m/OTHER(-ing): Dubble Duch at W-E-R-K!

This article pulls from the lecture-performance presented at Circus and its Others (CaiO) in Bogotá, Colombia, in February/March 2024 by Dana Dugan –an American artist-scholar, independent artist, and PhD candidate at Concordia University, Montreal, QC. The embodied component of this performance-lecture is not included aside from some photos from the research-creation process. The lecture-performance itself as performance artist and scholar weaves embodied text with the written word. The primary content of this article constitutes the rendering of an embodied performance through a text of the polyvalent ‘voices’ entangled with the sensorial, material experience of the performance. This experimental/unconventional article attempts to bring the writing body to the page and do justice to the blurred lines between the conceptual and the embodied of research-creation and this lecture performance. The task at hand proves challenging reconciling the compression from the three to the two-dimensional linear mediums and all the thick sensory, ephemeral, and affective engagement, the richness of the in-betweens, the cracks, the somatic responses, performance mishaps, stutters, sneezes, laughter, umms, awkward silences, sighs, ho-hums, etc. of the experience itself that escapes written language. A picture is a thousand words. But so is smell, taste, touch, and hearing. How might the performance component of the lecture performance be honored and given fair tribute and provide words to the ineffable? How do we make the embodied performance, text, and how does the text become the embodied performance? The article’s unfolding attempts to do just that. The content, structurally, and grammatically of this article is experimentally contoured through the weaving of both theory and practice showcasing the self-perpetuating movement between the theoretical and practical in research-creation. Research-creation becomes a mindful intersection of the body and writing that, in the case of the umbrella research-creation project BLAKshēp, which encompasses m/OTHER-ing: Dubble Duch at WERK, relies heavily on the body as the primary tool for investigation and knowledge production. Specific to this article, neologisms derived from conceptual modulations as lines of flight that move throughout the article concepts include: m/OTHER-ing WERK or W-E-R-K CUNT-fabulation Ethics of care CUNT-time