To begin, an excerpt from my senior essay:
I desire to interrogate the ways in which I have felt imagined freedom through performance. I position performance as a personal political project, aiming to capture the ease of movement across and beyond rigid gendered structures…To be a body in a space, breathing, acting, doing–in a space where it was allowed to just do, act, and breathe–through performance art has allowed me to feel a sense of freedom that I had not felt before…I felt stripped down to a selfhood that was unknown, malleable, curious, ready for discovery, ready to begin again and continue. In performance art, existence is allowed. The impossibly possible space becomes affectively visible. Out of this space comes transformation. This project is born out of a deep desire to go to that space; to feel it, even for a moment. Performance art, performance unbound, performance that is ever changing, performance that is actionable, performance that listens to you and to others; this is a medium worth traversing on the path moving towards and beyond.
I’m obsessed with performance. In some ways, this project began when I was 16 and exploring the Atlanta DIY arts scene through regular summer nights at a warehouse called The Bakery. I thank Daniel Oliver, my Drama professor at Queen Mary University of London during my semester abroad, for introducing me to contemporary performance art and issuing a class field trip to a queer cabaret performance bar in Vauxhall. I thank KBB for introducing me to the term “performance curation” in my sophomore year, for encouraging our class to interrogate the institutional structures that performance has been slotted into, and push beyond them. I thank all of my friends and collaborators over the years, who are the reason I ever started loving theater in the first place. It is all about being together. Xiran, Xingyan, Bre, Nina: Thank you for being the amazing artists and friends you are. It has been a joy to imagine with you.
Alisha Simmons