So Many Lips, Subtle Bulges (2018)
A collaboration with Avery Z. Nelson.
So Many Lips, Subtle Bulges is a hybrid performance that interrogates the trans/non-binary body as a contested physical and social site. The performance works through and across multiple disciplines to propose an aesthetic of provisionality and constant emergence. Each performance of the work features the creation of several live portrait drawings on cellophane. These drawings are created using a method that tracks the contours of the body: its bulges, curves, and hollows. These drawings then function as provisional portraits, not a portrait of the performer as a unified being but as they are in the moment.
Moving in front of, behind, and among these portraits, the performers exist in a matrix of marks. These marks defined their bodies in the moment they were made, but once committed to cellophane they become representations of past versions of the body that the performers reckon with. As the performance unfolds, the performers explore, through text and movement, how to attend to the contours of one's own body and the experience of it in the world.
Premiere: September 2018, Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA.