Foiled
Le Corpse Poétique is a refusal of
Le Corpse Poétique started by noticing all the ways I couldn’t move. This included epistemic economies and discipline - my body and the bodies of work I was trapped in.
I take poetry very seriously. I do not want to change it to the moving body without acknowledging the potency of poetry for movement.
This is what I needed to survive social death and start cultivating the conditions of possibility within my body and my relationships for life again.
commedia dell’arte & the respirator as a relational mask
In commedia dell’arte, you die of everything. While Lecoq describes commedia as the art of being human, I instead play with commedia as the art of being governed.
Using the framework of respiration and the respirator as a relational mask, we operate under the basic assumption that everyone breathes and breathes again.
Through this, we start to see the cracks of the mask of liberalism and neoliberalism more broadly - also the necropolitics of our everyday lives.
Can stock characters change? Can settings? Relationships?
The circus - competence, strategy
decomposing prefigured worlds [through respiration]
decomposing and composing prefigured worlds through play
Accessing the cultural work of decomposing prefigured worlds - in our bodies, minds, spirits, settings, and stages. Through respiration (hauntelegy) and competence; skillbuilding and noting/noticing for everyday life; drawing attention to economies & choreographies; colonial strategies; noticing necropower & necropolitical strategies; this also applies to commedia
clowning as playing with competence; there’s challenging competence and then there’s also cultivating conditions of possibility for something different - that is the slow process of cultivating the inner world and imagination
The circus & theater/musical theater
also bringing respirator into it as a “neutral” relational mask when really, it’s not. but it is a leveling? one? nonhierarchical, nonbinary mask, and it’s not neutral because of the amount of propaganda or projecting or our relationships with care or the enshitification of relational technologies of power
Taking the attitude of dying for everything and flip it? Like, what haunts you, what do you want the character (or whatever element resonates with you) to portray? Later: What would have to change in this world for that to happen? [this is also focused on access]
write a poem or use one of mine or a fave of yours and take something nonsensical and determine what must be possible for that to be in the world
Hauntelegy is based on hauntology and elegy.
playing with the
respirator
this may seem antithetical to many and intriguing for lots!
this could be ‘object work,’ physical theater, improv, clowning, and/or play, but really it’s about taking the little everyday moments & playing with them versus seeing them as inconveniences or interruptions - we need these interruptions - it gives us time to get out of the occupied flow state - out of this automatic death drive.
as a relational mask too
the circus & theater
The respirator & the neutral mask
What the neutral mask taught me about the respirator - and life more broadly. Spoiler alert: nothing about it was neutral.