Body Tongues (series 2023-ongoing)
Body Tongues began with the trans*/nonbinary/ gendervariant/ genderqueer body and endless conversations on the struggles to self-determine what and how we do with our bodies in the Danish healthcare system. We experimented with somatic awareness and movement in mapping desire, struggle, rage, grief, dreaming, play, and imagination with these conversations in the room in the format of a first workshop in Aalborg hosted by Lim Collective under the artistic caretaking of Fazle Shairmohamed.
The second workshop led us to Body Tongues:Trans Rage in a collaboration with curator and writer Eli Stål. We have caressed and released rage in our bodies, read texts and poems of Travis Alabanza and Susan Stryker, and made a full moon in Aries ritual of purging.
body tongues: techno rage
body tongues: techno rage
Photo documentation: Mariana Machado courtesy of Haut_Scene and workspace Brussels
From the previous workshop series into a research process - Body Tongues: Techno Rage (2023-) was born. In a first residency, Fazle Shairmahomed, Suziethecockroach, Keiria Shishay and I departed from these questions:
How can we move with, hold, and be present with rage in our bodies?
How can we divest from capitalist, colonial and patriarchal modes that have made us internalize how rage is simply destructive, unsafe, and undeserving of existing? Or, only existing to be expressed by certain bodies and not others?
Given the (continuous legacy) of this genocidal political climate we are living in and witnessing globally, how can we politicize rage even more through art? And show solidarity for the liberation of occupied land?
We went to Aalborg again at the invitation of Lim Collective and Buens Cafe and Queer Library, and we had spoken, visual, embodied and resonant conversations on collective rage. Rage as a mourning for oppression, or a stimuli for building action and mobilisation for international solidarity, or even, rage as collective ritual. We moved between indoor and outdoor space in and out of the city to experiment with prompts for vocalising somatic rage in our bodies in movement within spaces of care engaging with tension, play, release, support, grief, and deep anger. We located our rage in different points of the body and its textures, exhausted it in support of one another, and connected to land in ritual in an old viking burial place.
RAGE CHOIR PROTOCOLS
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RAGE CHOIR PROTOCOLS 〰️
As part of my academic study within the program MA Performing Arts as Critical Practice with social focus, I have also taken this work further here. From the previous experiments at the residency in Aalborg, I crafted what I call Rage_choir protocols. These imply a witnessing of and holding of each other’s rage through the somatic (awareness), touch, witnessing, observation, active listening, vocalization, movement, and an unfolding of the various layers that rage contains. I invite the participant(s) as my co-orchestrator negotiating these acts and gestures with one another.
From experimenting with these at my theatre academy, I oscillated between instructed base protocols and more free experiments with students as audience. In these experiments, I had a large projection of a video of a volcano erupting in the background while I was mixing soundtracks and theremin live only, and the participants were instructed to use their voices with another version of a rage_choir protocol.
Documentation: Edit Kaldor
Example of a Raging_choir protocol instruction for participants
Pair up
Agree on whom is witnessing and who is holding
Agree on which positioning to take and how to touch (or not each other)
Make any other necessary agreements (things to pay attention to, or avoid, or any other instructions that could be useful here)
Vocalize a groggy, just woken up type of voice sound
Sustain it for a few seconds
See how it changes
Push the shift when you see fitting
And search for your rage
Notice where it emanates from
Notice where it is located
Does it have a smell
An image
A shape
A texture
A voice
A place
A politic
An ideology
A culture
A land
Does it speak?
Is it mute
Muffled?
Numb?
Vast?
Restrictive?
Constricted?
taboo?
Keep searching for it if you cannot find it
Sustain the sound and see if it can shift into loudness
See how loud it can become
Increase
Is this a song yet?
Is it coarse?
High pitched?
Keep searching in the sound you make
Invite yourself to rage even if the rage is quiet
Push the rage to erupt
What is the trigger?
Stop
Recommence the exact same thing by evoking a memory of either being rageful in the past or present
See how your voice becomes slightly or abruptly affected by the memory
Increase the awareness of it
And push the sound into loudness
Invite the violence in
Invite the aggression and see if you can move
Stop
Recommence again
The exact same thing but with a lower threshold /intensity of the evocation of the memory
Catch yourself remembering the same thing
Try to be outside it while you vocalize
If there is an urge to say words listen to that urge and answer to it
Remap your rage - are there any other points of eruption or underwhelm?
What sensations are there?
Lower the vocal output
And see if you can move the points where you feel this holding of the other
And adjust the body better
SWITCH
Repeat as many times as you both see fitting and see if your protocol needs adjusting or a shift as you progress with the exercise. Agree upon what is needed after this exercise.
Say goodbye at the altar with a closing of the space through burning herbs, writing a note and leaving it there, or vocalizing a sentence out loud for this altar.
People are allowed to stay in and hang out as long as they don’t disturb the next participant trying in these exercises. I might also decide to do it in a small group setting if it is agreed in the space.
This space is ritualized with some objects that we brought from herbs to burn, rose water, incense, candles, flags, prints, and among others that we have set up in an altar.
And I ask participants to also bring their own objects/offerings into the ritual space related to their own raging/ or that could be a vehicle of raging in their lives.
RAGE_RAVING PROTOCOLS
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RAGE_RAVING PROTOCOLS 〰️
This trajectory is more focused on sound as an anchor informed by queer underground raving and noise-punk scenes, to compose live sound sampling with choir formation by activating audiences into participatory roles. Additionally, we activate multisensory bodily zones stimulated by scenographic elements that activate collective social choreographies enacting a sort of rave.
Mics are installed hanging from a scaffolding in a room, and the audience is invited to vocalize sounds, roam the room, sit, dance, watch, play, lay in the bed, drink, operate lights, and co-create the space. We record the live voices manipulating them, sampling them with other sounds, and crafting a live dj set with instruments and the voices of the audience while conducting a live rage_choir. The live sound compositions includes dj sets with improv jams with theremin.
We had our first experiment at Kaai Studios Theatre in Brussels at a residency program by Haut_Scene and workspace Brussels in Belgium, Brussels. Suziethecockroack, Keiria Shishay and Warren Jones joined me as we staged a secret rave for friends of friends of friends within the queer community in Brussels in a quiet Wednesday night in May 2024.
I have chosen to not publish the documentation of this evening here.
Photo documentation of post-rave remnants and traces: Mariana Machado courtesy of Haut_Scene and workspace Brussels
Protocols of
(does) LAND RAGE (?)
The trajectory here shifts from the multiplicity of body to land, and our relationships to land in re-imagining it in collective rage resonance.
These days I happen to be taking long walks in the middle of the night, at first spontaneously as being called by the quiet winds in the darkness and the slow-moving trees and their eternal interdependent cycles of birth and oscillating decay, close to my now temporary home. I wonder how far these echoes can reach. Where else has this rain been, vibrating in my back so gently? Could it travel from lands that are amidst extinction weighted by the blood of those that have become ghosts just like some of our exterminated black ancestors and our children? Does rain age like the fungal remnant of indigenous poltergeists waiting for an evocation, a song, a libation, a story, releasing them from a colonial purgatory of disappearance? When can their stories truly haunt?
The spontaneity of these walks became a regular ceremony as it started happening again and again at the same time of the late evening transitioning into morning - a ritual. I noticed that I pursued contact with eco resonances along these walks, and these turned into key moments of emotional and psychic attunement within my dreaming of freedom. How can we dream of futures of liberation if we are not attuned to do so? How can we take decisions that will influence those futures from that space of attunement and with whom right next to us? How can we materialize the (im)possible?
A(n) (im)possible that breaks with delusions of neoliberal lies mouth-feeding ideas of separateness
A(n) (im)possible that ignites your hunger for a different kind of aliveness
A(n) (im)possible that summons you into waking up to raging for those forgotten, ruined, deaden, debilitated,
A(n) (im)possible that makes you remember what has been consistently erased and concealed within our modern existence into the future
A(n) (im)possible that haunts as a method of unveiling
and of revenge.
Notes: readings referenced "Decolonization, but make it spooky" by Kati Johnson
21-22.02.24_Albertslund_ evening + photo below with edited graphics
Photos from residency in Møn hosted by Hosting Lands with suziethecockroach
Suziethecockroach and I went to Møn in April 2024 to play with sound and movement in a residency at Kunsthal 44 in collaboration with Hosting Lands. We made sound collages inspired by previous rage_raving protocol prompts and experiments and moved to songs in our playlists that could activate somatic rage in conversation with the landscape surrounding us.
Video stills from video recorded by suziethecockroach and photos taken by me
