INTENTION
Virginia Frankovich, Julia Croft and myself in rehearsals for Medusa, taken by Andi Crown, 2018This collection of writing and performance is about my experience of making experimental, live art in Aotearoa as an Indian-immigrant-feminist artist. In many ways it is about the way that I survive in this world and the ping pong effect that growing up with feminist values inside a capitalist, neo-liberal upbringing and environment has had on me. While feminism has moved much further on than the second wave rallies of the 1960s, the well-loved phrase, “the personal is political,” acts as my social system for this collection, which spans twenty years of making art in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Once I had shrugged off the colonial spell of Shakespeare et al. in my twenties, I gravitated heavily toward the multiplicitous nature of live art in my thirties. I use live art to express, question and heal from living a life of discrimination. As a marginalised form, live art aligns itself naturally with an intersectional viewpoint. In Time, Space and Power I talk about how it is a practice that resists colonial structures. It allows for storytelling that softens the linear edges of defining people of colour through their cultural identity alone. It allows us to soften the edges between a performer and her audience. It allows us to soften the edges between you, the page, the stage and me.
Live art has been a useful way for me to enter conversations about feminism, cultural identity and decolonisation through art. However, at the time of compiling this collection, these conversations are rapidly moving from decolonisation to re-indigenising the way we make art and the institutions that carry that art. So, as I continue rewriting the story of harm caused to me through racial inequity and gender bias, I now face a crucial questioning of the very tools that helped me begin to tear down the walls that hemmed me in. Live art itself still hails from a Western, privileged and elite society, even though it was built to resist and challenge the status quo. I am now sceptical of saying that it is these processes that allow us, artists of colour, a fuller way to express ourselves, free from a colonial/patriarchal gaze. Really, it is a Western label that acts as a convenient container for the kinds of art that was in our blood and bones to begin with.
The useful processes I attribute to live art were already present in my ancestry, but dulled and gaslit by the Western gaze and its obsession with capitalism as its social system. The saris that my mother was no longer welcome to wear, the lavish neighbourhood Diwali parties she could no longer throw after moving to the West are tiny examples of a rich and creative inheritance that I struggled to connect with after moving to Aotearoa from Doha, Qatar, via the Himalayas and, my complicated home, New Delhi. Direct results of colonisation, patriarchy and capitalism. I have spent the better part of two decades believing I had to discover something new in order to arrive at the “postfeminist fantasy: that an individual woman can bring what blocks her movement to an end.”1
In Under The Light of a Full Moon, I take a strong a lead from Sara Ahmed’s Living A Feminist Life and reject the notion that I discovered feminism through emigrating from East to West and instead remember where I found feminism, where feminism found me, and who I learned from2. I want to rediscover, remember and re-indigenise the tools learnt from my first feminist teachers, my mother, my grand mothers, my aunties; learnings that I had resisted for a long time as I gazed wistfully at the West, at Whiteness, as the benchmark of personal freedom. Through largely co-self-taught and co-self-built processes of intersectional collaboration with my artistic peers (poetically expressed in Rolling On The Floor Laughing, or, ROFL), I now treasure my ancestral tools as part of my arsenal of weapons intended to dismantle, destroy, and dissolve those pesky colonial / patriarchal walls.
Day to day, I find myself resisting and relenting to wider socio economic power structures at play in the world, and I’ve chosen to use art and the fostering of its process as a tool to express the push and pull of living through gender and racial discrimiation. I am now entering a third decade of making art combined with my job as a programmer of independent artists and their work at the Basement Theatre in Tāmaki Makaurau. In a world that is actively surviving through the effects of a global pandemic, civil reckonings and rising sea levels, my central questions now turn from myself toward the structures of making art from relational, economic, social and political perspectives. In A Reason To Rest, I call for a departure from the neo-liberal rhythms our existing arts structures continue to play out, despite the enforced slowing down of this beat that the Covid-19 pandemic has encouraged in the arts worldwide.
This collection is a political reply to the conditions of creating live art work in Aotearoa and could be seen as islands from which you might observe various entry points for living an intersectional, artistic life. And, in defiance to language, to Western academia, and Ayn Rand's thin and dangerous philosophy, objectivism3, I will switch, slip, dodge and ping pong from objective to subjective in tone to reflect what Donna Haraway would simply term “staying with trouble.”4 By which I mean, I’d rather sit in kinship with my questions and all that makes up the muck of my world, than imagine myself as any kind of expert in dominance over it. Sometimes I will play into the tones that universities, arts organisations, and the Western-colonial-patriarchy demands of me. Sometimes I will not. Rather than offer a clean, linear, well beaten out narrative, here, I offer you episodes through which you might map your own journey through the Time and Space we live in today.
As you float through this website, you will find a relationship between live art and performance studies in how my questions are written and performed. As Nien Yuang Chen, a Singaporean Chinese artist and scholar in her article, Globalisation, Transgression, and the Call to Performance Studies, writes, performance studies has a reputation of being innately rebellious. Quoting Richard Schechner’s seminal textbook, Performance Studies: An Introduction she interrogates the field as a form that, by its very nature, leads to “the avant-garde, the marginal, the offbeat, the minoritarian, the subversive, the twisted, the queer, people of color, and the formerly colonized”5. While this collection avoids embedding itself in what Chen calls “settled hierarchies of ideas, organisations, and people,”6 I am also cautious of giving my approach a birth certificate that, as Chen persuasively argues, still has the clear stamp of imperialism on it.
If the social system of this work is personal and political, then, in gentle resistance against the dominant powers within art and its making, the qualities of hope and care (practised daily out of necessity by QTBIPOC artists) are the currency of this collection. These islands of hope and care offer moments of clarity from within a complex set of intersections for fellow artists to rest upon. Though some of these intersections have stark realities for artists, I would like to draw on a sentiment by Rebecca Solnit in making the case for hope: “hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them and addressing them by remembering”; on top of that, hope in itself, “can be an act of defiance.”7
Once I had shrugged off the colonial spell of Shakespeare et al. in my twenties, I gravitated heavily toward the multiplicitous nature of live art in my thirties. I use live art to express, question and heal from living a life of discrimination. As a marginalised form, live art aligns itself naturally with an intersectional viewpoint. In Time, Space and Power I talk about how it is a practice that resists colonial structures. It allows for storytelling that softens the linear edges of defining people of colour through their cultural identity alone. It allows us to soften the edges between a performer and her audience. It allows us to soften the edges between you, the page, the stage and me.
Live art has been a useful way for me to enter conversations about feminism, cultural identity and decolonisation through art. However, at the time of compiling this collection, these conversations are rapidly moving from decolonisation to re-indigenising the way we make art and the institutions that carry that art. So, as I continue rewriting the story of harm caused to me through racial inequity and gender bias, I now face a crucial questioning of the very tools that helped me begin to tear down the walls that hemmed me in. Live art itself still hails from a Western, privileged and elite society, even though it was built to resist and challenge the status quo. I am now sceptical of saying that it is these processes that allow us, artists of colour, a fuller way to express ourselves, free from a colonial/patriarchal gaze. Really, it is a Western label that acts as a convenient container for the kinds of art that was in our blood and bones to begin with.
The useful processes I attribute to live art were already present in my ancestry, but dulled and gaslit by the Western gaze and its obsession with capitalism as its social system. The saris that my mother was no longer welcome to wear, the lavish neighbourhood Diwali parties she could no longer throw after moving to the West are tiny examples of a rich and creative inheritance that I struggled to connect with after moving to Aotearoa from Doha, Qatar, via the Himalayas and, my complicated home, New Delhi. Direct results of colonisation, patriarchy and capitalism. I have spent the better part of two decades believing I had to discover something new in order to arrive at the “postfeminist fantasy: that an individual woman can bring what blocks her movement to an end.”1
In Under The Light of a Full Moon, I take a strong a lead from Sara Ahmed’s Living A Feminist Life and reject the notion that I discovered feminism through emigrating from East to West and instead remember where I found feminism, where feminism found me, and who I learned from2. I want to rediscover, remember and re-indigenise the tools learnt from my first feminist teachers, my mother, my grand mothers, my aunties; learnings that I had resisted for a long time as I gazed wistfully at the West, at Whiteness, as the benchmark of personal freedom. Through largely co-self-taught and co-self-built processes of intersectional collaboration with my artistic peers (poetically expressed in Rolling On The Floor Laughing, or, ROFL), I now treasure my ancestral tools as part of my arsenal of weapons intended to dismantle, destroy, and dissolve those pesky colonial / patriarchal walls.
Day to day, I find myself resisting and relenting to wider socio economic power structures at play in the world, and I’ve chosen to use art and the fostering of its process as a tool to express the push and pull of living through gender and racial discrimiation. I am now entering a third decade of making art combined with my job as a programmer of independent artists and their work at the Basement Theatre in Tāmaki Makaurau. In a world that is actively surviving through the effects of a global pandemic, civil reckonings and rising sea levels, my central questions now turn from myself toward the structures of making art from relational, economic, social and political perspectives. In A Reason To Rest, I call for a departure from the neo-liberal rhythms our existing arts structures continue to play out, despite the enforced slowing down of this beat that the Covid-19 pandemic has encouraged in the arts worldwide.
This collection is a political reply to the conditions of creating live art work in Aotearoa and could be seen as islands from which you might observe various entry points for living an intersectional, artistic life. And, in defiance to language, to Western academia, and Ayn Rand's thin and dangerous philosophy, objectivism3, I will switch, slip, dodge and ping pong from objective to subjective in tone to reflect what Donna Haraway would simply term “staying with trouble.”4 By which I mean, I’d rather sit in kinship with my questions and all that makes up the muck of my world, than imagine myself as any kind of expert in dominance over it. Sometimes I will play into the tones that universities, arts organisations, and the Western-colonial-patriarchy demands of me. Sometimes I will not. Rather than offer a clean, linear, well beaten out narrative, here, I offer you episodes through which you might map your own journey through the Time and Space we live in today.
As you float through this website, you will find a relationship between live art and performance studies in how my questions are written and performed. As Nien Yuang Chen, a Singaporean Chinese artist and scholar in her article, Globalisation, Transgression, and the Call to Performance Studies, writes, performance studies has a reputation of being innately rebellious. Quoting Richard Schechner’s seminal textbook, Performance Studies: An Introduction she interrogates the field as a form that, by its very nature, leads to “the avant-garde, the marginal, the offbeat, the minoritarian, the subversive, the twisted, the queer, people of color, and the formerly colonized”5. While this collection avoids embedding itself in what Chen calls “settled hierarchies of ideas, organisations, and people,”6 I am also cautious of giving my approach a birth certificate that, as Chen persuasively argues, still has the clear stamp of imperialism on it.
If the social system of this work is personal and political, then, in gentle resistance against the dominant powers within art and its making, the qualities of hope and care (practised daily out of necessity by QTBIPOC artists) are the currency of this collection. These islands of hope and care offer moments of clarity from within a complex set of intersections for fellow artists to rest upon. Though some of these intersections have stark realities for artists, I would like to draw on a sentiment by Rebecca Solnit in making the case for hope: “hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them and addressing them by remembering”; on top of that, hope in itself, “can be an act of defiance.”7
1 Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life, 9.
2 Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life, 8.
3 Ayn Rand Institute. “Introducing Objectivism” by Ayn Rand.
4 Harraway. Staying With The Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 3
5-6 Schechner. Performance Studies: an Introduction, 4
7 Solnit, Hope In The Dark, 9
2 Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life, 8.
3 Ayn Rand Institute. “Introducing Objectivism” by Ayn Rand.
4 Harraway. Staying With The Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 3
5-6 Schechner. Performance Studies: an Introduction, 4
7 Solnit, Hope In The Dark, 9