Mapping queer experiences

Caroline Plummer Fellowship - Week 1


Lots of threads have begun to unravel this past week in playing with the idea of mapping queer and trans* experiences of public spaces around Dunedin city.

I've been:

- exploring ideas of queer choreography and queer contemporary dance technique,
- considering the possibilities of parties, picnics and discussion groups as ways into exploring notions of experimental and temporary queer communities,
- noticing the surfacing of the public and private in all spheres of my life,
- developing small tests that map desires and queer feelings,
- toying with the implications of queer time and queer space,
- scribbling notes on inclusion, exclusion, the binary of dirty / clean, intersectionality, safety, invisibility, darkness, introversion and agency...


So yeah, necessarily I've been thinking a lot about toilets.

 
 >Otago University library<

In particular, I've been thinking about bathroom experiences for transgender, non binary and gender non conforming folks. There are heaps of disturbing and inspirational legal cases, hearings and stories in a number of countries being talked about online at the moment. So I'm taking creative cues from the important work being done around these issues by trans activists, and on-to-it journalists and lawyers etc.

I've been taking photos of toilets from outside looking in, and from inside looking out and around. And I've been dancing inside toilets, and recording the soundtracks that are played inside public loos. I've been thinking about shame, privacy and the sacred body. And I've been dreaming about utopic queer bathroom designs.


 >The Good Earth Cafe, Cumberland st<

Anyone who knows me well, knows I've always had a thing for toilets. So now I get to make some live art and performance work in relation to these intimate, contentious and mysterious spaces. This part of the Fellowship project will be connecting in with OUSA's Diversity Week, which runs from May 16-20. My hope is to create experimental spaces and structures for temporary queer and trans communities to thrive in. THIS CLOUD IS QUEERING!



 >behind The Atheneum off the Octagon<

I've also been imagining and listing methods of mapping for this project, where the question of how to map queer experience has been opening up.

I've been going on lots of walks, mapping out my own pathways from home to office, to supermarket, to friends' houses, to the green belt, to the Leith.. etc. One night I ended up down the bottom of Serpentine Ave, and found myself drawn to the dark recesses inside The Warehouse carpark.


>The Warehouse carpark, Serpentine Ave entrance<

I started filming short clips of me doing 'queer choreography'. With the question of what is queer choreography? No answers yet! But some interesting off-shooting ideas, which I will focus my next post around I think.

:)

THIS CLOUD IS QUEERING!

Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance 2016 (project runs Feb-July) 

@ University of Otago

- mapping queer and trans* experiences of public spaces around Dunedin city - 

one-on-one walks, conversation, somatic experiments, mapping, site-oriented practice, choreographic and live art tests

#co-imagining  #the_political_body  #hand_holding

DUNEDIN. A QUEER UTOPIA. 

haha, thoughts on this?
Dunedin is a designated queer utopia.

Gutter Matters Pecha Kucha styles

I recently presented my work 'Gutter Matters' at the DPAG for the Dunedin Fringe Festival's Pecha Kucha event (March 2015).  This is my script.

Gutter Matters: queer choreography in city gutters

A city’s drainage system is designed to channel unwanted runoff from the streets, but has become part of a cycle of toxification, which circulates pollutants from city to sea to fish to gut. Gutter. Cigarette butt, oil, gas, and litter. This is our collective gutter matter. Gutter matters. 

I’m val smith, and I lie face down in gutters as a kind of dance practice. Tonight I will introduce to you a choreographic project called Gutter Matters which investigates the relationship between city drainage systems, ecological thinking, and a queer politics of pride and shame. 

The project begins three years ago in Auckland city when I was thinking about a parallel between the way Western society conceives of and treats the body of the city, and the human body. 

I noticed that people walked alongside the gutter, stepped over the gutter, but, they didnt step into the gutter. In fact, people seemed to ignore or block out the existence of the gutter, as if it wasn’t there. 

Is Western thinking driving us to close our eyes to what is considered to be unclean, shameful or private? And does the gutter, as system of elimination, somehow relate to Western beliefs and values that fuel homophobia, transphobia, and other hate crimes in society?  

When you think about city drains and gutters, what aspects of society come to mind? When I asked this question of participants in the project, I heard a range of associations, which became starting points for the creation of 7 performance experiments. 

Nowhere further to fall, Channels of shame, BLOCK, detox/retox, mind in the gutter, META-gutter, You’re draining me. In one of these experiments, I invite passers-by to lie on the footpath next to me and observe what is in the drain below.   

When activated on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, this performance resulted in some confrontational verbal and physical responses from the public. 

Despite these external happenings I carry on with the bodily practice, dropping into a process of becoming-gutter. I am s l o w i n g and stilling, to sense and listen to the gutter environment. Becoming-gutter is at first embarrassed and nervous, but then it softens, dissolves and relaxes.  

Assumptions about the gutter peel away to reveal unexpected beauty and aliveness. The underworld of the cigarette butt filled gutter morphs to become a palatial theatre chamber with deeply moving lighting states and elaborate miniature gardens and sculptures.

I want to talk with you about the unspeakable. I want to sneak through the cracks of the city, and follow its flows and blocks. Let’s make friends with the hair bunny, the chicken bone, the scrawny leaf.  

I have presented iterations of Gutter Matters on Auckland’s K Road, and also in Finland’s city of Turku. Each gutter I encounter reveals particular human habits, and that specific city’s attitude towards cleanliness, or an ethics of the ecological. 

Finland’s gutters for example, were squeaky fucken clean. Each night a truck would drive through to scrub away unwanted dirt, or “scum”.  Socio-economic issues, and attitudes towards homelessness and cultural minorities, were mirrored in the state of health of this city’s gutters. 

In Auckland I crawl up two flights of stairs to enter the bright, clean, white room of Artspace Gallery. A stark contextual contrast to K Road downstairs on that Friday night.  

This is a Pride Parade of my own design. I finish with a slow motion pompom routine on the floor. Afterall, focusing on the details of movement inside the joints of the body, is just as gay as holographic hotpants, right?! 

I invite the gallery goers to join me in an After Party for Introverts, my own queer utopia. Inside the party is pitch black with only a windup torch and a tiny disco ball to light the event.

There is also a small hole that allows for an introverted socialization between the individual party zones.

I’m interested in embracing shame in performance as a productive force, an affective experience through which we might engage with our identities from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. 

Can these bodily experiments contribute to the re-writing of a gutter culture?  I am dreaming here of ‘Pride’ events that reflect counter-cultural ideologies that exist outside of the gay mainstream.

Gutter Matters demands to be seen and valued, it resists gutter-judgment, and celebrates gutter-life. Gutter Matters walks with the fullness and power of gutter - desires. 
  

Photos by val smith, Peter Jennings, Nina Gastreich, Hannu Seppala, Antoine Pickels 



Thanks to:

Josh Thomas for the invite to present at the totally packed out Pecha Kucha event, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

All the Gay Shame Parade helpers and participants.

Support from New Performance Turku Festival, Amelia Hitchcock, Artspace Gallery, Alys Longley & Dance Studies, University of Auckland, Dunedin Fringe Festival.

     

Circle in Box review, Finland iteration

Review of Circle in Box, New Performance Festival Turku (2014), by Mia Hannula. A Finnish to English translation using Google Translate. 

Photo: Hannu Seppala

  

Viewers of the body choreography

DANCE | Turun Sanomat 03.10.2014 3:32 | 0

Val Smith: Circle in a Box. New Performance Festival in Turku presentation 1.10. The weaving mill.

New Performance Festival in Turku and Turku University of Art History visit to the lecturers Mark Harvey and Antoine Pickels opened a fantastic presentation on the performance and dance the multiple linkages. Forms of expression, association is not straightforward and not always as successful as an artist Val Smith dance going on Circle in a Box (2013-2014).

The work begins with five minutes before show time in the hall. Smith moves the tight space pakkautunutta public body, gestures and the words "toward", "cancel", "come" help. Presentation mode after the transition to the artist in the background is set to the audience, and the audience starts the presentation with the author.

Title of the work in accordance with the floor is a box, inside of which is a circle. Instinctive circuit grouping after the gentlemen begin to respond to the situation tavoillaan. Multi-sit down, a few will go down, some will not budge, while others move in ever-deformable formation.

The waiting, observing, condensing, conscious atmosphere vary to lose control and activation of the range. The apparent tapahtumattomuus is full of events.

Sensory and perceptual experience-based kinesthetic movement choreography reflects the social relations dimensions. The artist is understated, but the presence of unpredictable ways, and the viewer comprehend how one should behave. These characteristics are often considered as factors causing discomfort. The work event participants a creative adaptation to the rules but without the socially regulated the situation is fascinating.

Val Smith's works deal with the body's micro-political dimension of the theoretical thinking of taking advantage of. Circle in a Box is suitable for the analysis of the work, for example, deleuziläinen mycelium concept that makes it possible to understand the thinking and social relations, organization of programs without a dominant player. The essential happens a variety of factors between the active movement of the underground conditions.

Guided by the end of the performance the artist's back room refreshments their lives. The public debate viewers to share their experiences. Today the festival as a whole is anti perfect.

MIA HANNULA

Retrieved from: http://www.ts.fi/kulttuuri/nayttamotaide/683629/Katsojien+kehon+koreografia

Nikki sees sam_i_am

Nikki Upoko caught a little of sam_i_am at Short and Sweet Dance competition (2013) lol. I called this one "Untitled Drag Performance".

soundtrack - de novo

video - val smith

CHOREOGRAPHIC NEWSFLASH!

Samiam after a Deleuzian research session at Point Chevalier beach.

SHOCK RESULTS = Sam-i-am-not!

Stay tuned for upcoming samiam-not performances at a beach near you.

MAGIC SHOW ...

POOF!