She Is

Video
4m27s
2017

(Some)Time is my most recent attempt to develop a new project that can navigate the complex intersection of lived experience with crip time, queer conflict with heterotemporality, and learned colonial linearity. Working with aesthetics informed by disability, this performance deliberately rejects the fetishization of “pushing one’s self” as an achievement in performance, and instead uses the mundane — where I am and how I experience the present — as a site for somatic therapy. It asks “in this moment, what does my body want?” and it listens. It takes the time it needs.

My ability to overpower my nervous system has allowed me to operate as a high-functioning artist-activist — but this is unsustainable and has begun to fail. Acting in spite of my bodily response has left permanent marks on my emotional, spiritual, sexual, social, and physical health. It’s not an easy response to unlearn. It asks that I embrace failure, and miss out on things which are important to me so that I can care for my own body. To do so is to allow for temporal slippage, to let go of dreams of finding “success” as an early career artist, and to sit with the discomfort of my own mortality.

(Some)Time was presented as part of M:ST‘s streamed performance series, Bodily Response, in May 2020.