Sick Gurl
In this solo project, I explore what it means to live in a body that has experienced two nearly oppositional existences, and how those existences have formed the physical dance dialects of my now-body. This body is a chimera. It has become something with two lived experiences, two lived histories. I dwell in here, and the movement that thrusts itself out has been formed by both enormous chapters of time. Time is not linear in the cellular make up of me.
Sick Gurl an interdisciplinary dance work that uses movement, text, video, sound, and objects to enter into an autoethnographic exploration of my experience as a chimeric being. My chimera is both literally a cyborg who had a pre-cyborg body (pre-transplant) and a distinct cyborg (post-transplant) body, as well as a body in an ongoing relationship to surgical alteration, being cut into and remade again and again. In this work, chimera is both actual and metaphor: I am disabled, and I am in flight (dreaming and imagining is an embodied movement experience). Sick Gurl is about what it means to transform the internal logic of refusing a disabled identity into one that holds my bodymind as both magical and trauma-informed. As such, my chimera has dragon wings, gazelle legs, terrible indigestion, and lungs that both gasp and take in long deep breaths. This work is about the journey to fall in love with scars, regarding them as tattoos, and how survivor’s guilt dances with the joy of still being ‘here’. It considers why so many disabled folx love horror movies, have practiced various forms of self-harm, and are in need of liberation from cure models of disability. This dance is my love letter to a cross-disability intersectional future where we can belong to one another.
Footage of Sick Gurl (2022)
Footage of Sick Gurl (2018)
