Assimilationist Agita (2014-2018)
drone_dance01_trim.mp4 (Catwalk Institute, June 2018), choreographed and performed in collaboration with Matthew D. Morrison, video by Eric Fleischauer, sound recording by May Beattie. Image description: a screenshot of an aerial drone view of Matthew and Kiera in patches of sunlight and tree shadows on bright green grass. Matthew plays violin and Kiera crouches with bent knees and hands on their thighs.
Companion planting scores at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden. Image description: Simone stands and reachese her right arm forward toward Kiera, who is lying face-down on the wooden studio floor and Melisande, who is folded forward with her hands on the floor and her right leg extended outward and backward.
Image description: a screenshot of a video of Apple Crisp Collaboration (a performance at the Catwalk Institute in May 2017). While an apple crisp is in the oven out of frame, Kiera is on a roof deck surrounded by trees wearing their mom’s red plaid shirt. They raise their arms above their head while turning on the ball of their left foot with their right leg extended diagonally to the side in the air. Their hair is long, flying in the wind, and covering their face.
Archive of an archive of a microbiome (Catwalk Institute, May 2017). Image description: Kiera eats a gluten-free matzo and almond butter sandwich during an intense gastrointestinal illness flare-up and engages in a pain-based durational movement score through the (in/non)digestion process.
Stemming from my Performance Studies M.A. thesis at NYU in 2014, this process involved practice-based and traditional research into digestive rituals that function as performances of assimilation and/or resistance. In conversation with Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (2013) and other texts at the intersection of food studies, critical race studies, and queer affect theory, Assimilationist Agita aimed to interrogate some of the modes by which Irish diasporans have assimilated into unmarked whiteness across Turtle Island (colonially known as North America) while carving out movement scores with my chronically ill guts/body/mind.