Her Body is a Book

for Electric Cello and 3-6 dancers
2014

My exposure to dance has always been from a place of release. Even when I first started dancing blues, it was about feeling the music in your own body rather than memorizing any particular steps. The summer of 2014 was when dance became something much more therapeutic. I started exploring Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms and discovered that dance helped me live authentically in my own skin.

“Her Body is a Book” attempts to illustrate this journey. It begins with reluctance, hinting at a chaos that hides beneath. This chaos builds through soft-spoken spurts of lyricism and relentless, rhythmic pizzicatos. When the chaos has amounted to full expression, the piece withers into calm, though not entirely content.

With improvisatory dance cues, one dancer is cast as “She,” representing the journey of a dancer from fear of dance to surrender. The other dancers act as supporters, each with their unique way of interpreting the music. The cues for the dancers outline the 5Rhythms to show the progression in and out of the most intense parts of dance. However, the final section is dedicated to a partner blues dance as a way of illustrating the calm of surrendering and the necessity of compassionate human connection, especially after an intense emotional journey.

The title “Her Body is a Book” describes my own mental shift in viewing my body. First I viewed it as something on loan, something transient and destructible. Dance has helped me view the body as something powerful, something that has the capacity to express who I am and where I’ve been.

when my body becomes the art

mixed media

2018

Winner of the 2019 SEAMUS Allen Strange Award, “when my body becomes the art” is a reflection of my process leading up to the decision to go on testosterone. It uses recordings of my voice from different months of T, reflecting on my experience of gender. The performative elements of the piece include different gender expressions, ripping up the letter from the therapist, taking off a binder, creating ritual space, and injecting myself with testosterone, ultimately showing how testosterone is an ongoing surrender to continual shapeshifting and self-love. The incorporation of my physical body in the piece demonstrates how the ritual of gender is enacted on my physicality. My body cannot be separated from the art. My body has very real implications for the way I experience the world. This is my way of survival.

The electronics in this piece use a sample of a chant by Sharon Knight, “Light of the World.”

Check out the interviews I’ve done about this piece:

• Interview with Robert McClure on his podcast, Lexical Tones. My part starts at 14:30.

• Interview with Steven Ricks
   

Text:

• *The text from the third movement “Return” has been published in the literary journal Impossible Archetype, issue 2, in 2017.

Prologue

It is Tuesday, March 28th and they say this is my rebirthday. That I might remember this day for the rest of my life.
[underneath Days of Testosterone]:
Here’s what I know so far:
Woman and man are archetypes for whom gender is meaningful.
Masculine and feminine are unattached to the aforementioned labels.
Gender is a social construct particular to time and place.
Masculine and feminine are divine and exist in everyone.
Masculine and feminine are meaningless and non descriptive labels.
Trans as a prefix means moving away.
We are always moving towards and away and between and through.
People assigned female at birth who later go on testosterone
typically experience a growth in sex drive,
possible increase in appetite,
possible need for more sleep.
Some people going on testosterone experience an attraction to men, sometimes for the first time in their life.
Being on hormones is not required of any specific gender, even and perhaps especially, trans.

I am:
Transforming
Transcending
Transitioning
Translucent
Tranceiving
Transcribing
Transversing
Translating
Transecting
Transferring
Transporting
Transgressing
Transfiguring
Transfinite
Transfusing
Transient
Transilluminating
Transitting
Transitive
Transliterating
Translocating
Transmigrating
Transparent
Transshaping
Transmitting
Transmuting
Transpersonal.

If I find ways to use this prefix, can I claim it as my own?

I ask - where is my voice?
With me, all along but -
Can you hear me yet?

Where is my voice?
Can you hear me yet?

1. Departure

I’m supposed to write a poem right now
(Then I will tear it apart).
I stutter because I want to make it impersonal,
but this manila folder on my desk keeps staring at me.
I’d like to pretend it means something,
That in going this far I have become trans enough.
(How will I substitute this?)
But maybe this journey
(towards, away - the prefix trans doesn’t actually specify direction)
is just an ongoing argument for external validation.
I know it doesn’t have to be that way.

In this poem, I have used the word “I” 
ten times.
Tell me this isn’t self-absorbed.
Tell me everyone is on a journey of becoming
and no one is done transitioning.
Tell me we just talk more about our journeys because they can often be more visible.
Tell me my trans is in the right direction.
Tell me it’s not all in my head.
Tell me
Tell  .  me
Tell m . .e.

Right.
The letter in the folder uses my birth name.
(I could make some “deal” out of this, but it is my professional name after all).
The letter never once messes up a pronoun.
It uses words like:
“strongly and persistently”
“desire to be less feminine”
“a 21-year-old biological female”
“androgynous identity”
“significant mind/body conflict”
“genderqueer, nonbinary, demiboy”*
“gender neutral pronouns”
“masculine attitudes”
“significant reduction of personal distress”
“persistent gender nonconforming identification”
“goals for transition”
“presents as nonbinary in areas of school, work, and social circles”
“not fully disclosed their gender identity or goals for transition with their parents”
“align their physical appearance with their psychological identity”
“increase the likelihood of being gendered as more masculine or androgynous”
“criteria for Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Adults, (DSM-5 302.85)”
“insight and judgement are within normal range”
“psychologically sound decision making capacity”
“has met all the criteria outlined in the official World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care v7 for treatment of individuals diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria”
“psychologically ready to proceed with hormone therapy”

If this was a queer theory class,
we would discuss how
identity is unstable,
reaching for meaning pushes it further away,
longing for a sense of self destroys the sense of self,
(long)ing for . a. sense of
.. se . l . f.
d / e  /  st / / ro  / / ys
              ///
the (sense) of
[self]

we must allow room for contradictions.

Perhaps my contradiction
is the numbness of reading this letter
and the urgency with which I will deliver it.

2. Threshold

It’s in my throat,
an itch,
like I have to keep clearing it
or drinking water,
a weight
like everything yet unsaid
is collecting there,
preparing the cords for song.

I return to the railroad tracks because I thought I would meet someone there.
Brown hair swinging in the wind,
blue dress and bare feet
waving at me.
She wasn’t there though.
I think I left her on a vision quest
sitting in the woods with twigs in her Earth-tangled hair,
reflecting jungles in her eyes,
crouching by the river, sharpening a knife.
She flits out like candle flame if you look too closely at her.

Instead I stare into the eyes of Pan
stalking the crest of a hill,
an impish grin on his face,
asking me why I summoned him.
I dance,
jumping around and through him
all chaos and flow
pinning him to the ground
panting as his laugh shakes the Earth beneath me.
His smile tastes like a secret he will never tell you.

My voice cracks
and the world pries in
to open me wide.
I am Ritual
enacted. 

I don’t know who I’ll be tomorrow.

3. Return

If I could,
I would stop writing
poetry about being
trans enough.

I would accept
the changing
fluid motions
of understanding
and identities.

I would surrender
to Mystery between
my atoms,
rejoice in the unknowing
as a way of becoming
again and again.

If I could,
I would accept
this body
as is, 
as grows,
without injecting
my shapeshifting
into its biology.

(Sometimes, even,
I do accept Her. 
It is only by outside,
the others looking on,
that I fear I will
never be seen in
entirety.)

I am not substituting this journey.
I am not forsaking my past.
I am not letting go of my feminine.
I am reverently listening to all parts of me.

I am making room for my contradictions.

Epilogue

Sweet boy -
Breathe.
You are here.
You do not have to be good -
You only have to stay.
Stay,
Stay, love -
Patience with your becoming.
You are enough.

Leave me to my
     eyes welling up
Shapeshifting
               and feeling all of it.

               Follow if you wish -
                    We’ll trace the circuits of time
                          lean into divine.
                                Softly surrender
                                      our animal.

*Note: The phrase “I wish they’d used an “i” for boy” is heard in the live premier video of this piece. While I used to identify with the spelling “boi,” I learned after the premier of this work that the history of this spelling began in communities of color, among Black folks reclaiming “boy” from its derogatory use. I has previously only associated the “boi” spelling within queer communities as an identity term. As a white person, I don’t use this spelling anymore, and have edited the audio for future performances of this piece to not include “boi.” The premier video, however, remains unedited, as it was first performed.

Fragmenting Ymir

immersive backyard myth

April 2018

Installation art by Kellie Masterson
Choreography by Riley Bartlett
Music, poetry, and conception by S. Wellington

Fragmenting Ymir was an immersive backyard theater project involving over 40 collaborators. The performers included musicians, actors, dancers, and witches that helped hold the project as large-scale ritual. 

The project explored the Norse creation myth of Ymir, laying the primordial landscape of the place of fire, the place of ice, and the yawning gap between. Within a two hour time period, visitors approached the entrance where they were greeted and given a map and two verses describing the myth and asked to draw a Tarot card. After passing through the entrance, the visitors freely explored the garden. Throughout the garden, they were invited into various forms of interaction, which included reading poetry tied to tree branches, receiving tea from an actor, writing responses to question baskets in the garden, playing percussion instruments, and even dancing with some of the performers.

Besides laying the landscape of the myth and exploring various emotions associated with fragmentation, the project also included a unified section in the middle, demonstrating the chaotic grief of fragmentation, then quieting into the collective hope for healing and reunion. The project intended to explore the mysteries of creation myths, as well as the grief I personally found in feeling this myth - the loss and literal fragmentation of Ymir.

Beyond the myth itself, I intended the piece to explore broader experiences of fragmentation. Whether this is a spiritual fragmenting or the fragmenting of connections between living beings, the project invited visitors and performers to reflect on their disconnections and consider paths to wholeness.

 body like scripture

Mixed media
2019

Premiered February 20, 2019 on the Pendulum New Music concert series, this piece explores the chaos of gender dysphoria and resists legibility.

 Body Like Scripture

Mixed Media
2019

Body Like Scripture is a full length performance art show that weaves together electroacoustic music, spoken word, drag, dance, and ritual, exploring themes of legibility/illegibility, coherence/incoherence, survival/resistance, and the sacred/profane.

The overall show title Body like Scripture, is both a prayer and an assertion. Body like Scripture, as in my body is the sacred map I follow, all the guidance I need to lead me to the horizons I seek. Body like Scripture, as in, please let these worlds change, so we may value our trans bodies, please let these worlds change so we may listen more to the wisdom of our bones, these bones that have come from Earth and return, these bones that can call us forward into accountability, into dreams of sustainable futures. Body like Scripture, as in, maybe through witnessing this performance you can more deeply experience the ground of your being, let the reflection of my art echo-shine off some important place within you.

The show has been performed in Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins in 2019 and in Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020. Some pieces in the show are available to watch online including: Body Like Scripture (the title song), we taste queerness on the twilight, Lullaby (for Blake), and when my body becomes the art.

Contact me for bookings in your area or if you’d like to see more footage or read more text from the show!

 Hollow: A Banishing Ritual

for string quartet, electric guitar, Electronics, and spoken word poet

2022

Commissioned by The Playground Ensemble with financial support from the Denver Music Advancement Fund.

*Content Note: This piece includes expressions of transphobia, misogyny, sexual harassment, sexually explicit messages & discrimination/stigma against sex workers.

Hollow: A Banishing Ritual, explores the paradox of being both de-sexualized and hyper-sexualized as a transgender person. In public, mainstream narratives of desirability often preclude transgender bodies, but in private, in the anonymity of dating apps, I have experienced far more harassment and objectification from cisgender men (both gay and straight) after transitioning.

Using found text from cisgender men on dating apps, Hollow unveils the public/private paradox of cis men’s desire for trans bodies, unearths the hollowness of affection fueled by objectification, and asks how we can reach for each other’s humanity.

For me this piece is about coming out about these experiences in an effort to understand them, heal from them, and be witnessed in them to release what’s getting in the way of intimacy.

During the live performance of this piece, audience members are invited to take part in this ritual of release, by answering the question:

What do you need to release to come closer to yourself and others?

Responses were collected before the piece and you will hear some responses read out loud in the video before all responses were released.

“After Scandal: School Hires Witch”

for piano, electronics, and spoken word poet

2023

“After Scandal, School Hires Witch” moves from national to local, using news clips highlighting the trends towards anti-LGBTQIA+ hatred. In it, you will hear clips from CBC, CBS, Fox News, CPAC speakers, Poudre School District board meetings, Erin Lee’s Twitter feed, conservative podcastsand lists of anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation.

Locally, this piece responds to the hate spread by a group called “Parents Defending Education” and specifically uses clips of Erin Lee, a parent who began antagonizing the school district, local LGBTQIA+ youth organization SPLASH, and me after she learned her kid had been attending a GSA club without telling her about it. In it, you will hear Erin discuss how the school district has a radical “gender and sexuality ideology that hurts kids,” because they host clubs such as Gender & Sexuality Alliance (formerly referred to as Gay-Straight Alliances) where students can talk to others about their identities. I became the subject of this hatred because of my former work at the Alliance for Suicide Prevention, where I visited classrooms to teach students and staff about LGBTQIA+ suicide prevention and mental health.

During the second half, I read a poem describing my perspective of the story.

To view this piece, please contact me.