I’ve been thinking a lot about queerness and failure, childhood as a queer space, and the spaces within Live Art. I made this list, about wrongness.
Things that (I think) are wrong. (I could be wrong):
- Live Art is easy to define
- Queerness is easy to define
- Hope is easy to define
- Transness is measurable
- Youth is measurable
- We will all live to be old
- Gender is binary
- Gender is an actual thing
- Cultural forms that perpetuate and celebrate and venerate tradition are the most important kinds
- Language gets us closer to understanding
- Mess is worthless and always a by-product rather than an intended product
- Virtuosity is what we should aspire to
- Destruction is always destructive, never generative
- There is no value in mistakes
- Mistakes can’t be the
and end in end and of themselves
- Theatres are accessible enough
- Theatres are accessible enough to push for and bring about radical thinking and action in any large way
- The theatre that young people encounter and sometimes participate in has a lot of space for Otherness in how it represents gender
- Theatre has a lot of space for Otherness in how it represents most things
- What you can do is more interesting than what you can’t do
- Creation is more interesting than decay
- We talk about despair enough
- We are realistic about pain
- We know what to do
- We know how to do
- We should keep producing at the rate we are now
- We are not responsible for the future
- We are realistic about despair
- We talk about hope enough
- Our lives are not, by their very nature, performative
- Children cannot handle the truth
- Children are good at getting things right
- Adults are good at getting things right
- We should aspire to get things right
- We should aspire to succeed
- Success is measurable
- We should keep reproducing at the rate we are now
- Productivity equates to value
- Other people can make you whole (either for the first time, or again)
- Children don’t want to think about difficult things
- Things breaking is bad
- Things not working is bad
- Things going wrong is bad
- Things collapsing is bad
- Losing things is bad
- Looking hard at hard things is negative
- We are all given too much permission and affirmation to carve out our own space, throughout our lives
- We are given far too many tools
- Carving out your own space isn’t important
- The margins wish they were the page
- The page wishes it was the margins
- Carving out your own relationship with language doesn’t matter
- Language is an actual thing
- Learning strategies for dismantling is not the same as discovering a power
- Live Art would be better if everyone loved it
- Lists are not ever even a little bit lazy
- Lists are lazy