Touching Language: Queer writing in/As Performance
WORK IN PROGRESS
Touching Language is a practice-based project that explores experimental queer writing in and as performance in the visual arts, through collaborative research, multi-sensory practice, and pedagogical experiments, in the context of disability justice. In this project, queer performance is not just understood as an art practice, but also a provisional pedagogy that teaches us a lesson about form. Queer isn’t linear, predictable, consistent, but constantly shifting.
Moving away from discourses of representation, Touching Language tests experimental forms of writing in, about, and as queer performance to reimagine the politics of queer performance through experimental form: the forms we use to write, gather, and learn. It will result in an innovative public programme of lecture performances, workshops, an exhibition of video and sound works, a catalogue, a toolkit on somatic queer pedagogy for organisations, a peer-reviewed video essay, and a monograph, reaching audiences across the UK, US, and Germany.
Touching Language employs inventive artistic and educational methodologies that are simultaneously outputs: lecture performances, somatic workshops, and creative captions/audio descriptions. The lecture performance is a formally innovative, embodied form of pedagogy that challenges where and how learning takes place. The envisioned somatic workshops use a body-oriented approach drawing from Feldenkrais, body-mind-centering and the Lichtenberger® Method, to offer a non-hierarchical and playful learning platform. Beyond providing access, creative captions/audio descriptions will be used to produce new queer performance-writing that foster critical and sensorial awareness.
Some work that forms part of or informs this project:
Listening for Texture (an essay)
Vulva’s School (a lecture performance and video essay)
‘Playing with Knowledge’ (an essay)
Supported by:
Research Support Award (Standard Grant), Goldsmiths, University of London
Early Career Research Fund, Goldsmiths, University of London