Promiscuous Emplacements: Performing with Marginal Urban Places.

Date
2022
Authors
smith, val
Supervisor
Randerson, Janine
Nikolai, Jennifer
Item type
Thesis
Degree name
Doctor of Philosophy
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Publisher
Auckland University of Technology
Abstract

Promiscuous Emplacements investigates more-than/human relationality through performance with outdoor urban environments across Tāmaki Makaurau. I encounter hidden, overlooked, and neglected crevices and corners of the city – marginal urban places that range from forgotten alleyways and uncared-for stairwells to unnoticed bushy corners of city parks. These places support my reimagination of anthropocentric habits and narratives in and through choreographic practice. I bring together discourse regarding transmateriality, queer concepts, and Indigenous materialities specific to Aotearoa. Developing a queertrans/materialist approach, I position the tentacularity and promiscuity of queer and trans matters as central to a Choreoqueering of performance. The inquiry is based on a series of live works and collaborative processes, developing approaches for more-than/human kinship, intimacies and modes of communing. The methodology of Choreoqueering is comprised of five perverse techniques – scat-tending, flotsy, bttm//bottom, queer clean(s)ing and queer napping. Scat-tending is a somatic process of at-tending marginal urban places, whilst flotsy is a playful non-representational mode of performance documentation, and bttm//bottom centres a friendship-based take on collaborative practice. Collaborations activate everyday tasks in performance, such as cleaning, resting, and napping as queertrans rituals of care and protection. Questions and propositions are generated through practice, enacting an affective and haptic, critical and sensuous research-creation. Key performance events explore the possibilities of intimacies with place in Queer Dating Sites (2018); the face-down-bum-up queer sensing of subterranean realities in Queer Failure Walk (2017) and Bttm Methodology (2019); the feltness and affect of queertrans time in queer walk-naps (2020); and trans forms of humanplant communing in ill grow back (2020) and Songs with Birds (2022). A queer/ing of Somatics is key to my research, along with the development of modes of Pākehā response-ability through performance in the context of Aotearoa (Bell and Ream 2021). This research proposes a re/generative queer*trans practice that invites the connective reach of *, and the grounding effect of /, to uplift rainbowy lives and co-shimmer with marginal urban places.

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