what do you do with your fingers when you scream?
Welcome to what do you do with your fingers when you scream?
This project premiered on December 2nd, 2022 in collaboration with the Brown Arts Initiative at the Granoff Center for the Performing Arts in Providence, RI.
The following are program notes:
Thank you so much for being here! You are already the coolest person in the world!
I hope that if you take just one thing away from these thoughts, it is the depth in which this project relies upon my collaborators to create, converse, and perform. We are performing together, for each other, with love so deep it’s painful to stop.
“Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”- adrienne maree brown
My collaborators: Maya Polsky, Leo Major, Gabe Toth, Agata Cudzilo and Nat Hardy
I met with each of these people every week, starting in January of 2022, with the goal of exploring the idea of embodied memory. Our sessions consisted of telling stories of pain, of togetherness, of transition, of despair, of longing, and of love. With these stories in our bodies each one of my collaborators and I set out to create a new duo practice by combing our specific artistic tools and intentions. Each arrival point with one person was a beginning for another as these explorations dribbled then oozed then exploded all over each other. In the fall of 2022 we kneaded our findings together, creating a 45-minute long performance as one possible container for a way to entangle sonic improvisation, visual echoes, trans embodiment, and bodily memory.
My work with Agata Cudzilo (they/them) explored dozens of writing prompts, place-based performance practices, and telling stories of how to bleed, sink, bite, and swallow the feelings of how pain lived inside of us and what we could do with it. Through this, Agata and I developed all of the text used in the performance. We would spend full days hiking around different forests, screaming and dancing through lyrical phrases, slowly sculpting them into distinct bodies of text to be recorded.
While this was happening my work with Nat Hardy (he/him) explored some of these same forests, but with a camera. We would go out with translucent items of clothing, drape them over the camera lens, and play with the forest's light for hours. We called this texture hunting. In the editing room we would weave our visuals with the textual offerings Agata and I created to form an interactive score.
Maya Polsky (she/her) , Leo Major (he/him) , Gabe Toth (he/him) and I would cram into the Granoff recording studio every Wednesday afternoon for multiple hours laughing and meditating on different sound palettes that our bodies collectively yearned to explore. We encouraged each other to let our improvisational histories guide us as we started to engage with the prompts and audio-visual concoction that Agata, Nat and I created.
“That moment when I whirl with words, when I dance in that ecstatic circle of love surrounded by ideas, is a space of transgression. There are no binding limitations; everything can be both held and left behind? Race, gender, class. It is this intensely intimate moment of passionate transcendence that is the experiential reality that deepens my commitment to a progressive politics of transformation.” - bell hooks
I also want to highlight my work with Joseph Hlavinka, another one of my collaborators, who sadly wasn’t involved in the final performance because of extenuating circumstances. Joseph and I explored extended vocal techniques, choreography, and told hundreds of stories about physical absence, cyborgs and grief. We miss you performing with us! Sending lots of love to Joeber!
My last collaboration was with myself. I set out to develop a practice of taking care of myself artistically, physically, emotionally, and theoretically. I read, cried, ran, danced, screamed and understood how to think about where the boundaries of this project tugged on my life and where I shouldn’t let them. In doing so I created a dance practice of fastening contact microphones to my body and improvising. I then processed this audio into an electronic piece of music you will hear today. This piece is unrelenting in its exploration of pain and discomfort.
There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy. Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”
- adrienne maree brown
On the following page is a non-comprehensive list of a few creators and thinkers that I have relied on heavily throughout the last year. Not only do these people and their work directly impact the way I go about my own musical and theoretical practices but they have been my friends, my teachers, my emotional support buddies, and my provocateurs:
Performers/Composers/Creators: Matana Roberts, Lingua Ignota, Esperanza Spalding, Uboa, SOPHIE, Meredith Monk, Show me the Body, George Lewis and the AACM, Dreamcrusher, Moor Mother, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Irreversible Entanglements, Holly Herndon, Liturgy, Fiona Apple, Jockstrap, Beverley Glenn Copeland, The Books, Robert Wyatt, Deli Girls, Aaron Dilloway, Jennifer Walshe, Claire Chase, and so so many others!!
Scholars/ Thinkers: Sarah Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, adrienne maree brown, bell hooks, David Novak, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Joshua Chambers- Letson, T Fleischmann, Tia DeNora, Tara Rogers, Louis Onuorah Chude- Sokei, Susan Sontag, Susan Stryker, Anna Tsing, Judith Butler and so so many more!!
“Performance has an intense relationship to life and to the live. It can be a way of materializing worlds and of remembering and keeping our dead alive. In the face of devastation and great loss, people often turn to performance and ritual, putting performance to work to make what C. Riley Snorton calls “still life” possible. In performance, still life (still being alive) becomes the grounds on which one improvises more life into reality. The tradition of the oppressed, though marked by defeat and great sadness, is also the tradition of transforming still life into more life. Of still being here and of being for the then and there...And while we must demand more than just “still life,” hope and performance can be powerful tools in the struggle to realize such demands.” - Joshua Chambers-Letson
I want to thank Erik DeLuca (my thesis advisor), all my friends, my family near and far and the communities I have grown to love, care for and need here, everyone at The Granoff Center for the Performing Arts and the Brown Arts Initiative and everyone at the Brown Music Department!!
We will remember a new sense of shared time. This means eating music, nibbling at its edges, until it bites back. Being sonic foragers, and investigators who peel noise from the most peculiarly intimate places, encourages each other to listen with our feet and with the spaces around us. These noises are nudged and stirred out of their sonic homes to come hang out with us for a reason, so we must let them. We must reimagine our stories together as we press our bodies against a mirror so hard it shatters and the glass cuts us open.