Queering Ritual

Contributor Abstracts

• Fulla Abdul-Jabbar

  That which fades away continues forever
  That which fades away continues forever is a PowerPoint poem covering "2 H.B." by Roxy Music. Fulla Abdul-Jabbar is an artist and writer living in Chicago. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Assistant Editor at the Green Lantern Press.

• Dr Kimberly Campanello

  America, this is how we got here: A queer conversation with Dr. Laura
  Self-help psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger was one of the original conservative radio hosts hellbent on transforming America’s values. No shacking up or sex before marriage. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Races and religions are best kept separate. Gays, a biological error. Dr. Laura explained that ‘If you're a liberal, anything you say is protected. If you're a conservative, anything you say is hateful.’ Thus, her advice isn’t hateful, it’s advice. During those Satanic Clinton years when I was a teenager, my family listened to Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura during car rides across the Midwest. I will ritually hold forth in queer conversation with Dr. Laura. America, this is how we got here.

  Kimberly Campanello is currently working on MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla Avant Objects, forthcoming 2018), a book of conceptual and visual poetry created using archival materials related to the St Mary's Mother and Baby Home in Ireland, a selection of which appeared in Laudanum Publishing’s Chapbook Anthology Vol. 2. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University.

• Amanda Couch

  Our Palaces of Intestines
  Through the enactment, appropriation and subversion of the ancient ritual of extispicy, divination using the entrails, and commensality, eating together, my provocation, Our Palaces of Intestines aims to explore the theme of Queering Ritual by enacting ideas of interconnectedness, and otherness, a ‘transactional mingling of organism and environment’ (Shannon Sullivan, 2015). At the centre will be a large pie, a kind of sacrificial body. There will be an extispicy through the cutting of an ‘opening into the invisible world’ of the pie (Jeremy Naydler, 2009), to reveal a labyrinthine sausage, the ‘palace of the intestines’, which will be examined/read.
  Amanda Couch is an artist, researcher, and senior lecturer at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, where she teaches Fine Art, and Creative Arts Education. Cutting across media, her art practice and research straddles the domains of performance, the live and recorded image, print, bookarts, sculpture, food, participation, and writing.

• Crisis + Denial (Catherine Hoffman and Lesley Ewen)

  These Tender Alms (10 mins video)
  In our hybrid drag identities as Angus and Rayshal– crafted, applied from the outside and queering notions of gender and race, we reveal curious songs: absurd cover songs…Whilst engaging in thrift shop rituals which may bring us together, satisfy our craving for connection or at least for crisps. Developed from our full show These Tender Alms shown at Spill and Buzzcut in 2016. Eternal Flame, Light up my Life and Ebony and Ivory are the cover songs arranged to reveal.

  No, no! I am nothing pure! My race is mixed. My sex is mixed.
 I am woman and man, light with darkness, (*Penda’s Fen 1974)

  A collaborative duo emerging from Dickie Beau’s drag family-The House of Strange Loops, 2015/16. A 'synthesis of oddity' arises when creating together: manifesting in absurd play, DIY song making and drag personae. We execute ambiguous actions and alternate ceremonies using found objects and food as potential commentary on everyday consumer rituals. www.crisisanddenial.com

• Cassandra Davis

  Baptism, 2016
  Baptism is an invitation to re-imagine a ritual denied to queer bodies. In this work, I have assumed role as baptizer in an intimate exchange between myself and the baptized queer, calling into question power dynamics within religious hierarchies and reclaiming a lost experience of ecstasy. While evangelical religion works to suppress sexuality, this baptism offers both the baptized and witness a sexual liberation in this symbolic act. It is both irreverently erotic, and reverently spiritual. 10 minute excerpt, sound by The Very Real Horst. Through performance, video, installation and sculpture, Cassandra’s work examines her Midwestern Evangelical upbringing, relationships between redemption, resurrection, embodied trauma, and the failure of the American dream. She is enchanted by the power of spiritual ecstasy and how the reclamation of ritual might offer the marginalized body a transcendent experience. www.questionsfromthesoil.com

• Dr Louie Jenkins

  Queering Loss: Shame and the Art of Mourning
  This provocation questions what it is to (Dis)identify with culturally sanctioned expressions of grief asking how shame affect is manifest through the disjunction between experience and expression of loss. My partner Rebecca died in 2005 and, as her female partner, the law did not acknowledge me as her ‘next-of-kin’ so the profound experience of loss was queered even more. I began to write and perform about the experience, but it felt indulgent somehow; my grief, I perceived, was ‘unfair’ on others. Shame affect as posited by Tomkins (1962/3) and explored by Sedgwick (1993), presents a dynamic way of examining embodied experience as both innate and learned. Dr Louie Jenkins’ (University of Chichester, UK) research focuses on shame, class, queer performativity and the art of mourning. Her solo performances have been performed nationally and internationally. She has a chapter in the upcoming book Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration (Ed. Pinchbeck and Westerside 2018).

• Virginia Kennard

  My matrimonial body belongs to me
  My matrimonial body belongs to me takes the traditional feudal cisheteronormative marriage ceremony to seek a newly queer system of wedded bliss outside of the legal and classist ideals of the nuclear family. Why is marriage equality so bloody important? What does your ideal wedding look like? What does your ideal marriage look like? My body is mine i am sharing it with you…It bleeds it fucks it makes noise it loves being stuck in this dress. #redshoesnoknickers #notyourgoodqueer This work has been developed from Big Queer Anti-Wedding performed for Virginia’s MA Performance final project.

  Virginia Kennard is a live artist and movement practitioner from Aotearoa New Zealand. She creates work unpicking and repacking moral panic, unclean femininity, and the commodified sexed body, using dance, sonic mash-ups, and comic banter. Performing alongside her are interactive theatre-maker Alice Boulton-Breeze, live artist and scenographer Florence Simms, and live artist Cieran Reed. viggimakesart.nz

• Dr Liesl King

  Queering the Cosmos – a ritual to delay apocalypse
  This provocation will explore the way in which queering the collective perspective might be seen as a project of urgent necessity if human beings are to circumvent the impending dissolution of our species. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1987), it will be argued that to queer is to participate in the radical, radicle, cosmos-wide transformation that the multiverse undertakes every millisecond and across millennia. Since the time of the Industrial Revolution, human beings have interrupted the planetary rituals which reveled in biospheric equilibrium. Galvanising queer forces, it is time to re-harmonise the dance.

  Dr Liesl King is Deputy Head of School of Humanities, Religion and Philosophy at York St John University in York, England. Liesl is particularly interested in exploring the way in which science fiction enables readers and viewers to access perspectives on secular spirituality. Her online magazine, based at YSJ, can be found at yorkstjohnterratwo.com

• Dr Alexandros Papadopoulos

  How to Use Gay Nazis in Job Interviews: Facebook, Lust and Existential Sodomism
  Based on an actual interview with a gay nazi, this playful presentation explores how social media can stage a horny war against fear, hatred and uncertainty. It is a provocative -- both physically and intellectually -- analysis of the relationship between Facebook, austerity-horror and queer desire. Mixing analysis with storytelling – this talk re-stages shocking testimonies of the experimental short-film/video-performance called The Homonazi Effect. Centered on factual -- violent, flirty and cyber -- encounters with Athens-based gay neonazis, the Homonazi Effect encompassed an alliance of platforms: blogs, queer festivals, popular magazines, academic writing and social media.

  Dr. Alexandros Papadopoulos is performance artist and ‘archaeologist of dreams’. He has contributed video-performance and audio-visual installations in the Athens-based annual exhibition: Civil Disobedience. His upcoming work is called: ‘Come on Darling, Domesticate These Industrial Rabbits’. His latest academic publication is Performing The Homo-Nazi Effect: Gay Neo-Nazism, Digital Drag Attack, and the Postcinematic Cultures of Crisis.

• Amble Skuse

  Balancing act
  Balancing act is a live processing performance by Amble Skuse and laptop using body sensors as an interface. It takes female composers names and mixes and filters them into Noise, inaudible, unheard, filtered out. The piece presents 1464 names, female names, invisible names, to the concert hall. Composers who are “simply not there” are simply here, we “cannot rewrite history”, we are not the ones rewriting herstory. The names are so overwhelming that they blend to noise, become waves, rain and all around us. Women in music make up the air we breathe and the water we drink.

  Amble Skuse is an AHRC PhD candidate exploring the use of body sensors in composition and performance for performers with disabilities. She recently won the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association prize for her work. She plays electric violin and laptop for the British ParaOrchestra and OFFAL and has performed internationally.

• Nathan Walker

  Lilies Under the Tongue
  Voices that touch and objects that are not separate from subjects. Heather and grammar. Queerness creates a space when you’re neck deep in coal or balancing a tree on your head. Where are the commons for harmony, mud, cattle or dust? A lily under their tongue unlearns gender. Lilies Under the Tongue is a visual-text for performance. It brings together concepts of anarchist geography, queer ecology, Buddhism and action-oriented performance art. By reconsidering the performance actuations of Alastair MacLennan as queer rituals this text aligns these rituals with a non-dualistic thinking of queerness as spatial.

  Nathan Walker is a performance artist and poet. He has performed nationally and internationally. His poetry has been published by Uniformbooks and If p then Q. In 2017 he was commissioned by BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’. Nathan is co-founder of performance art organisation Oui Performance, with Victoria Gray. www.nathan-walker.co.uk

• Jessica Worden

  Rudework: A Hex in Two Parts
  Rudework: A Hex in Two Parts constructs ecologies of diversity by transforming gestures of writing and ritual knotting into communal participatory practice, while exploring an emotional and sexual terrain often associated with the feminine. This piece destablises writing in live space. It generates and performs a sense of lessness: a space between things that is fluid and unfixed. Rudework acknowledges and aims to subvert the binary oppositions that create understandings of lack and seeks to recognise how we can realign our thinking about economies in relation to bodies, emotions and experience.

  Jessica Worden is an artist and writer. Her research focuses on performances of breathlessness, written scores and writing-as-performance. Recent publications include ‘Slow veins’ in Syncope in Performing and Visual Arts (2016) and commissioned writing for EROS, Salt and ]performancespace[. She performs and exhibits work in the UK and abroad.