If my body were you

Interactive Performance performed first performed at Woerdz 2018, a spoken word festival,
Lucerne, Switzerland on October 19 & 20, 2018
Montgomery Community College, Germantown Campus, Maryland, USA, April 10, 2019
Doug Fogelson’s Studio, 1821 West Hubbard St. Lofts, June 8, 2019
Paradox Fine Art Symposium, Riga Art Academy, Latvia, September 14, 2019
Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, USA, November 23, 2019

If my body were you was inspired by the election of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the ongoing misogynistic rhetoric towards women in the USA under Trump’s rule. The performance makes visible the physical feelings that entered women’s collective social body at this moment.

The score of the interactive performance engages in a series of gestures and actions that evoke the relationship between language and the body. The performance is performed in interstitial spaces and has been performed outdoors and in hallways and lobbies. When I was performing at Germantown Campus the alarm went off and all these students came out of their classes to see me pulling poetry out of my mouth. Some were aghast some where helpful and supportive and it was fascinating to hear the students response to the work in a workshop after the piece. This inspired me to create another section of the performance that analyzed the signs and their meanings. This was performed at Riga Art Academy in Latvia at the Paradox Symposium. The conversation was extremely generative and provided a platform to place women’s bodies front and center in the discussion. This inspired another adaptation of the work in which I ended by performing the Poem for Sylvia Hikins entitled A Long Road that I wrote while I was artist in residence in Liverpool, U.K. This performance includes two people poems I have written, one for Rose Hernandez entitled A Taste of Honey that I pull out of my mouth and the second piece for Sylvia Hikins.