Moderator: Kailin Wright
Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
The Performance Art of Sleeping: Working to Sleep, Sleeping to Work
I’ve always had sleep disturbances like nightmares, sleepwalking, and night terrors, but didn’t realize their extent and frequency until I started filming myself as part of my performance-based art practice. My paper examines my sleep performance in the video installation, Restless and compares it to my live feed sleeping performance, Under Surveillance: 12hrs at the PHI. In both performances, sleep explores the boundaries between conscious and unconscious states—a liminal space that I argue is productive for my art practice as a space of knowing and unknowing. Here I can recuperate my demonstrable sleep anxieties that take the form of gasps, yelling, talking, screaming, starts, jumps, snores, and sleepwalking as performance gestures, inviting viewers to reflect on their sleep experiences. My analysis draws on queer theoretical analyzes of effect, performance, counter-publics, and subjectivity. The queer theory offers a way of thinking about the effect that expands on traditional understandings of sleep as political, how publics and counter-publics are created and circulate meaning, and the transformative processes of queer performativity. I will discuss how my sleep performance differs between Restless and Under Surveillance, highlighting the dis/similar affective registers and productive unconscious performativity. I will also examine the formal presentations that these performances take and how these differences contributed to, shaped, and revealed different sleep states. Finally, I will conclude by reflecting on my own sleep performance and its ability to re-frame sleep as a productive practice for performance creation.
Dayna McLeod, Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, McGill University
Bio: Dayna McLeod is an artist-scholar and Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture research-creation postdoctoral fellow. She earned a Ph.D. from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. She is part-time faculty at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University.
Voicing an Echo, Re-Rooting in Resonance
Across the great body of the Atlantic Ocean, do my own ancestor’s earth-based traditions still echo, vibrating between the memories of trees chopped down and hearths covered over with poured concrete? Before the archive, before my ancestors were robbed of their traditions, like all people, they sang while they worked, put their babies to sleep, and fought. Songs, like water, flow, they resonate across time and space filling in cracks of understanding.
In The Book of Jessica, Linda Griffiths debates with Maria Campbell about the treasures of Maria’s sacred traditions. Maria, a Métis activist and artist, continuously entreats Linda to search back through her traditions to find her power. Where Linda could not find this connection, I wish to help settlers build bridges to their land-based ancestral traditions by using vocality as a path to the traditions of my Gallic ancestors. In developing a practice centred on the power of vocality espoused by Virginie Magnat in her latest monograph, my goal is to listen to these ancient songs while exploring the body and voice connection. In this presentation, I will unpack how I plan to use my voice to examine whether Magnat’s cross-cultural theory of vocality as a performative tool is useful in remaking relationships between settlers and the land while contributing to settler accountability.
Tracey Guptill, Queen’s University
Bio: Tracey Guptill is a Cultural Studies Ph.D. student at Queen’s University.
Drawing from years of collaborative devising with anARC Theatre, theatre voice and movement training in Canada and France, a degree in Philosophy and a practice-based master’s degree in Environmental Studies (2014), her research brings together the disciplines of cultural and environmental studies, philosophy, and performance studies under the umbrella of research-creation.
“There is Nothing You Need To Do Now”
On the boundary of performance and sound studies, my paper will be a theoretical reflection that responds to a post-pandemic spatiality by invoking the surge in popularity of ASMR and meditation apps over the course of the pandemic – forms which use sonic stimulation as therapeutic performance practices. This work draws on relaxation and healing meditations while challenging the cisheteronormativity of such forms with a queer (and theoretical) approach to what it might take to relax in a world not made for us. My intention is to consider forms of attunement and sound/space in relation to the positionality of listening practices by disrupting the boundaries of public and private listening and to parse the shores of (dis)comfort in the reception of certain types of sound in the era of post-pandemic re-gathering. I pursue this line of inquiry because I am interested in how queer soundings permeate the shoals of theory and performance.
As part of a larger research-creation project, I am working on a series called Queer Medz, which are sonic meditations that turn to queer theory as the potential foundation for achieving a queer sense of calm. I have been invited to perform a public meditation at the Spoken Web Sound Symposium in Edmonton in May 2023. For the CATR conference, I will present the auto-ethnographic reflection that emerges from this work as part of my investigation of the ways that und reaches listeners (through waves) in both live and mediated contexts.
Moynan King, Postdoctoral Associate, University of Western Ontario
Bio: Moynan is an artist and postdoctoral scholar working on a research project entitled “Queer Resonance.” She is currently (re)developing trace about the voice in gender transition (Theatre Passe Muraille, April 2023) and working on Queer Medz; the first of which, “Queer Time:1”, will be released on the Listening, Sound, Agency lathe cut record project in 2023.