CONDUCTING THE FUTURE: How Disability and Improvisation Prepare Us To Be Unprepared
by STEPHANIE HEIT
QUEER ELECTRICAL FIELDS W e gather in the shade under the metal structures of the old shipping facility in Township Com- mons Park in Oakland. It is an unusually hot October day in 2023 forecast to reach nearly 90 degrees; several participants have already bowed out due to the heat. The small group present is eager to play. After we do an access check-in, talk about temperature accommodations, and make sure everyone has enough water, we begin. I invite people to experiment with what grounds them. Gestures. Stims – a term that originates in autistic and neurodiverse cultures referring to repet- itive soothing actions. Touch. Movement patterns. Sound. Each person har- vests a repeatable phrase to bring back and share with the group.
Left to right: Bhumi B Patel, Stephanie Heit, and Raven Malouf-Renning, Queer Mad Electrics at Township Commons Park, Oakland
Now we work with the follow- ing score: Take charges and currents from the environment and move them through your body. Where do they enter? Where do they exit? How do you direct the energy? Return to the grounding vocabulary whenever you’d like. We dance next to the Bay, that watery conductor, and play with changing the volume of the charge as
it moves through our bodies and out knees, hands, zapping out top of head, bouncing off a shoulder blade. We send currents to each other, back to the water, feeling our own conductive properties. Eventually, we reinscribe our own electrical fields, peripheries vibrating quicker due to the heat. This offering, “Queer Mad Elec- trics,” was an early exploration of what would become Mad Conductors,
a participatory performance I co- direct with disabled interdisciplinary artist and dramaturg, Alexis Riley. Mad Conductors arises out of a desire to transmute and transform personal experiences of electroshocks and psy- chiatric memory loss. It is an explora- tion of electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being. “Mad” in this context is being used as the reclaimed slur
(similar to queer) for madness rooted in the Mad Pride Movement. On this particular day, we experi- mented with electricity and connec- tion. The engagement was also shaped by being next to and in dialogue with the Bay and its inherent dangers, kind- nesses, fluidity, and conduit proper- ties. This was the culmination of the Co-Dreaming: Improvisation Toward Liberatory Worlding Symposium
Hands touch the heart, brush down the front of the torso and legs to contact cement. Gentle jiggle of the whole body. Slow intentional twirl of a strand of hair. Loose-jawed sigh.
We slowly build a collective grounding vocabulary. This will be a resource for the next part. This may be a resource for the future.
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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