As I reflect on my own practice of writing and performing, vibration and contact crystallize. And isn’t this hybrid writing?

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance artworks worldwide including Black Weirdo School (Pop Up Critique) (2023), the déjà vu—live (2022) and Jupiter (2021). Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), the déjà vu (2022) and In & Out of Place (2024). Her writing has also appeared in New Daughters of Africa, Kitchen Table Translation, Migrating Pedagogies, DanceNotes, and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. A 2023 Franconia Performance Fellow, she earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS:

* a n e m o n e [excerpt]

the black woman performance artist between windfl ower and sea.
moving through the tinny, post-metallic, into facing desire. succulent thinking.
an attempt at body. pleasure rebel how...

(threshold: search engine)

Track 1: Beez in the Trap - Nicki Minaj (curtain opens)
Slide 1 (already up): Black screen with the word “Anemone”

Gabrielle stands puff y and swaddled in the space looking.
She holds up her fl ashlight and starts to survey the audience
(she is looking for soft ness).

At the end of her search, she says: “but fi nding soft ness is a harder thing.”

Artist Reflection

“Ineffable Intangible Sensation”

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Yesterday in my workshop in a swamp in Florida, we wore matching yellow T-shirts like at a family reunion and described photographs from memory in our notebooks. We created a video of us dancing to the sound of “Silk”—not the ’90s jam “Freak Me,” because that would be NSFW and the youngies don’t know it anyway, but the ringtone on my phone timer which always ended our writing prompt sessions. We read all our writing aloud at the same time following a practice I first learned a decade ago in Miguel Gutierrez’ “INEFFABLE INTANGIBLE SENSATIONAL” workshop at Defibrillator (DFBRL8R) in Chicago, a city where I don’t live (and I don’t live in Florida either). We put our sounding in conversation with a paragraph from Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, which is a wonder but also a funny thing—I hadn’t actually planned to bring this into the workshop. The program coordinator, moving materials into Canvas, dropped a PDF of the intro into our site by mistake or happy accident or grace: how “sound consists of more than what we hear. It is constituted primarily by vibration and contact and is defined as a wave resulting from the back-and-forth vibration of particles in the medium through which it travels” (Campt 7). As I reflect on my own practice of writing and performing, vibration and contact crystallize. And isn’t this hybrid writing? Living and creating memory and landscape, traveling and teaching, description and movement, image and text, video and dance, the critical and the creative, togetherness, being somewhere else, tuning into the frequency, accepting the gift, interweaving, connecting, and fusing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .