Loving Strangers Swollen & Inflamed (2021)
Performance, 11 min.
Informed by the Resilience Toolkit created by Nkem Ndefo and conveyed by Char Kasza as part of the Ecologies of Transformation, and by Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, the 11-minute performance is a research into nervous system shifts and co-regulation within the audience of a performance piece.
Sound, music, spoken word, text, body, and a three-meter tall puppet.
The puppet’s anthropomorphic form becomes a companion to the human body on stage.
It acts as a medium of transference between performed action and its layered implications: care, violence, violation, pain, love; and the nervous system responses they evoke in the witnessing audience.
What unfolds between the puppet and the human reverberates somatically through the viewers’ bodies.
