panel 1
Moving With Care: “Switchy” Methodologies for Transformative Queer Street Performance
(interactive workshop)
Moving With Care: “Switchy” Methodologies for Transformative Queer Street Performance
The Switch Collective
What if communities moved through their streets together immersed in artful, interdisciplinary, queer stories? What if a care ethic was woven into every stage of creating such radical roving street performance? Is it possible? What would this look, sound, and feel like moving across a landscape, a busy intersection, a parking lot? How would we recognize that we were a part of this liberatory creative care practice – amongst artists, audiences, backstage teams, strangers, neighbors, and wilds?
Since 2016, the Switch Collective has been deeply invested in developing an explicit aesthetic and methodology of “queer street work” (Switch Collective, 2024). To “switch” is to be deeply present, adaptive, and in tune with self and collaborators (including strangers and wild kin), to shift roles and power, flow, pause, and reorient as a queer, crip, and feminist erotics of improvisation (Waterman, 2008). A “yes and maybe, what if..” style of improvisation that leverages care, trust, deep witnessing, consent, and collaboration to build an artful community. We would also call this performance style a “queering” of place, performance, performer, and public practice (Butler, 1988).
The Switch Collective would like to offer the following critical and creative interventions for the Care Ethics Conference;
- A presentation that explores some of our previous work and shares how we have developed our methodologies and approaches to place based and care centered queer art making.
- An interactive workshop that explores “Switchy” interdisciplinary approaches for creating embodied social justice art that can be taken to the streets, while considering how we practice care for each other, for place, for strangers and for the stories we share.
References
Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893
Switch Collective (2024). Switch methodologies. THE SWITCH COLLECTIVE. https://www.switch-collective.com/methodologies.html
Waterman, E. (2008). Naked intimacy: Eroticism, improvisation, and gender. Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études Critiques En Improvisation, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.21083/csieci.v4i2.845
The Switch Collective is an interdisciplinary performance troupe in Tk’aronto (Canada) that has been co-producing new research-creation methodologies and roving political performance works for the public sphere since 2018. Switch centers the unique knowledge systems, activism, and artistic expressions of Two spirit, Queer & Trans folks (2SQT), Black, Indigenous & Peoples of Color (BIPOC), and the lived wisdoms of intersectionally marginalized folks who varyingly experience the world as fat, mad, disabled, working class, and/or criminalized. The Switch Collective pushes creative and political boundaries by blending mediums, and by moving art and ideas through unexpected public spaces. Switch resists art elitism and exclusivity, prioritizing audiences of everyday folks, strangers & arts-enthusiasts combined. Any sidewalk can be a stage; any building, a projection screen. A procession might lead into a parking lot for a grieving ritual, while a shadow puppet leads the audience into a back alley for a dance party. Switch creates work through a decolonial and transformative justice framework of “inqueery” that leverages rigorous archival research, deep site based learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, attention to human and non-human life in a space, and “switchy improv.” The current core members are Naty Tremblay, Sedina Fiati, Lexi Sproule, and Faith-Ann Mendes, though our collective composition shifts constantly as we interweave new and local collaborators.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman