Performing Resistance/Negotiating Sovereignty: Indigenous Women's Perofrmance Art in Canada

Performing Resistance/ Negotiating Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art In Canada investigates the contemporary production of Indigenous performance and video art in Canada in terms of cultural continuance, survivance and resistance. Drawing on critical Indigenous methodology, which foregrounds the necessity of privileging multiple Indigenous systems of knowledge, it explores these themes through the lenses of storytelling, decolonization, activism, and agency. With specific reference to performances by Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Skeena Reece and Dana Claxton, as well as others, it argues that Indigenous performance art should be understood in terms of i) its enduring relationship to activism and resistance ii) its ongoing use as a tool for interventions in colonially entrenched spaces, and iii) its longstanding role in maintaining self-determination and cultural sovereignty.

Performing Pedagogies and Exploring Embodied Knowledge

Performing Pedagogies was a week-long performance and exhibition series I organized that took place in Kingston, Ontario between March 15th - March 20th 2016. The motivation for this project came from a desire to explore performative modes of experiencing critical, embodied knowledge. The series featured five performances, a long distance collaboration between thirty-one Queen’s undergraduate students and a Vancouver artist-run free school (The School for Eventual Vacancy), a subsequent exhibition, a panel discussion, and a radical performance pedagogy workshop led by co-artistic director of the international performance art troupe, La Pocha Nostra. Artists featured included Golboo Amani, Basil AlZeri, Caitlin Chaisson, Justin Langlois, Saul Garcia-Lopez, Francisco-Fernando Granados, and Andrew Rabyniuk. By curating examples of performance art that variously incorporated embodied pedagogical interventions, I examined the processes of performance as pedagogy. Performing Pedagogies explored interventions into contemporary contours of neoliberal education paradigms through embodied encounters—fostering conversations about the meanings and limitations of knowledge dissemination and education today and posing questions about possibilities for radical pedagogies, embodied knowledge, and counter curricula.

Need To Be Adored

Faced with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, I began with the objective of discovering methods for creating art that were still accessible to me. Along the way, I encountered others who had travelled this road before me. Their experiences led me to examine, not only my art, but also my political orientations, my love obligations and my transitioning self. In my varied art pieces, I conjure something from diverse sources and different worldviews, including contemporary feminist performance art and disability cultural theory. My thesis is a project. I make things: puppets, videos and performances, which included the exhibition, Need to be Adored (2014), staged in the digital media lab of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The exhibition introduced thirteen of my puppets and a thirty-two-minute looped video. Following the exhibition, I put the puppets away and spent two years reading. Finally, taking my inspiration from Carolyn Ellis’s The Autoethnographic I (Ellis 2004), I turned my processes into words. I wrote out my experiences. I created an alternative text of my identity from an able-bodied cis-identified woman into a disabled trans-feminist artist academic. The writing required an uncomfortably intimate examination of my life. Nothing less than complete honesty would allow me to understand my new location. The resulting text is a lyrical and sometimes whimsical flow of consciousness that invites the reader to imagine what it might be like to engage in such a candid review of everything one holds close to one’s heart. Contained within are all my identities. In this text I let some out. This is a story of unsettling. I am working on my art practices, creating a cast of characters from cloth. Puppets. El becomes the exulted main character of a fictional accounting. She uncovers her queer roots and begins to see that she is at the centre of a very strange geography. Her desire to make film is revealed as she re-remembers her childhood through a disability lens.