Rose Garrard: Redressing the balance

On hybridity, drag and performance in Bolivian folklore

Performance Research pg 98-106, On Hybridity Volume 25, No 4, June 2020.

Ron Athey is one of the most important, prolific and influential performance artists of the past four decades. Queer Communion, an exploration of Athey’s career, refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey’s performative practice and each community he engages.

In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer–Rosa Parks–to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against Black women and added fire to the growing call for change.

This is a book about falling as a means of reconfiguring our relationship with living and dying. Dancer, choreographer, educator and therapist Emilyn Claid draws inspiration from her personal and professional experiences to explore alternative approaches to being present in the world.

‘The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which my ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into an intensive writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.’ Toine Horvers

Paper leaves and other constructions
a reading companion to Always Already
compiled and edited by Karen Christopher & Tara Fatehi Irani

Always Already is an 8-hour performance installation by Karen Christopher & Tara Fatehi Irani, which uses materials, text, sound and movement to explore the weaving together of plant, human and machine, including human/plant and human/machine hybrids.

Paper leaves and other constructions is a 32-page booklet, introducing the themes and content of the project, and responding to many of the questions that arose in the creative process. Drawing parallels between a path through life and one through the making of a particular work of performance, the booklet answers the question “how did you do that?”

The booklet includes contributions from Karen, Tara, Payman Kassaei (Professor of Mathematics, Kings College), Felipe Ribeiro (performance artist and researcher), Omikemi (poet), Eirini Kartsaki (performance writer and teacher), and an interview with Henry Dagg (sound sculptor and builder of experimental musical instruments).

This series of interviews, held by curator and writer Gilane Tawadros are focussed entirely on Stuart Brisley’s practice and directed by him. The artist’s narration of his practice demonstrates an unswerving resistance to controlling the narrative or fixing the meaning of his works.

“(…) What could be good practice, in a moment like this? What is the art organisation needed for a no-future public? and what would a sustainable, feminist organisation look like?…”

The text was previously published in Who’s Art For? Art Workers Against Exploitation, edited by R-set/tools for cultural workers (Impasse) in collaboration with Rete al Femminile, postmedia books, 2019.

Edition 60/70

With 49 contributors of artworks and words, this magazine is a real snapshot of Neurodivergent and survivor women’s voices and visions today.

Contributions are organised into nine chapters: Esoteric Sensory Bodies, Persist, Tangled and Complex, The Specially Initiated Alone, Obscuring those Beneath, Into the Woods, Unearthered/ Returning to the Hills, Precarious Arbitarity / Radically Nuanced, and All that glistens.

This story is a product of lockdown, of not being able to create gatherings and experiences with, and for, other people. It is an account of intensely personal histories and experiences, that usually stay behind the screens. It is also a document of the Heteraclub project and the safe space created there, in which hundreds of women shared their stories of love and pleasure.

This book was produced as part of ‘Challenging Archives’, at. the University of Bristol Theatre Collection: a Wellcome funded project to catalogue and conserve the archive of the artist Franco B. Maddy Costa and Mary Paterson were writers in residence for the project from 2018-2020.

Mishandled Archive offers a way of imagining, creating and disseminating an archive.