my hand. And then I speak. Voice noticeably trembling. I speak like someone who has never spoken before, like someone who is not used to speaking in public. I speak about who is already perceived as articulate and who is not. I speak about desire and about anger. I speak about the chairperson as a person of certain privilege and how this certain privilege has allowed her to be in a position of privilege as chairperson. I speak about how it feels important and near-impossible to acknowledge these things. I speak, as an artist, about our responsibility to create structures within which ‘awkward silences’ can be held<span style="font-family: inherit;">:</span> structures of gathering within which we can pause, reflect, feel angered or at odds; structures within which we have time to feel challenged and confronted, and in which it is not already time to move on so that we can go home and forget, but in which it is time to find a way to be with each other.<br /><br />The trembling in my body and voice. The desire to say these things without flipping them from being inarticulate to being articulate. Being inarticulate mostly means becoming invisible, unable to be heard or seen. But being articulate also means a kind of invisibility, a kind of eliding with the main-stream of the argument, gliding into the space of speaking that has already been set up or decided. Sometimes I <a href="http://chrisgoodeandco.podbean.com/e/thompson%E2%80%99s-live-s3-ep05-7th-february-2016-rajni-shah/" target="_blank">give myself permission to not reply immediately</a>, and this helps. But if I have not given myself this permission in advance, then I am carried away by the rush and desire towards articulacy.<br /><br />When people speak of diversity, so often they mean diversity within the terms of expression that are already understood. So someone who speaks, say, in the context of a debate about feminism in a town hall in North Melbourne which also happens to be an arts centre, has to speak in a way that is already able to be heard in that context. If they speak in a way that is not already understood as articulate, their difference is so different that it simply cannot be registered within the frame of the room. I am not talking about myself here. I was afraid to speak, yes, but my language is exactly the language that could be understood in the context. I am talking about the many people who may not even have felt invited into the room.<br /><br /><br /><br />2. <br />An academic panel. I am presenting a paper, alongside two other people. I have prepared my paper well, it is clear and articulate, and it is well received. And then it is time for ‘questions’. I express a desire to not engage in the format. I try to say that my paper, the one I just read, the one you said you enjoyed, was exactly about this problem: about how the spaces in which we gather, and the ways in which we are invited to be together in those spaces, affect what is audible and visible within them. I try to express that the format of the question and answer session is a problem for me, bec<span style="font-family: inherit;">ause it is already rigged to repeat a certain performance <span style="font-family: inherit;">of knowledge, <span style="font-family: inherit;">because </span>I want to question its very format</span></span>. But there is not a way for these words to be heard. The format is set. And so we continue.<br /><br />I was born in Oxford, England. I have a certain accent. I went to a school and a university where I learnt to be articulate in ways that would buy me privilege. I know that I have the skills to be received as articulate. And yet, during this Q&A, I was deeply inarticulate. I said muddled things, I did not succeed in answering the questions that were being asked. I did not succeed in bringing myself into the room during that moment. And since then, I have replayed that scene many times, knowing now how to speak articulately about the inarticulacy I was experiencing. Later is always easier.<br /><br />And yet, what bothers me is that I have this feeling that I was exposed – not as the person with the gentle voice and the Oxfordshire accent who can put you at ease, who can be heard if she needs to, and who can be accommodated and accommodating if she needs to – but as something else, <a href="http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Anne-Carson-The-Gender-of-Sound.pdf" target="_blank">woman maybe</a>, she who cannot come to the point, she who does not understand how to become heard and at the same time cannot stop speaking. What terrifies me and saddens me is that there was not a place for that kind of voice in the room.<br /><i><br /><br /><br />The feeling is of having the words that we wanted, but only having them later. Or of having the feeling but not the words. Or of having the words, but they were not the kind of words that could be heard in that particular setting. Or of having the right words for that particular setting but having the wrong tone or accent or pitch or body to be accepted as someone who could be heard.<span style="background-color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></span></span></i><span style="background-color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span><i><span style="background-color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></span></span></i></span></span>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-83178971270518656952016-05-02T18:35:00.000+10:002016-07-28T09:53:20.093+10:00Giving up and giving away<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><br />I could see you were standing there fierce with something but I didn’t know how to ask you. </i><br /><br /><b><br />A while back</b>, some years ago now, I wrote <a href="http://autumnbling.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/the-big-fat-finger-of-disappointment.html" target="_blank">a long blog post about disappointment</a>. It was around the time that I gave up being what I have come to call a ‘career artist’. And of course, in the process of giving up, of letting go, I found that all kinds of other things emerged and continue to emerge as new structures for life, and as life-giving structures. But I’ve kept thinking about it. We have such narratives of keeping going, especially in the arts, but really everywhere. We encourage each other to keep going, to find a way through, to keep afloat, to stay on board. And it’s problematic, this urge to keep going, keep succeeding, keep producing, keep showing up. Not only because it fails to acknowledge that there is value in stopping, pausing, not being productive – that there is value in creating spaces where people might do those things together, as part of a social rhythm. But also because it’s a plea to not diverge.<br /><br />There are times when it’s not possible to go on; when it’s not possible to go on in the ways in which we are expected to go on. When ‘progress’, in the narrow definition with which that term is used in western models, is the very thing that is holding us within dis-abling structures. In those moments that are dark and difficult, we might be able to see something more of ourselves and our interactions, if only we were brave enough to look into them for a sustained moment together.<br /><br /><br /><b>A few months ago</b> now, in February 2016, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/731168953649710" target="_blank">some people gathered in a small room in London and celebrated endings together</a>. We were an odd bunch, and a small bunch. It was part of a long process of ending something: ending a company, ending a possiblity, and confronting some impossibilities. It was a beautiful moment that felt solemn and light at the same time, that was filled with goodwill and also a kind of refusal to yield. For me, it marked my move away from the UK for a few years, my move away from the idea of building a career as an artist in which I needed to constantly evidence ‘success’, a move away from (professional) relationships based on sustaining a social and operational model that felt immoral and uneasy at best. It was a giving up, a letting go, a giving away. But those three things have very different connotations. To give up is still very much seen as a failure to move forward, and to move forward is too often perceived as the ultimate goal. But giving up is something I have been doing a lot of.<br /><br /><br /><b>Recently </b>I watched a <a href="http://www.complicite.org/live-stream.php" target="_blank">livestream</a> of a theatre show about a white man’s journey into the Amazon rainforest and his encounter with some of the people who lived there. It was a show about a white man’s journey and it was performed by a white man who already has a good reputation as a theatre-maker. It was performed in theatres across the country. And many people I know loved this show, they thought it was sublime, and exciting, and somehow they found it not to be racist or problematic that this white man was standing on a stage telling this story in big theatres. But I found that no matter how much the man in the show talked about a complex web of presence and authorship, he was writing the end to that story as his story, as the story of him standing on a stage and receiving critical acclaim. He was buying into the myth of authorship and authority and colonialism even as he claimed to disavow and disrupt it. He made that story end with him standing on a stage telling it. Even if I had enjoyed the show itself, I’m not sure I could ever understand why he made the choice for it to be <i>him </i>telling the story, at this moment in time, the choice to place <i>his </i>body on the stage in that way. It baffled me. It could be that this was his way to look into darkness for a sustained moment together. It could be. Maybe it was. But it was also married to his own continued visibility.<br /><br />I have made a show that was seen in a similar way to this – the way I decribe seeing the show above. I made a show called <i><a href="http://www.rajnishah.com/glorious" target="_blank">Glorious</a> </i>where local performers were invited to stand on stage and make music and speak words, and in which I stood, for most of it, in the middle of the stage on a podium inside a sculptured costume. I stood in the costume and sang, and all the other things that happened in the show happened around me. It was, among other things, described as “a vacuous ego trip” by Libby Purves in the only mainstream press review it received. <br /><br />I have made several shows where I have stood in the middle of a stage, as the ‘centre’ of a piece of theatre. In making those shows, I was always making a choice, and that choice was about having a short-ish brown-skinned shaven-headed body in the middle of the stage, holding the centre whilst embodying western clichés of ‘beauty’ and ‘power’. It was a choice I was making even when I knew it could be read as egotistical. Whether rightly or wrongly, it seemed important to me to make that choice. Even as it engaged with a certain relationship to power, it felt like a place of resistance. <br /><br />At the end of <i>Glorious</i>, after everyone else had left the stage, I stepped out of the costume and left the stage, and the audience were invited to populate the stage as they exited the theatre. The idea for that show, in a way, is that it could be anybody who stepped into that costume and then out of it again, holding that central<i> </i>place of power for a night so that people could gather around and perform as audience members, speakers, technicians, or musicians. The idea was that all of us were standing in those positions temporarily, each of them as important as the other. But of course it also wasn’t just anyone. On those evenings, it was my body standing in for power. Libby Purves clearly felt that I made the story of <i>Glorious</i> end with me, with my ego, with my body, in a way that negated the other stories for her.<br /><br /><b><br />I’m interested in how all of these things sit together</b>, in what it means to give up, what it means to give away, and how power operates in the tiniest details of a seemingly simple structure like the theatre. Quite apart from ‘the work’ itself, I am thinking about the acts of watching and seeing, listening and hearing, and interpreting. I’m thinking about what is held open during a performance, and whether that confronts or conforms to the power dynamics that we may have brought in with us. I’m thinking about what people are ready to notice, what people are ready to say, and what people are prepared to ignore. I’m interested in whether it is possible to give away power and remain visible, or whether it is possible to retain a kind of power while being invisible. The relationship between noticing something, acknowledging something, and understanding something. What it means if giving up and giving away are a kind of giving over of attention. What it means to hold quite still and listen intently and not turn away. What it means to give ground, to enact giving ground, or to not give ground. And how different these are, and how different these all seem, depending on the body that you happen to inhabit that night.<br /><br /><br /><i>It’s just words, asking.<br />It’s just words. <br />It’s words.<br /><br />It’s words, and you.</i></span></span>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-82026617897978831242016-02-24T08:21:00.004+11:002016-02-24T10:10:24.040+11:00A new normal<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixIq2sKIahpLQCCl1pZIw1gYLTti4pj2dehvywd6jTZQ_5tdVFrIQcGA-DDtKdcWf1El8hFJpdI0bp45dQI5Mq9zq35sgk3FC9qkF0yCr9Usw_IsO7LNqGEYVqd_PUBwCs2RGDjVYgczWG/s1600/2015-06-23+14.11.06.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixIq2sKIahpLQCCl1pZIw1gYLTti4pj2dehvywd6jTZQ_5tdVFrIQcGA-DDtKdcWf1El8hFJpdI0bp45dQI5Mq9zq35sgk3FC9qkF0yCr9Usw_IsO7LNqGEYVqd_PUBwCs2RGDjVYgczWG/s320/2015-06-23+14.11.06.jpg" width="320" /></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />Some wandering thoughts on ‘here’ and ‘there’ following a move from London to Sydney (having moved to Sydney in June 2015, and then spent four and a half months back in London October-February)…<br /><br /><br /><b>Transition</b><br /><br />I’ve been thinking about what it means to transpose myself from one sense of local to another. To understand what ‘makes sense’ what is ‘default’ and what is ‘invisible’ in a place. This moment (of transition) is important. This, in some ways, is the moment I would always wish to inhabit. <br /><br />The moment right before I grow any roots or find any bearings or create any categories. <br />The moment in which I am aware of my own assumptions. <br />The moment in which I know that what I am calling ‘normal’ is just one version of things. <br /><br />To feel my body as curious in a place, not already imposing an understanding on how I might fit there. <br />To not yet know how to assimilate the weather into my physical being. <br />To not yet know the solutions to small everyday problems; to not have routines fixed in place; to not possess ‘knowledge’ that shuts down options before they have been considered.<br /><br />Of course, it is near impossible to always inhabit this place, but it appeals to me, the idea of always seeing the world anew, and most of all the idea of being able to encounter other people as new, with their thoughts, their feelings, their histories, all curiosities rather than problems or – worse - things to be dismissed because somehow I already know better.<br /><br />Learning to be a local somewhere new.<br /><br />Of course, I have done this before. I actually moved here almost a year ago, in June 2015. The privilege of my situation is very clear to me. Also, the privilege of taking time to assimilate, to even be able to consider not assimilating as a choice; the privilege of being able to take time to feel lost here without the imperative to lock into survival mode. It takes very little to make humans lock down into survival mode. I know this. So to push forward into a not-knowing that is about choice is perhaps the greatest privilege. <br /><br />But also, it is something worth fighting for. Because caring for this is also about caring for each other, if it is about caring enough to create those spaces where not-knowing can be chosen.<br /><br /><b><br />Acceptance</b><br /><br />I know now that my body eventually did find its place in London. I found a way to belong, and I began to make a lineage, a family of sorts. Those past few months back in the city made me realise that the place where I had lived for the past thirteen years has become familiar to me, and me to it. I know people who live nearby. I know shopkeepers and market sellers. I know teachers. I know certain routes to certain places. I know how to walk to trampolining, and who I might see when I get there. <br /><br />And yet, this place has not changed, it is me that has changed. <br /><br />When I first moved to London, I felt scared and alert and unsure. I was younger, of course, and London was new(ish) to me. But also, I hadn’t made myself feel secure through my own rhythms and relationships yet. <br /><br />Nowadays, when I walk the same streets, there are still many people I don’t know, many people behaving in ways I don’t understand. But I see them in a place that I do understand, or at least that I understand myself within. <br /><br />Perhaps that is the other side of not-knowing. Like a crescent, at the one end not-knowing is a kind of acceptance because I do not yet have another category. At the other end, in a familiar place, perhaps I can hold my own ground enough to accept whatever is there. It is a different kind of acceptance, the acceptance of the familiar. It sits in the body differently.<br /><br /><br /><b>The speed at which I am moving</b><br /><br />I am reading Jo Carson’s <i>Spider Speculations</i> and a kind of truth comes back to me. I remember that sometimes I am moving too fast to take in the person or the thing or the writing or the idea that is in front of me. And then sometimes I am moving at exactly the right speed to take it in. And so the quality, or worth, or value, of what is in front of me is not given by that thing but by me. By the speed at which I am moving. Which is quite radical when it comes to ascribing value to things in a new place. It means that what is before me can always be encountered – there is always that possibility. It means that there will always be a way of seeing, a way of hearing; and the only work that can be done to make that encounter happen is within me.<br /><br />I’m not saying that I feel the need to be able to encounter every person or thing that comes my way. But I am saying that there is something fundamental in recognising that the value of what lies before me is far from being intrinsic to that thing.<br /><br />We are so used to the idea of ‘forming opinions’ - digging ruts for ourselves in the form of belief systems - that it can feel naughty to stay open to the idea of change. But somewhere in there lies a great possibility. I love coming back to books or pieces of art or even people whom I had previously dismissed and realising that it was me who was moving too fast to be able to notice them. <br /><br />I wasn’t yet the person I needed to be for that to happen. <br /><br />I wonder if I could live in a way that included the possibility of being that person<br />– which is not to say that it will happen for sure, but that it could, and it might, and to not dismiss this possibility seems important.<br /><br /><br />In terms of Sydney, my new home-city, what is happening here is not yet in focus for me. I am far from being able to tune into the frequencies of this city. But I’m noticing my points of resistance, and trying not to take the easy route of translating them into judgments either of myself or of this place and the people in it. Instead, I’m holding open the possibility that one day I might be able to be here; that one day I might be able to encounter this city. <br />And for now, our encounter makes visible the contours and pitfalls of my supposed knowledge.<br /><br /><br /><b>A big silence</b><br /><br />Recently, at a screening of <i>Experiments in Listening</i>, I insisted that we invite silence into the room in our discussions. I was hoping to un-anchor us all a little from the need to speak as a way of affirming. I hoped to invite curiosity over visibility or the display of knowledge. I hoped to loosen some of the hierarchies that were in the room. Many people I know fear silence. They fear what might emerge in silences. <br /><br />I think I am trying to hold a big silence in my entry into Sydney. <br /><br />It can seem rude sometimes, as I refuse to declare “who I am and what I do” when I meet new people here. It’s strange, it’s not courteous, to refuse to offer what is expected as a guest. But that silence, that holding off, that act of waiting, is all I can do. That silence is what I have to offer right now.</span></span>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-43049299471931757952015-12-11T02:57:00.000+11:002015-12-24T02:22:51.055+11:00Structures of Listening<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]-->Last night, I went to a talk. The talk was about the
invisibility of women in art – the way that women only become visible (and
valuable) after they are dead. The introduction was all about women’s voices, about how we (in the arts) might work
differently, about structures that would allow for new ways of thinking and
viewing and making and coming together, and about new spaces for visibility and audibility. And yet, there we were, sitting
within a traditional power structure, in a room with experts on stage and the
usual question and answer session, and it killed my spirit. <br />
<br />
And this keeps
happening. <br />
<br />
I keep finding myself at events like this where there is no room for thinking, no room for processing, and no consideration given
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">how </i>this thing might happen. But if we don’t consider how the power structures are operating in the room, then
traditional power dynamics emerge. <a href="http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm" target="_blank">I’m nowhere near the first person to observe this</a>. And yet it keeps happening. I keep finding myself at events where the topic up for discussion is compelling and important, and then there is no way for us, the people in the room, to reach the place we want to discuss. We’re stuck in a place where we perform
change but we perform it within structures that are oppressive and
non-conducive to the very change that we are discussing.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
This change, it happens slowly. It happens over centuries.<br />
<br />
Over years, I will keep saying the same thing. I will keep
saying that we need to listen better. And what I will mean by that, what I will
mean every time I say it or write it or fail to say it, is that we need better
structures within which to listen. What I will mean is that this voice you are
hearing, it is the voice that is permitted within the structure you have
created. And very often there would be a more interesting and more present and
more considered voice here if the structure allowed for it. What I will mean is: <br />
<br />
What if my voice
were invited? <br />
<br />
What if I were invited to speak uncertainly, or in a language you can't comprehend? What if there were really space for that? And I don’t mean invited
like, “yeah, anyone can speak, anyone is welcome to speak” said from the front
of a room in which there is an unspoken hierarchy; but I mean really thinking
about how the space invites the words. I mean spaces that have easy exits and
different kinds of entrances so that people can find their appropriate way into
and out of them. I mean spaces in which the etiquette is clear and transparent.
I mean spaces that welcome silence. I mean spaces that welcome silences in which
we can hear and understand coercion as well as silences in which we can hear
complex thinking that has not yet settled.<br />
<br />
What I mean is that every space has a choreography, and to
ignore that act of choreography when setting up any kind of event is to ignore
a certain politics that holds our conversation. I mean that the aesthetics and the welcome of
the space are not an add-on or a frivolity but formative features. How and
whether we approach something or someone is entirely determined by what we can
see or hear from afar. Politics. Choreography. Aesthetics. It all comes down to the details of how we are invited to be in the room.</div>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-48656480341433283452015-10-22T20:56:00.000+11:002015-10-22T21:19:15.740+11:001. On not having opinions<div class="MsoNormal">
When I was young I used to ask myself frequently, “what will
it be like when I am old enough to have opinions? Will I have any? How will I
know what they are, what they should be?” This feeling comes back to me often. It sits in an interesting relationship
with ethics, this idea of not knowing what my opinions might be. On the one
hand, I blame sexism and capitalism and the many links between them for forming
in me someone who might not be able to value her own thoughts and opinions, who
has had to learn from others what it might mean to believe in something, and to
trust that belief even when it flaunts the everyday reality that is being
presented and underlined. On the other hand, I like that a part of me still doesn’t understand how to have an
opinion. I think that holding on to this kind of wonder is a part of not
falling into the patterns of the world. It is a part of not falling into what
is given. It is, and of course I would say this, a part of what it means to be
a listening creature in the world.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I
recently read something written by a friend of mine who
has a very clear relationship to their own opinions. This person is
humble and
generous and interesting, and also always seems sure of what they are
saying, and their right to say it, in a way I feel I never could. And
having read what they had written, I feel
inspired and excited and I want to draw lines between what this person
is
saying and what I am saying. But at the same time I feel like slipping
more
into the shadows and drawing myself into cracks and negating myself. The
wonder
in not yet knowing how to understand, or how to respond, it’s a wonder
that is
hard to hold, it’s a place that is almost a negative place. It is, in
many
ways, the opposite of identity. It is the opposite of words. It is the
opposite
of making a mark, of being a part of ‘history’.</div>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-86975061148454885622015-10-22T20:55:00.000+11:002015-10-23T00:16:37.704+11:002. On niceness<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>The notes went </i><br />
<br />
[Niceness being used to disguise:]<br />
<br />
Reproducing structures of oppression<br />
<br />
Reproducing structures of listening (who is heard, what is heard)<br />
<br />
Reproducing the very shapes of conformity and obedience – in patterns of
behaviour, patterns of speech, patterns of dress, and patterns of life-arc<br />
<br />
as opposed to<br />
<br />
[what is seen as] BEING TOO NICE = [labelled as] Of Lesser Value<br />
<br />
<br />
I think these notes might actually already hold everything I want to say on the
topic – which is why I held this blog post idea in draft for quite a while,
making it shorter every time I come across it. The notes above lead to quite a
diverse array of possible examples that I want to keep present in this
conversation without noisily elucidating them all. But a few specific examples
and reflections, in case they offer something, follow.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[--As is frequently
the case, you can see that the a lot of my thinking is inspired by <a href="http://feministkilljoys.com/" target="_blank">Sara Ahmed’s thinking</a> – or at least that her excellent writing gives me the courage to take
a leap of faith and explore out loud the way I perceive the structures that are
holding things in place.--]<br />
</i><br />
<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Reproducing structures</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For some reason, and much against my instincts, I recently attended
my twenty-year school reunion. It’s a private, all girls, Church of England
school. We drank tea, and went on tours of the (almost all-new) buildings, had
lunch in the refectory, and everyone commented on how no-one had changed at
all over the years. And I don’t know why I was surprised by this, but I was struck
by the performance of niceness that happened when we were reunited, and the way
it felt utterly familiar, and that this was entirely linked to a performance of
sameness. When I tried to express, for example, how much I had changed during
the twenty years since I left school, this was met with a particular kind of
non-response that entirely reminded me of the experience of being at school.
People were unable to hear anything that differed from the model they were
proposing. Under a veneer of niceness, of politeness perhaps, were hidden all
the possibilities for difference and dissensus and queerness that make life,
for me, bearable.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
There is something important for me here about the ways in
which we enact niceness, and reinforce structures where niceness is enacted.
The place where I went to school feels far far removed from this life I have
built for myself, as someone working in an experimental arts world. But I have
seen this pattern of behaviour particularly when working in the arts world – a
world that prides itself on the niceness of the people in it (we all do this
because we love it! why else would we do it?) and yet people act in some of the
least nice ways I can imagine towards each other and then never mention it
again because “we are all nice people”. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Being too nice</b><br />
On the other hand, I’ve often heard, and felt, the accusation that I am <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">too nice </i>or that my performance work is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">too nice </i>to be taken seriously. It is
the familiar opposition that is created between things that are ‘too nice and
inclusive’ and things that are ‘rigorous and critical’, and it’s a problem I’ve
articulated frequently. For me, those spaces that are both difficult and nice –
by which I mean both genuinely inclusive in their invitation and able to hold
open spaces that are not easily resolved and that do not aim to please all –
are the most important, and perhaps the only important artistic spaces. But
they have to be doing both those things: they have to be taking care as well as
holding open.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />I had a conversation recently with the wonderful artist
<a href="https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/rosemary-lee" target="_blank">Rosemary Lee</a> about this – about how, if one is trying to make truly inclusive
work, one will always be accused of being ‘too nice’ or maybe ‘not challenging
enough’. And I realised that this very accusation, which sounds like the
opposite of the enacting of niceness described above, is in fact exactly the
same thing. The work is described as being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">too
nice because it is inclusive</i>. But this very accusation, of the work being 'too nice' is often levelled at an inclusivity that might mean voices or
aesthetics are included that in fact are simply not conforming to the shapes or
structures of the avant-garde; the structures of thinking, of language, of
aesthetic, of life arc, that are valued within a certain artistic structure as
‘challenging’, ‘rigorous’, or ‘critical’.</div>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-63756206226123279462015-10-22T20:54:00.000+11:002015-10-22T21:04:52.368+11:003. To Not Act<div class="MsoNormal">
I recently overheard a conversation between some activists who were complaining about how academics are never in action, always far away from where the works is really happening. It is something I have found
myself saying in the past, that I wish academics could stop being cowards; that
they should come down and campaign, or put their bodies in the place of ideas
in order to understand those ideas better, more broadly, in their most complex
versions. And yet, I suppose, in that conversation I overheard, there was a
kind of black-white argument, and that argument believes that action is always
better than contemplation, and that to be in action always means being in
occupation, putting the body in a place as a form of protest; and that to be in
contemplation always means being far away from the action, not having the body
acting as a form of protest. And what I realised in this moment was that I am
uninterested in a form of action that does not include the distance of
contemplation. And I am uninterested in a form of contemplation that does not
include the immediacy of being-in-place.</div>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-63511259498404301112015-10-22T20:53:00.000+11:002015-10-22T21:05:48.632+11:004. The conclusion<div class="MsoNormal">
The pattern looks something like this: make a proposal,
attempt to realise it, and then prove that it was realised. It’s not a flawed
structure, but a flawed interpretation of a potentially very useful structure.
Within the arts, as artists and perhaps also as academics, we’ve learnt to put
a huge amount of emphasis on the ‘conclusion’ of a project: whether that’s the
final argument of a book or the documentation or evaluation of a show. To the
extent that it shapes the entire project – without this being a conscious
structuring device. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
It seems simple, but it takes great energy and discipline to
move away from that cycle. It’s something I’ve come to greatly admire in
<a href="http://regularmarvels.com/2015/07/25/summers-lease/" target="_blank">François Matarasso’s recent work</a>, and his decision to move away from a very
successful career as an arts consultant and to invest his time primarily in
creating experiments in collaboration with other artists. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
It is easy to equate this kind of thinking with a ‘scientific
model’. But it’s not the
notion of a scientific or rational model that I’m having trouble with. It’s not
the notion of having a hypothesis, conducting an experiment, and then drawing a
conclusion, that is suspect. In fact, it’s a perfectly valid way of conducting
research <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if the researcher/artist can
remain open to the possibility of change, challenge and failure</i>. <br />
<br />
But our
projects and our thinking as artists have become shaped to a great extent by
what we believe to be models of success – so that we’re attempting to write the
correct narrative about a project (the one, perhaps, that fits with the
proposal we made in the first place) to such a great extent that we often fail to
allow the project itself to drive us in our thinking and our discoveries.</div>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-71195569285952765842015-08-10T15:59:00.001+10:002016-12-23T17:00:57.682+11:00Invisibility<div style="text-align: center;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<img alt="image by Rajni Shah, originally created for Qasim Riza Shaheen" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQmkmF37wB8hqZNrRkHchGpcMbTZXZSl03fN7I1-Nz19iCvRdLvqfxYMjCTzT9CHcyHOLYmDR-12jJU4A_LS0DGBLZrAJZFtnL_ZNl5GQ_eLRWmd9GQ7oOE6mAJQywlYI0XX8zY_7wDWG/s320/DSC06327-002.JPG" title="" width="260" /></div>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="color: #999999;"><span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who
haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of those Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am
a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be
said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people
refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus
sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard,
distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings,
themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything
except me.” </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #999999;"><span style="color: #999999;"><span style="color: #999999;"><span style="color: #cccccc;">– from the novel</span></span></span><span style="color: #cccccc;"> </span></span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man" target="_blank"><i>Invisible Man</i> by Ralph Ellison</a></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><b>I remember </b>when I first came across this book. Before I had even read it I felt
deeply moved by the title and the idea of it. It is funny to say that I felt a
sense of recognition at the feeling of not being recognised, but that’s how it
was. I felt recognised, I recognised myself, in the description of invisibility.
I loved reading this book. I loved that it existed. The world of the novel is
not at all a world in which I live, and the characters in the novel and their
lives are factually far from the details of my life; and yet it felt in that
moment like it was written for me; like it was written about me. <br /><br />I recognise
the feeling of being invisible.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />*</span><br /><b><br />Over the past few weeks</b>, I’ve been reading written
reflections from people who took part in a project I co-organised called <a href="http://www.rajnishah.com/lying-fallow" target="_blank">Lying Fallow</a>. I’ve noticed that there is a thread that runs through them, a sense of<span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />what it means to be recognised and what it means to be anonymous.</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />Or</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />what it means to be accepted without the need to be recognised.</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />Or </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />what it means to matter, to count, as someone in the room, even if your way of
being someone is not the dominant way of being. </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />Or </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />what it means to be counted as part of the conversation when your contribution
is one of silence. </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />Or </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />what it means to hear someone without already deciding who they are and what
they bring. </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />Or </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />what it means to hear someone without needing to be reflected in them.</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />Each piece of writing is bringing a different perspective and is written in a
completely different style – but somehow the thing that keeps calling out to me
in my reading of them is the sense that recognition without
already-knowing is a rare and precious
thing. That these spaces in which we can hold each other without needing to ‘know’
each other, where we can be counted without having to declare ourselves, are
incredibly important and incredibly hard to find. <br /><br />*</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br /><b>Right now</b>, as you may know, I am living in a city that I do not
call home. I have moved here. And part of what is happening, across every
strand of my life, is that I am figuring out what it means to recognise when
the land and the people are not familiar. I am trying not to simply impose structures
of knowing and understanding that are from another place onto this place. [ – a
very particular challenge in a place like Sydney, a city which in so many ways and
for painful historical reasons superficially models much of itself and its
thinking on 'England'. And of course, I am a part of this lineage now,
of violence, of <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">invasion, and of stolen <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">lands</span></span>.] But I am also experiencing
what it feels like to not be recognised. To not be known. To be invisible. </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br />It is interesting how quickly I feel the need for someone to know my history,
to know <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the </span>work I have done, to know and value who I am and what I have to offer. It is
interesting how quickly I feel the fear of anonymity. It makes me realise how much I have been held by the listening of others, counting on them to know me or to want to know me. I have found that I've been spending time
with friends in my dreams, as if to replace the day-world with the night-world,
making the nights familiar and the days strange.</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br /><i>We are so quick to know.</i><br /><br />And I awoke this morning thinking about the violence in what
we call understanding, in the act of drawing an equivalence between ourselves
and others when they do not necessarily ask for it. I realised that there are times
when I might think that I am making someone feel welcome by agreeing with them, but by agreeing with them on my terms I am only making them into
another version of myself … and that turns out not to be about them at all. <br /><br /><i>I understand the violence in the act of drawing an equivalance, or even what we might call 'understanding' - it is an act of taking away, of removing potential and possibility, it is in fact an act of colonisation.</i><br /><br />I was thinking about how it is sometimes the most generous act to not already
know someone; to care to hold what they have to say without needing to draw an
equivalence with one's own life. To notice them. To not need them to be making themselves visible. And to not need to become visible through them.<br /><br /><br /><br />(with special thanks to Ben Webb, Emma Adams, Michelle Outram & Stella Duffy for your <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">reflections on <i>Lyin<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">g Fallow</span></i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">,</span></span> which have been inspiring me)</span></span></div>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-802755877717136982015-07-29T13:09:00.001+10:002015-07-29T14:50:04.355+10:00But who is it for<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">First, there is
another place that you should go<br />
<br />
</b>Right as I was drafting this, as I was drafting it very slowly and
occasionally, as is my way, the wonderful Karen Christopher posted <a href="http://www.haranczaknavarre.co.uk/blog/date/July-2015.html" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">this blog</b></a> on her site, and it says some
of the things I might be stumbling towards here, and it says them very
eloquently. You might read hers as a parallel to mine. Or, if you’ve only time
for one, read hers – it will inspire you. Karen articulates very beautifully
many of the things I felt when I was making performance, and her performances
are exactly as she describes them -<br /><br />"<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.haranczaknavarre.co.uk/blog/date/July-2015.html" target="_blank">I’ve slowed down to look closely and I can do the same for you</a></i>"<br /><br />- and I am so glad she is making performance, and writing about
performance, and teaching. There is a deep value in work that slows down, that
doesn’t assume; and that same thing that is so valuable is what makes the work
very difficult to ‘value’, difficult to catch hold of, difficult to write about
and to blow into the shape of success. It takes a lot to hold this place, to
hold it open. And Karen is doing that work. And in a different way, I hope I am
also doing that work. And we are doing some of that work together.
<br />
<br />This was a kind of preface. Now to my stumbling struggling words…
</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br />
<br />The Question </b>
<br />
<br />One of the ways in which I use this space of the blog is to work through things
that I repeatedly encounter. Things that I have an instinct to be wary of, but
I’m not sure why yet. This is a common feeling for me. It’s rare that someone
says something and I immediately disagree or have a counter-argument. You could
say it’s part of my commitment to listening, that I like to hear what a person
has to say before figuring out whether I also have something to say about it.
Or you could say something else… (!!<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">*</span></span></span></span>)
<br />
<br />There’s a phrase that I’ve come up against several times recently in slightly
different guises. Each time I hear it, I find myself putting a guard up,
feeling a slight anger, but I can’t quite work out why. It’s the phrase,
<br />
<br />“But who is it for?”
<br />
<br />as in: but who are you making this work for, or who are you writing this for?
<br />
<br />It’s a fair question, you might think. I think it’s fair question, which is why
I can’t quite work out this feeling of being so vexed by it.
<br />
<br />For example, it was asked of me in my PhD Upgrade exam, in response to a series
of dialogues I’ve been conducting, called 'Experiments in Listening'.
<br />
<br />“Who is the experiment for?” the examiner said.
<br />
<br />I, of course, had no answer. I knew it was a good question, and a fair question
in the context, one that was designed to open up conversation and thinking
around the project, but I felt and still feel a very peculiar resistance to
answering it. I felt it was important not to know the answer.
<br />
<br />And then I heard it again at a conference recently, someone asking:
<br />
<br />“We must ask: who are we making this work for?”
<br />
<br />And as I examine my response, I know that there are many things that might be
problematic or irksome about this type of question, and these are not the
things that are bothering me. It contains the idea of duty, that one ought to
know in advance the audience for whom one is writing or making, that the work
will always (and not just sometimes) be better for this question. It taps into
a world of marketing-speak and funding-speak where artists must pre-determine
their work and their audiences in order to draw down funding, in order to fit
within what many of us consider a flawed structure of evaluation and value
within the arts. And yet I don’t think it’s (only) these things that are
bothering me when I hear the phrase. I think it’s something about the
relationship between selfishness and selflessness, and how these things are
perceived.
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /><br />
<br />How generosity is perceived</b>
<br />
<br />Maybe it will help to briefly explore another problem I have repeatedly encountered, with
people who refuse generosity as a term on which work might be made. Because
I’ve noticed that a lot of my peers will say that they only make work
for themselves – ultimately, they make work for themselves, not for anyone
else, and not in response to anything greater. Like it’s disingenuous to say
that we might make work for something other than selfish reasons, when making
art is such a luxury.
<br />
<br />And it bothers me, because yes, I have made the work for myself in a way, but
that can’t be the only reason I make work. And I suppose it comes down to a
problem I keep revisiting about the ‘white male genius’ figure of the artist,
who only makes work for himself, who follows his instinct and his vision, but
everyone gathers around that work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">because
it is brilliant</i>. And I won’t deny it, I have had fantasies about working
in this way, about forging a career path that is only about what I want, and
keeping on in this path until I receive some kind of recognition for stubborn
self-faith. But I have found that in practice I just can’t make work within
this model, which assumes knowledge and genius is only held within a person, and
that ‘success’ is dished out in accordance with merit. I don’t discover the
work or the ideas in solitude. I discover things in the world, in dialogue, in
company, in full recognition of all the people in the room. And so yes, I do
make work for and with other people.** Often, what I am making is not so much a
performance or a product but a structure within which we might encounter
something – an excuse to gather around something in order to be in (often
quiet, or non-verbal, subtle, complex) dialogues.
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br />
<br /><br />The need for answers</b>
<br />
<br />“So who is the work for?”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />As is so often the case, my biggest problem with the
question is that it’s a question that loudly demands an answer, and it demands
an answer that clarifies.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com.au/2008/07/reason-enough-for-hope-conversation.html" target="_blank"><br />And I don’t want to give an answer that clarifies. </a>
<br />
<br />I can’t tell you if it’s for you, and I’m not sure if I can tell you if it’s
for me. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Who is it for</i> reveals itself
in who comes, and how they come. And it’s a question that should remain alive
in the room. It’s not one that should be set down with an answer. I don’t make
the work for someone, and I don’t conduct the experiment for someone. It’s not
that the question is irrelevant, maybe it’s a good question, but maybe it just needs
to remain live.
<br />
<br />And maybe this was embodied in <a href="http://www.rajnishah.com/glorious" target="_blank"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Glorious</i></a>,
where the figure of the artist stood in the middle of a stage on a podium, with
people gathering around, a temporary community, all of us listening. There is a lazy
reading of this which goes: the artist is elevated and considers herself superior. In
this reading, “who is it for?” is answered easily with, “it’s for the artist
and for her success.” There is resolution in this position, it makes it easy to
read, and it makes it easy to place the responsibility for the work in the
realm of the artist. But it’s more complicated than that. There is a responsibility
in watching, too. For a start, there is the responsibility for finding that
image problematic and understanding why and how this problem is occuring.
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /><br />Who is it for?</i><br /><br />might also be<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /><br />How are you watching?</i> <br /><br />or<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /><br />How are you listening?</i><br /><br />or<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /><br />Where do you position your body in
relation to this body?</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /><br />Performing
<i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Glorious</span> </i>never stopped feeling
difficult. That act of standing centre-stage, it never stopped feeling
problematic. And that difficulty was important. Maybe because it was a
difficult thing to read, to accept. Maybe because that very organisation of
stage, of visuals, asks the question – “but who is it for?” – and leaves it
unresolved. And maybe, whilst difficult, that is also generous. Maybe it's a difficulty that sits between us.</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
</i></span></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br clear="all" /></span>
<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">* </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">I
think there’s an easy slip here between being someone who listens and considers
and doesn’t pre-judge or predetermine a conversation, and being someone who is
not brave enough to speak when speaking needs to happen (even if that speaking
might sound inarticulate). It is, maybe, the difference between silence that is
an active listening, where one is present, and silence that is a
being-silenced, a going-along-with, when really what is needed is some kind of
articulation or a demand to be heard. I do both things, though I am slowly
trying to weed out the less brave one!<br /><br />** I'm fully aware that I've made work under my own name, in collaboration with other artists, for which I have largely been the one who is credited, because of my role as director. This is definitely problematic, but a problem for another discussion. I don't think it's as black and white as it seems.</span></span></div>
</div>
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rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-87103697359163211212015-07-09T14:17:00.001+10:002015-07-09T14:24:32.866+10:00Passing the PhD<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">I recently gave a talk at a conference called <a href="http://passingconference.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">The Politics of Passing</a>, and I opened the talk with the following description of my first PhD supervision:
<br /><br /><i>On the first day of my PhD, my supervisor said to me,
<br /><br />
‘There might come a time in this project when we’re faced with a decision between doing the PhD that you want to do, and doing the PhD that passes.
<br /><br />And my job will be to encourage you to do the PhD that passes.
<br /><br />That will be my job. And I need you to know that.
<br /><br />But that won’t necessarily be the right choice.’
</i><br /><br />I keep coming back to thinking about this. The fact that the role of a supervisor is to help a person ‘pass’. And how important it feels to think about this alongside other types of passing – racial passing, passing as able or disabled, passing as one gender or another. Passing and its relationship to success. Because to be successful in a PhD is to pass the PhD. And yet to pass the PhD often involves quoting the “right” names, showing that you are able to follow a particular trajectory, one that has been defined in advance. It is not necessarily about ‘original thinking’ since the trajectory of passing is by definition one that relates to what has gone before or already exists.
<br /><br />My experience of doing a PhD has not been about passing. But to a great extent this is because prior to embarking on the PhD I very consciously lay aside notions of ‘success’ and ‘career’ and I was very clear that in taking on this new project I was not prepared to simply adopt those notions again in another context.
<br /><br />Immediately after my talk (which was concerned with the act of holding open as opposed to the act of passing in relation to a variety of contexts) there was time for one quick question, and someone asked, “Did you pass the PhD?” I laughed, then I answered hurriedly that I hadn’t yet completed it.
<br /><br />But I’ve kept coming back to that question, as one that I didn’t answer seriously. I mean, it was kind of funny, the question, it kind of felt like a joke. ‘So… did you pass?’ I enjoyed it in that way. But I kept thinking about it later not as a joke but as a serious question.
<br /><br />Because this is the only question that remains at the end of a PhD.
<br /><br />And the choice not to do it solely in order to pass feels important and difficult. Difficult in the context of a society that values passing to such a great extent.
My experience of life has been this one. If you can pass, if you can pull it off, if you can convince others that you are successful, or white, or educated, or straight, then you can proceed. I have operated quite successfully within this system. But it’s a troubling system.
<br /><br />This doesn’t feel like a particularly novel realisation, I’m sure I’m not the first to write about it. I suppose I just wanted to answer seriously a question (asked after my talk at the conference) that I didn’t answer seriously at the time. And to acknowledge that it was a serious question, and that it’s a serious topic. And to say that I wish there was more time at conferences to sit with a question, to hold it between us, to be in the room with what has been said, before the need for answers enters the space.</span>rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-87217133149715107752015-06-08T22:02:00.002+10:002015-06-08T22:11:28.198+10:00Not a tight community, but a community<div style="text-align: center;">
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A few days ago I was lucky enough to be on a <a href="http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-going-on-sustaining-life-in-theatre-tickets-16392712043?fb_action_ids=10153138964480631&fb_action_types=og.shares" target="_blank">panel</a> with the wonderful artist <a href="http://www.rescen.net/Rosemary_Lee/r_lee.html#.VXWDQEb0fhs" target="_blank">Rosemary Lee</a>, who has inspired me for many years. She said something that struck me. She said, <br />
<br />
<i>What I’m looking for is a community. Not a tight community, but a wider community.</i><br />
<br />
There was something important about this for me. The idea of community so often gets presented as a tight-knit and overstated set of similarities, based on place or race or gender or age. It inevitably has outsiders and insiders. It sometimes has artists ‘coming in’ to ‘do projects’. These communities do exist, of course, and there is value in feeling like one is inside a tight-knit community sometimes. But in relation to arts practices, and in relation to my life and needs, I find that this notion of community as something solid and contained is always deeply problematic, and will primarily generate a feeling of outsiderness for me – something that will feel difficult to enter into.<br />
<br />
A loose-knit community feels so much more like something I might aspire to both create and be within. It feels like something that has space to breathe, that might change, over time and space, that might welcome newness without drawing too much attention to it. And that one day might fall apart in a way that wasn’t alarming or threatening, just the course of things. <br />
<br />
I’m interested in how we might allow those kind of spaces, and how we might hold those kinds of spaces. I’m interested in how to hold something just enough, not to constrain, and not to let go completely, but just to hold and commit for as long as it is there.rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-48090822442959014592015-04-25T23:57:00.000+10:002019-06-10T03:31:45.487+10:00Letter for you from the future<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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In my new life I am learning to surf, and I am learning to
love the sea<br />
<br />
In my new life I am performing with a dance troupe in Taiwan<br />
<br />
In my new life I am a popstar<br />
<br />
In my new life I am making direct actions to help illegal
immigrants<br />
<br />
In my new life I am training to be a therapist in a prison
setting<br />
<br />
In my new life I care about my body and the land equally as
I care about other people
<br />
<br />
In my new life I am always far away and not far away
depending on how you choose to position yourself<br />
<br />
In my new life I am spending a lot of time with inspiring
older women<br />
<br />
In my new life I am queer and glamorous and quiet and
awkward and brimful of ease<br />
<br />
In my new life I am writing<br />
<br />
In my new life I am gathering impetus and throwing it off
again in a repeated circular action<br />
<br />
In my new life I meditate with people who care about being
in action<br />
<br />
Yes, it is possible to start over from this moment.</div>
rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5149652545428290930.post-43678177638112914632015-04-23T18:58:00.000+10:002015-04-23T19:03:05.529+10:00The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western LaplandSome notes on <a href="http://www.ridiculusmus.com/shows/on-tour/eradication-schizophrenia-western-lapland/" target="_blank"><i>The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland </i>by Ridiculusmus</a>. Which I've seen twice, and continue to find difficult to describe - and that's a great thing. These notes were written freeform and fast, about a year after I first saw the show. They haven't been edited.They're a bit clumsy.<br />
<br />
<b><br />20/02/15 2.30-2.50pm</b><br />
<br />
This is a show that changes every time it is performed, and for which the playscript is not clarifying as the order of things is sometimes simultaneous, sometimes chronological. This is a show in which the audience is seated in two groups facing each other, except that they can’t see each other because there is a theatrical set between them. This is a show that uses repetition in an unusual way, by performing two different interlocking scenes involving the same actors on either side of the theatrical set, playing to half of the audience on one side and half on the other side and making ‘entrances’ and ‘exits’ via a door in the set that leads to the other half of the audience, and then reversing which act is performed on each side. This is a play that is influenced by <a href="http://opendialogueapproach.co.uk/" target="_blank">a method of therapy called ‘Open Dialogue’ which is being used very successfully to treat schizophrenia and psychosis in Western Lapland</a>. This is a play that challenges what we might understand as ‘narrative’. Underneath all of that, this is a play about holding space and time together, and recognising that we are all responsible for the relationships we have with each other, and sometimes those relationships fail, but that does not mean that we are failures. This is a show that is funny, and trying to be funny. This is a show that is funny, as in ‘weird’. Because it is funny, as in weird, this show does not allow language to become hierarchical, just weird. Language travels across the space between us, all of us, and we catch what we can. Sometimes several people are talking or making noise at once. They are having conversations that might just be related but that will only become related if we do the work of relating them in our heads. This is a show about the attempt of language, and the violence of uttering one word. This is a show where the actors listen very carefully to each other, and we listen very carefully to them, and we also sometimes give up, let go, of making sense of the narratives that they are speaking. This is a show where everyone in the room is trying to make sense of something. And that is all that is happening. But we are doing it in the same room. <br />
<br />
Nothing gets resolved, nothing gets actioned, no-one gets saved. We can’t take it away with us, and neither can we pack it away after the applause. It continues as we leave the theatre, which is not to say that it intends to continue after we leave the theatre, but because nothing has been resolved, our lives as we leave that space are already related to the violent attempts at language we have witnessed. ‘The story’ doesn’t follow us home. ‘The characters’ don’t live on inside our heads. But just as we were in that room trying to make sense of language with a bunch of other people, so we continue to be in another room or on the street in the same event. It is all the same event, but within that one frame we gathered and we paid attention to it.rajnihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16312033551897578663noreply@blogger.com0