Queer exceptions: Solo performance in neoliberal times

An essential introduction to the life and work of Sonia Boyce, a leading contemporary artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores artistic authorship and the creative potential in unexpected play.

This e-journal edition from performingborders gathers artists and practitioners exploring how their work crosses borders—territorial, cultural, political, and personal. Rooted in connection, resistance, and shared struggles, these contributions reimagine collaboration and solidarity across time and space. With a foreword by their long-time collaborator Diana Damian Martin, this collection is a tapestry of methodologies and practices grounded in survival and creative resistance.

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

Maska 196-197 summer 2019 edition on Re/De-Generation. In Slovenian and English.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

pg. 59-67

In Acts of Affect, siren eun young jung returns to the disappearing Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatre. In her discussion of the project, Ashley Chang examines how masculinity is produced by women.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

pg.49-57

Hyunjin Kim contextualises siren eun young jung’s audio-visual work at the 2019 Venice Biennale in relation to queer performance in South Korean history.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

P.27-35
Nizan Shaked traces the interventions of Sonia Boyce’s work in received categories of artistic practice, considering how these interventions suggest means of classification beyond media, artistic intention and identity.

Publication on a new entity of events as part of ANTI Festival, where the artists shortlisted for the International Prize of Live Art present their work.

In English and Finnish.

“Sadly, as people of color we experience discrimination everyday. It’s exhausting. And when it happens, we often question ourselves, thinking: Did that just happen? Am I being too sensitive? And when we can identify that it is discrimination and speak to it, we’re often questioned and others often don’t believe us or brush us off, calling us too sensitive or angry. The burden falls on us to prove that we are being discriminated against. This book is here for you to take detailed logs of your everyday aggressions so that you can show off your receipts–proof.” Aram Han Sifuentes

Designed and illustrated by Ishita Dharap.

Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2023)

Essential Work : Eastern European Immigrants and Models of Participation, Bojana Janković

This article investigates the relationship between a marginalised community of essential workers and dominant models of participation.

Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2023)

On Scent in Theatre Audience Research : Sensory Mining and Olfactory Archives, Freya Verlander

This article uses netnographic research methods, as a form of olfactory sensory mining, to investigate the smell-based experiences of audience members at Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (2011).

Performance Research Vol 6. No. 1. Spring 2001

Departures

The first of three related issues which engage with the migrations of people, performance and performance cultures, generating writing around differing geographies and histories of travel and travelling performance in a diversity of written and visual forms.

Reviews : All Over the Map

A Review of ‘A Woman Who…Essays, Interviews, Scripts’ Yvonne Rainer

by Claire MacDonald

pp. 121 – 123