Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain

Meghan Moe Beitiks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000516814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

How might performance serve as a means for facing ubiquitous trauma and pain, in humans and ecologies?

While reflecting on her multidisciplinary work Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience, artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers bodies of knowledge in Trauma Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research, Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy, Performance Art, and a series of first-person interviews in an attempt to answer that question. Beitiks brings us through the first-person process of making the work and the real-life, embodied encounters with the theories explored within it as an expansion of the work itself. Facing down difficult issues like trauma, discrimination, and the vulnerability of the body, Beitiks looks to commonalities across species and disciplines as means of developing resilience and cultivating communities. Rather than paint a picture of glorious potential utopias, Beitiks takes a hard look at herself as an embodiment of the values explored in the work, and stays with the difficult, sucky, troubling, work to be done.

Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain is a vulnerable book about the quiet presence and hard looking needed to shift systems away from their oppressive, destructive realities.

1 The necessity and danger of empathy (Moment 1)

With audio description by Emily Beitiks¹ and an interview with Shelbi Bretz

An introduction

STAGE DIRECTION: Longer Pause. MOE spreads out tablecloth, begins arranging tablecloth and oranges. (Lamps flashing.)

SHELBI: I was sitting with my friend Amy, who I was really close to this whole time, in the basement of a coffeehouse, well, it’s a basement coffeehouse called Crescent Moon, we were sitting in kind of this back corner in two chairs next to one another, and it was sort of dim lighting.

And we were having a conversation and something she said, like, not anything – it was just something normal she said triggered a really intense memory for me, and it was at a time when that was still happening very frequently.

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: The artist assembles the oranges, stacking them in a pyramid, rearranges items on the table, and places the oranges all in a line.

SHELBI: Um, and usually what happens if I go into flashback mode is I just sort of zone out, and um, my friends describe it as I look like I am no longer “behind my eyes”.

Um and so, usually they know to say my name, to touch me, things like that, and so what she did was she immediately grabbed my hand and she started naming the things that were around me.

And she said, “There is a picture on this wall, we are sitting in Crescent Moon, you are sitting in a green chair, you have coffee next to you, we were just talking about this,” um, and, I just sort of listened to her for a while and then she would say “where are you, what day is it,” and you know, just kind of ask, questions that they ask you after you’ve been unconscious in the hospital, kind of.

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: More rearranging on the table, the lamps continue to flash on and off.

SHELBI: Um, and then, you know, once I kind of came out of it, she continued to hold my hand, continued to stay close to me, um, and then just made sure that I was okay after that, and she said, you know, usually she would ask me, “do you want to tell me what you saw?” and sometimes I would and sometimes I wouldn’t, um, at that moment depending on how I was feeling or, or the nature of the memory that I was experiencing.

STAGE DIRECTION: MOE slams a big knife on the table.

SHELBI: Um. But yeah, that happens often, and my friends are, they’re adorable, they’re just, they know exactly what to do, and they don’t act weird or get weird about it or treat me weird afterwards, you know, Um. It’s just yeah, it’s really, it’s kind of, it’s almost like they’re saying “Bless you” after someone sneezes, like it’s just become sort of second nature to them, um, and I, you know, it’s made me feel a lot better because I do think that my body and my brain have felt safe enough around these people to let me escape when I need to, process when I need to, um, as annoying as it can be sometimes. I would rather it happen around people who love me and are willing to take care of me than around people who aren’t or even by myself.

STAGE DIRECTION: MOE puts knives in vase. Gathers the tablecloth.

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience was an art-piece-project-thing. It was a video/installation/performance piece in multiple chapters and separate works. It had video and sound and involved talking. It happened in multiple locations and involved the investment of many people’s time. It came out of the experience, in 2015, of transcending a prolonged moment of pain through meditation and observation, a minor moment of triumph over a deeply carved neural pathway of hurt and despair. A moment that opened up hunger for more perspectives, tools, explorations.

I interviewed people with personal and professional experiences with processes of recovery at multiple locations and spliced quotes from the interviews into scores for videos, installations, and live performances. The project evolved from that moment of transcended pain over the course of about three years (2015–2018), largely developed within artist residencies that supported the work.

It was a belief in pain as a universal/unique, horrible/generative experience that drove me to explore it. Interdependency is a reality that is not always visible. I try to draw connections between things in my work, as a way of articulating it.

My artistic practice is research-based, but I am not a scholar. In this context, I mean: I have not sought a doctorate degree. My research process comes from growing up around journalists and working alongside curious artists, from taking and teaching university-level courses, and from collaborating with researchers outside of my discipline. I have advanced degrees in performance-making. This means I am also (somewhat) unburdened by the presumption of academic authority (I do teach; I am writing this thing). The work is informed by multiple fields.

In many cases, sanctified precedent in one field is similarly established in another field, just using different words. We can all be looking at the same text, artwork, process, and be using a chorus of different terms to describe it. One of the lies of silos – disciplines, academic structures – is that information must speak the insular language of each separate canon, or it isn’t acceptable or valid. Disciplines draw imaginary lines around materials and ways of making (this is drawing, that is sculpture, this other thing is performance), even when they draw upon similar spatial, mark-making, time-based ways of knowing. Another is that knowledge can, and therefore must, be accessed in a particular order, according to a previously established singular, linear, timeline of progress, or what each field imagines are its basic initial tools.²

But we don’t always have the means, context, or access to approach knowledge in such a manner. Sometimes, we have to reverse engineer the problem, attack it with the tools we have, drawing upon our available communities and resources. We look it the fuck up. We read Marcuse before Marx, we make a dance before we’ve learned first position, we learn how code behaves before we’ve fully grasped what the individual commands mean. Sometimes, we have to listen to wisdom in a language that isn’t immediately recognizable as language. That is to say, I am always learning. And I am trying to articulate something in the languages I have available.

Still, I’ve cited the hell out of myself in an attempt to pay respects not only to bodies of knowledge but to communities. Those citations are juxtaposed with the creative work and with the experiences of various people. Look out also for the links to media throughout the book. They’re also the work.

Here are some things I know: how to make a raw carrot cake. How to set a rehearsal schedule. How to determine the number of technicians a performance will need, how to find them, how generally to compensate them. How to make good popcorn. How to compost. How to troubleshoot a lighting or speaker system. How to ask a performer about their needs. How to make Latvian piragi. How to hang and circuit a stage light. How to work a wrench. How to change the filter on a diesel engine. How to write an artist statement. How to prune a tree. How to design a space for a performance. How to set up a microphone. How to arrange a portfolio in a residency application. How to route an audience. How to make a clean cable run. How to speak from my diaphragm. How to read a bibliography. How to find a good hairdresser. How to polka. How to feed a goat. How to apologize. How to click into the truth of my own experience. How to ask people I admire for their time. How to say things in Latvian and Russian. How to attune to an ensemble. How to write. How to watch a performance.

How to observe my breath.

Undoing systems of oppression means urgently honoring experiential knowledge. How we observe is culturally shaped. Observation, as a conscious process, is a tool in ecological research, psychological therapy, meditation practices, artistic practices, relationship maintenance, basic survival. So many contexts.

How ecologies are perceived affects humans’ management of them.

In every location I worked for this project, I asked people about their work, their stories, how they saw things, experienced things, recovered from things.

Shelbi Bretz was one of the first interviewees for the project.

This interview struck a deep chord with me. For Shelbi, recovery was a process of observation and description, of reminding herself where she was and what her relationships were to the place and things around her. Her friends did not mock, dismiss, or label her for her symptoms but rather see themselves as agents in her recovery.

This hit me powerfully and personally. I know in a bodily sense how it feels to be wholly in your thoughts, cut off from the world around you. I know the kind of overwhelming, demanding pain that drives you to pull back from everything as a gesture of self-protection, and how mockery and dismissal can compound the pain, extend that distance. I know it as a woman, I know it in my (gender) queerness, I know it from experiences of being bullied, I know it from the legacy of trauma in my family and in my body.³

It made me want to position description and observation as universal, transcendent healing tools. There’s a number of different reasons why that’s a problematic impulse – not the least of which is that it’s based on projection: the idea that what works for me works for everyone or, worse, that the folks who don’t use this particular process or agree with this particular method (describe all the things!) are somehow unenlightened.⁴

It is a very privileged impulse. My whiteness has made invisible the immigration of my father and grandmother to America within the space of my own lifetime: it has given me social safety and financial access that would not have otherwise been available to me, including resources to even partially heal from the transgenerational trauma of war, moral injury, and otherness. No one asks me where I am from with threatening undertones: no one looks at me and asks about histories of slavery. My pain is enabled in its transference to the universal by race: it is not compounded by experiences of racism.⁵

Trauma theory has come to inform a number of different fields, as we gain more and more comprehensive understandings of how thoroughly it affects our lives, experiences, relationships with other people, and perceptions.⁶ Trauma is an emotional and physical response to a disturbing event.⁷ Trauma...