June 21, 2014

Every two years, the Hemispheric Institute hosts an Encuentro—part academic conference, part performance festival—in a different site in the Americas.

The Hemispheric Institute’s 9th Encuentro, held at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, sought to explore the multiple valences of the term MANIFEST! How are performances mobilized and syncretized in civic, community, and cultural contexts to create manifold forms of political expression? How do public, theatrical events produce ‘evidence’ that manifests ideas otherwise invisible, hidden, or unspeakable? What new manifestations, manifestos, festivals, and manifs emerge via our changing visions of political spaces, intellectual arenas, and the everyday street? The 2014 Encuentro invited artists, activists, and scholars to engage with and investigate the aesthetic, social, and choreographic techniques that transform political ideas into collective images, through actions, embodied utterances, and ways of being. Such questions resonated in the host city of Montréal, where la manifestation has a rich and ongoing history.

I had the pleasure of performing Lifting Stone at this year’s Encuentro.

Lifting Stone, a queer, erotic re/mix of sections from Gertrude Stein’s classic text Lifting Belly, creates space for intimate encounters. This poetic performance reflects on vulnerability, violence, our relationship to the land, and being “stone.” Working with a queer femme notion of ‘stone,’ I play with ideas of touching and being touched in a context of colonial violence.