Blood Baby
ONE Archives, Jan 15 - 31, 2024
An interdisciplinary celebration of queer kinship, radical gender performance, and belonging, Blood Baby offers a fresh and multifaceted exploration of the queer family experience through dance performances, interactive sculpture, readings, and community events. Presented in four parts in and around USC’s renowned ONE Archives, the series weaves together choreography by Meg Foley, video installation by Carmichael Jones, scenic design by Rabbit AL Friedrich, and fiber art by Jesse Harrod to center gender-nonconforming identities, queer family, sex-positivity, and trans voices at a time when political developments in the United States threaten their existence.
CARPET WOMB is a sweaty gay disco ritual performed inside a large fabric structure that holds intentional space for shared, radical embodiment. Designed in collaboration with Rabbit AL Friedrich and receiving dramaturgical support from Michèle Steinwald, the womb facilitates an immersive, highly physical dance centering joy and sexuality. Meg Foley, Charli Brissey, Zara Martina Lopez, Kristine Manuel, Majesty Royale-Jackson, and Fox Whitney will perform relentless, gender-bending, pelvis-forward, self-sexualizing choreography through and around the audience, playfully referencing a wide spectrum of gender conditioning, everyday postures, geological principles, birthing and sex positions, drag, and disco. Every surface provides tactile feedback for performers and audience. Choreography will be derived from a physical exploration of the environment, tracing the surfaces and playing with weight to build shapes and architecture.
COMMUNION is a participatory experience involving shared reading and embodiment. Performed in part by its audience, Communion examines the space between body and language, demonstrating how language extends, represents, and ruptures our corporeal identities. Informed by text-based research with playwright and 2019 Guggenheim Fellow Sylvan Oswald, Meg Foley will guide the audience through an exploration of geology, gestation, queer ecology, queer kinship structures, and blood materials, and will coach the audience in somatic drag—the embodied resonance of speaking from within versus without, feeling the shape of language formation in relation to their bodies. An empty room will get filled with a collaged story, scenes, and reflections that have been evoked by the audience.
PRIMORIDAL captures “rock drag,” a site-responsive, sculptural practice of embodying geologic processes as movement prompts, in an immersive video and sound installation by visual artist (and Foley’s co-parent) Carmichael Jones, to connect geology, transformation, and queer gestation. Mimicking a boulder’s sped-up evolution, the Primordial rock appears otherworldly and sensual. Supported by an ambisonic sound score of recorded and altered human sounds (breath and heartbeat), Primordial uses a 2D time-based medium to present an internally focused, embodied practice (the “rock drag” which integrates geologic processes onto the human form and time scale) to foreground the false binary between felt form and perceived form, disrupting presumed understandings of subject/object, character/figure, animate/inanimate, and human gender.
TOUCH LIBRARY is a tactile browsing library and living archive, offering audiences the opportunity to engage with the physical traces of the performances and experience the somatic exercises, scores, and physical materials used in building the performance elements on their own time and in their own bodies.
