The Human Microphone
group performance, workshop, audiopiece and residency at Xarkis FestivalI was part of the residency program and festival Xarkis Festival - 2019 - Φεστιβάλ Ξαρκής in Cyprus. The festival takes place on the 16th,17th and 18th of August. Visitors of the festival were welcome to join my (writing and performance) workshop 'The human microphone' (on queer trauma survival). The link below is a audio piece based on recording of this workshop.
www.xarkisfestival.org.
Why this workshop?
Personal stories of hurt, not functioning as society asks you, because you are hurt by society's (capitalist, hegemonic) problems, this is/ can be seen as a border (gender, sexuality, shame, functioning and misunderstanding) creating distance. A direct affect that is always relational. Your problems are forced into a form of personal shame or guilt, but for what or who actually, and what structures are repeated to fill in certain emotions?
Borders created by ideas on gender are produced by patriarchy, and reproduced by many, through structures of shaming, victim blaming and other capitalist constructs of value.
While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival is seen as a negative. But we can see potential in taking action differently, rethinking an otherwise, being different, seeing potential in not finding “a cure” as expected. Curing and progress are mostly related to capitalist ideas of progression and value.
By creating alternative anthems, that we together amplify with our voice, creating and remixing, we make other value commitments, not anthems relating to nation, as we all know anthems, but related to the complexity of non-linear idea's on activism and vulnerability. Protest anthems : To shout, to release, to change, as counter narratives of the dominant system that forces what is discussed and made (in)visible.
How to think of alternative ways of living and not see it as failure, but just being? What is failure if we re-consider health and refuse functioning in capitalist ideas of success? Failure becomes a banal concept within a capitalist world, it becomes a specific kind of critique when making money is seen as success. Not making money, for any reason, becomes failure in itself.
Another form to think about failure is thinking how the current system is already failing, but keeps absorbing more and asking more of people. What if we refuse to give anything any longer? The system could break, because it's powerful only through repetition of its power. To fail and to refuse can be used to show that used bodies (fit for making profit in capitalism), can impede capitalism, it could make something new and create different hierarchies, even if it's imaginative through a performative act.
If personal stories relating to gender, which are usually connected to pain, trauma and/or violence, can show the borders that define us how can we break those borders and claim our autological stories while refusing the genealogical narrative around it? This could be done by using the 'negative' (shame, vulnerability, failure) as power tools and changing the narrative of becoming “better” or “in need of cure”, ideas promoted in society by capitalism and sexism. How do we create different ideas of the potential of failure if success is defined by capitalism? What are the terms failure and refusal actually? How do we use the ‘negative’, the dissonance as power tools? It is important to consider emotions as valid, always present, but also not always leading to a 'solution'.
Reclaiming what is 'normal' behaviour, sexuality and desire is a start to thinking of other potential futures.
We can propose alternative becomings and subjectivities. Breaking dominant narratives and so called ‘positivity’ within capitalist thinking. We can't break capitalism, but we can break our patterns of how we personally define growth.
Our workshop was developed by our writing and reading theory and had the aim to breaks open narratives and subject matters, setting things into movement, offering an improvisational space in which different voices and imaginaries converge, sound together, go apart, come back together and are taken home in collective memory.
The workshop itself
The ‘people's microphone' creates alternative anthems by using voices as echo/amplification, similar to the Occupy movement. Breaking borders of gender ; why do we see shame, trauma, mental issues only as a negative 'in need of a cure'? It is based on the negative victim blaming from the outside. How can we use those elements as power-tools? We can rethink shame and trauma in order to activate alternative thinking against capitalist ideas. This is a form of non-linear activism told by stories. Maybe you don't consider yourself an activist, but what your body and mind went through creates a different way of thinking. Ultimately, mental disorder is a construct and a cure is an idea of progression claimed by capitalism.
By using sound and voice as a conceptual tool, letting other spaces resonate with stories and frequencies, Saskia tries to improvise by telling alternative storylines in a non-linear way as form of resistance. Trauma and the negative outcome of that, (mental issues) can be a way of rethinking, fragmenting, reconsidering and reconstructing vulnerability without the capitalist claiming of it. Shame can used torethink the borders that define us.
Sound and resonance used as a tool is the first step in creating alternative anthems in order to find value commitments not relating to capitalism, but to care and listening. The workshop and the outcome will be in English, unless there is a conceptual need to speak native tongue. We will work in a group of queer/female people, the outcome will be collective performance with the tool of a human microphone. See video file The Human Microphone
Method / writing
With a small group we started writing our (personal) anthems, reacting and listening to each others stories. Not as therapy, but as tools for potential other futures and justice to come.
Any emotion was valid of course.
We read some texts and watch lectures on improvisation, queerness, shame, pieces on trauma, queer time, failure and activism and anthem use.
With that we made anthems, rhythms with stories, repeated by the group as resonance. This resulted in a live performance which later turned into an audiopiece.
During the festival we made a collective text by combining everyone's text. Participants and visitors of the festival could say their own sentences or someone else's (depending on privacy needs) and we amplified it with the audience who then also became participants. We also chose to do the whispering method as well, whisper the story in somebody's ear and somebody will whisper it to the next person during the whole festival where the workshops take place.