“Stories, Bodies, Archives”

Script-reading performance at 2023 Hamilton FrostBite Festival

This past fall, I had a pleasure of journeying with 12 amazing students/co-travelers in a course called Stories, Bodies, Archives: Un/Learning in Movements. During our course journey we made a commitment to ethically remember, forget, and retell in order to do justice to the stories, histories, and struggles of bodies who occupy marginal spaces in dominant institutionalized memories, imaginations, languages, and modes of narrations. We aimed to create a community that listens and shares concomitantly: a polyvocal community.

This collectively written script, came out as the outcome of such efforts, striving to do justice to the journeys and commitments of each voice that has contributed to the making of the larger moving whole, it is an outcome of a process in which multiple bodies laboured together to remember, listen, trust, explore, retell, write, move, and perform.

So here we are with our script, entangled, committed, and responsible for ourselves, for our communities and for one another as co-traveler and inspired by Sara Ahmad who reminds us that; "in queer, feminist, and antiracist work, self-care is about the creation of community, fragile communities… assembled out of the experiences of being shattered. We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday, and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other."

Click here to learn more about this script reading