Tag Archives: Response

An experiment in reading experimental choreography & theory on crisis through an experimental book on love.

Prologue 

For their winter 2024 program, The Blackwood Gallery and Toronto Dance Theatre curated a paired program of choreographic works—Weathering by Faye Discoll and Fran Chudnoff’s FACE RIDER—alongside a suite of transdisciplinary panels, The Attunement Sessions. From Discoll’s choreography distorting the scale and rate of climate collapse to Jack Halberstam’s talk on Unworlding as a creative and social practice of generative refusal, this trans-disciplinary program unfolds in the ruins of certainty and individualism, our precarious present tense. These intellectual experiments and experimental performances call for a heightened awareness of our interdependencies and impact(s)—relationally, historically, culturally, environmentally. A heightened awareness starting with an attuned sensory system. Western capitalism works hard to dull our senses because vulnerable points—be it nerve endings or marginal identities—are also powerful places. Love evokes all our senses and changes us radically. 

It’s the summertime now and I am gainfully unemployed. Every morning, I wake up at 2PM and take in the stunning views of downtown Toronto from my over-priced high-rise apartment. I recline (lengthwise) on my lumpy futon-couch and while away the hours reading about The White Pube’s (TWP) adventures in the art world. Love Island USA plays in the background, (my flatmate’s latest obsession), and occasionally distracts me from my reading. 

In 2020, I made a large-scale painting titled Mural Study for the Future Site of an Artist Union. The title ironically alluded to the fact that the painting was being shown in a commercial gallery, and with an idealistic future outcome, this venue, and perhaps other galleries, might become the site of an artist union. The painting is now housed in the Ivey Business School at Western University in London, Ontario. Students learning the fundamentals of business can view the painting as they leave the cafeteria and wait for the elevator to return to their classes.

It’s the body who has moved

the direction of light to wave

a chemistry of fog lingers

lost among clouds

the way a pulse echoes

a pulse echoes 

a pulse echoes onto the page

⟡

Jeremy Laing appears in blue, Fan Wu speaks in violet.

MIRROR-VASE DOT JAY PEE GEE

When I’m chanting for justice, peace, a ceasefire, and mercy for Palestine and Palestinians at protests in Toronto, I catch myself mixing up the carefully constructed asks. I blame this on my grief—my cold body marching for hours at a time. I think about these mix-ups and how perhaps the variations on these chants, many of them over 30 years old, will help someone to finally hear what I’m saying. These mix-ups—or, as I sometimes like to call them, lip slips—allow me to take a different cognitive path to the part of my brain that keeps me living and creative, the part that works on healing. 

Deep Horse Encounter #1: M Meets her First Horse Girl

SYNOPSIS: In this pulp fiction fantasy from the series “Cuntry Lavender Menace” M, your typical futch-leaning dyke writes undelivered letters to J, pondering whether or not she’s a “Horse Girl.” 

The clearest image is a fucking mess. Holes are cut in and through walls. The crap that came out swept together with the other detritus from the installation into little piles around the space. A deathtrap of electrical cables lay strewn on the floor, excretions from the neon-light entrails which spiral to infinitude. A polluting vibration of sound embroils itself with the feeling of controlled unruliness. A patient kind of anger tightens the air as if we’re waiting for something to happen, but unsure if we’ve just missed it. 

1. Have your child squeeze about ½ cup (4 ounces) of glue into a glass bowl.¹

For as long as I can remember, I’ve found comfort and pleasure in the sensation of soft things slipping through my fingers. I actively sought, and continue to seek out, sensory experiences I can squish in my hands, savouring the feeling of something being squeezed through the delicate space between each finger. As such, the space between my fingers has long been a murky secondary pleasure zone, producing in me an eagerness to run my hands through any dangling, soft, or gloopy matter within reach.

By Hannah Godfrey

and speak in vain to the silent ash                                                                                                                                                     

Catullus, “101,” trans. E. Cederstrom

and talk (why?) with mute ash                                                                              

Catullus, “101,” trans. Anne Carson

I was boarding a train from London St. Pancras to Paris Gare du Nord. At the end of the platform, on the wall of the station, above the clock, was some large, pink neon handwriting.

I Want My Time With You.

Continue Reading →