Author: Cydney Marie

A Queer, Disabled theatre, movement, and media artist exploring change both by and within the arts.

Crooked Fool: *How* the arts create change

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When I was younger, I used to insist that the arts were the most effective agent of change. I’ve also heard arguments to the contrary: that the arts may inspire or even change minds, but that they do not by themselves create change, and that, for some, consuming political art without engaging in other forms of activism may serve as a cop out. I don’t disagree that this is a pitfall, but I do still think that the arts play a bigger role in creating change than we often give them credit for.

The intersection between arts and activism (or, as some would call it, “artivism”) has been an interest of mine for a long time. Lately, I’ve been trying to think expansively about the various roles the arts can play in creating change. I’m still not sure that what follows is an exhaustive list, but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Challenging Narratives

We tell ourselves stories all the freaking time. We think up stories about how our day might go and build memories into narratives to understand where we’ve come from. We tell ourselves stories about how the world works and our place within it, what we’re capable of, and how we relate to other people. And the arts are particularly adept at drawing these stories into question.

 If the story we tell ourselves is that everything is fine, things will most likely stay as they are. But if we tell ourselves that the ways things are is unjust, then at least some people will want change. In story B there’s at least of chance of change happening.

Maybe a book shows us how a scenario might play out differently, or a movie makes us see ourselves in different roles than those we are used to playing. Maybe there’s a plot twist or an ending  we never thought was possible. Collective narratives play a massive role in how we live our lives and what changes we choose to fight for. They can either uphold power structures or call them into question. Under the right circumstances, the arts can poke holes in narratives we may take for granted and help us understand what a different story could look like.

Educating

Whether we’re talking about a play with a clear plot or a painting that captures an artist’s state of mind, the arts can teach us about people, places, times, and ideas that are new to us. Expanding our worldview can call entrenched ways of thinking and being into question and expand our view of what is possible.

Humanizing

Part of what makes a narrative compelling is empathy. We can understand another living being’s experience because we’ve felt those same needs and emotions play through our own bodies. Maybe the circumstances were different, maybe the stakes weren’t as high, but the sensations are familiar. Understanding how a given narrative can cause someone joy or pain can help us better understand the difference between right and wrong. It helps us understand justice and care and why human beings act the way they do in all their complexity.

Inspiring

I think maybe this is the part some folks get stuck on when they say that the arts do not, in and of themselves, create change. But that doesn’t diminish its importance – if we’re going to fight for something we have to believe it’s important. We have to decide it’s worth taking a risk and raising the stakes. We have to see enough beauty in the story being proposed that we decide it’s worth the cost to get there. Maybe inspiration is still a step or two away from change, but sometimes it’s what kicks our butts and into action.

Visioning

What are we moving toward? What is possible? We want something better, but what might it look like? We may be able to name what the injustices are and insist that we want them abolished, but what do we want to build in their stead? Visioning is where we figure out how we’ll actually move into a more just future. It’s where we dive deep into our creativity to think about what could be. It gives us direction and tells us where to steer a movement, and gives us a comeback when those who would preserve unjust systems ask how we can possibly do better.

Healing

Oppressive systems rely on shame. Everyone has to know that whoever is being oppressed deserves it because they’re Bad, Defective, Lazy, etc. We’ve spent our lives being told stories about all of the ways in which we’ll never measure up and how our humanness is wrong. The arts can challenge these narratives, show us how things might be different, and help us picture ourselves in a future where we exist in wholeness.

Again, this is a working list. I’d be very interested to hear if anyone feels there are points that I’ve missed. But at this moment in time, especially, this is how I’m building a narrative for how I understand my role and what I want to accomplish.

Crooked Fool: Are you angry yet?

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Witness.

I was young, crooked femme, buzzing with energy, a nova of anger that was pathologized, bad-ified, otherized, punished…

A performer adapting to the endless energy and life force late-stage capitalist performing arts charge as the price of admission to a club that will blacklist without hesitation. I was easy to work with. Disciplined. Energized regardless of fatigue, a vessel down to my fingertips, twisted body best when unnoticed and unclaimed.

I am a rebel in circus garb, prepared for the tower to fall, knowing my role when it happens.

A clown questioning the colonized, controlling, punishing logics of the state, somehow more threatening in a red nose, but not always thought of as such.

Arlecchino, Brighella, Colombina, Pierrot surviving, working, playing my way through a system designed to keep me wanting, needing.

The crooked, hunchbacked witch who served literal communion to an actual demon in the scariest place there was. The gods rewarded me with a red nose and a spine full of titanium so that eyes, breath, spine will forever be grounded and protected in the act of cursing systems that need to crack, crumble, re-puzzle.  

But remember, it’s just a show…

I am the deformed artist who was told by a psychic that I mastered dark magick in a past life and by a spiritualist reverend that even the darkest creature goes to the light.

I am the one who spent years seeing THIS quilted together in dreams, and now feeling the living, pounding, vital force in those hazy green, buzzing and burning images come to life.

I dance in darkness, a ghost in the making, a demon falling madly in love with my mangled form, the footsteps in the night, screaming the angry children out of sleep because they are the ones who know that something is not right, and that something is not them.

I am, apparently, The Bad, so why not play games with the worst of the worst, week after week?

And why not argue where I can? When nice accomplishes nothing, I can at least still play the game – wrong if I choose.

As an annoying clown once said to me, and as I once said to someone who talked down to me like I was a noisy 27-year-old child, cheating is a mode of play.

Apparently, there are those who genuinely hate crooked, hunchbacked witch clowns. And they’ll dress up their deep, burning hate like light, saying I’m sick, unfriendly, whatever, because they know they can’t say Bad.

Except now they probably can.

I will play the game with all the Bad ones, overdressing, playing ferociously, cheating if I have to. If they want a demon, I know a few. If they try to cut off my rough edges, I’ll crack their rigid walls and dance on the rubble, and everyone loves to dance. Eventually they’ll join.

Slainte to the Bad ones. When this ending happens and this tower crumbles, we will dance in the flames and build with our disfigured, tired bodies in our own image. The vengeful gods will die. And there will the demons be, in the light, turning to ghost with Mad, irrational love and screaming into the dark in joy and rage as our dance party goes on atop the elements that once made us. Who’s the demon now?

Are you angry yet?

You should be.

Crooked Fool: How an artist survives the end of the world

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In the morning before first light, they kneaded the covers with their legs, freeing themselves to roll onto the floor with gentle sureness. Eyes still closed, they rolled their body around on the cool wood, bending into joints, slip-sliding around, rolling over themselves, dancing horizontally until they felt stretched, released, ready to adapt and mold to whatever came their way. Then they finally blinked their eyes open, the rolling and stretching having worn the sleep away. They rose to their feet and walked downstairs. In the kitchen, they put on a pot of coffee and their favorite music. They hummed and half-danced until they could pour the black liquid into a mug, adding plenty of milk and some hot chocolate mix, because they damn well weren’t going to miss out on the sweetness. Cup in hand, still taking piping hot sips, they clumsily wrapped themselves in a thick blanket and stumbled down the stairs to the basement. By now, they could hear footsteps above them as the rest of the household started to stir. They knelt on concrete in front of a makeshift altar and just stared, breath suspended, cup clenched in hand. Then breath drew in ragged and ribs expanded again. Life filled body. Grief sighed out. Eyes glided and stopped on a photograph, then another, and another. Somehow each person on that altar was everywhere while simultaneously being wholly gone. A bow of the head. A lump in the throat. A zing of caffeine in the fingertips. And the day begins. They dress in their favorites because they can. In a bit their chosen family will pile into their living room to share food. And while they claim joy in sustenance, they will plan their survival, their safety, their freedom. And then they will take to the streets, maybe quietly, maybe screaming to be heard. Both can be dangerous. And after a day of reclaiming their place, and even if they lose another, even if they are bruised and bloodied, they will gather in yet another house to dance, talk, cry, and tell stories until their bodies tire out. More food will be shared. Maybe they’ll go home to their sanctuary. Maybe they’ll slide down and curl up where they are, in community, insisting on survival again.

Crooked Fool: Embracing the 10

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“I’m sorry there was some…emotion there.”

Sentences like this one have been said to me in a variety of situations in recent years, usually in the context of some minor moment of tension. And in many cases, this response almost rubbed me the wrong way moreso than the original conflict.

Why are you apologizing for emotions? We can apologize for our behavior or the way we respond to things, but that’s not the same thing. Plus, why is expressing big emotions somehow offensive, or even more troublingly, some universal sign of mental instability? Why does feeling and showing the urgency, immediacy, and importance of something warrant our friends diagnosing us with various ailments and commenting on how “dysregulated” we are? While therapy and emotional intelligence can be beneficial and healing under the right circumstances, they aren’t meant to be weapons pointed at anything that’s mildly uncomfortable.

Emotional intelligence isn’t the same as emotional absence. We have them for a reason, and using them smartly and compassionately doesn’t necessarily mean using them less.

I was an Angry Kid, or at least that’s what I was constantly told. My emotions were simply too big and implied that, at best, there was something a bit wrong with me mentally or, at worst, I was just a bad, angry person. As an AFAB, femme-presenting person, you could argue that this was mostly just misogyny. Since I’ve spent most of my life with a visible deformity, and since deformity is often equated with villainy in media and the arts, you could argue it was ableism. But whatever the underlying reason, it was a form of hatred. It was exclusion, meant to reinforce the notion that my emotions made me bad and that I needed to be punished into controlling them, cutting off their sharp edges, in order to be worthy of love. I needed to fit in the box and follow the rules, and if I couldn’t do that, I was Bad.

I’ve struggled for years to articulate what drew me to theatre in those early days, but one thing I remember vividly is how freeing it felt to be able to fly up to a 10 on the emotional scale and be praised for it. Onstage, the 10 is encouraged, a necessary use of energy to draw the audience into energetic proximity. Though they know we’re just telling a story, heightened emotion shows immediacy, need, scale, stakes – it shows that the events taking place, real or imagined, are worth drawing up our vital force and setting it loose, pushing it beyond us. And if it’s worth it to us, maybe it should be worth it to them.

This is why live performance has so much power. It’s a sharing of life force in proximity and a declaration that there is something out there worth physically putting ourselves out there for.

Theatre has its problems, at least as it exists in a late-stage capitalist, colonized society. But it makes space for big personalities and big emotions. More than that, it cultivates them, training them into us because of the power that they have to move a room, to cause someone’s breath to catch, to break skin out in goose bumps, focus soul power through glaring eyes, and zing urgent, world altering energy into fingertips, twitching them into action.

And sometimes we need the 10 even in life. Big emotions are there for a reason. Sometimes that reason is change.

What is worth your 10? Where will you lend your vital life force? Which story will you let breathe fully into your living body in the years to come? When is it worth exhausting yourself and getting angry if it leads to change?

We can’t live every moment of our lives at a 10, but sometimes we are called to it, and we have to be ready to draw upon ourselves in fullness when that call comes. Villainizing our heightened, most powerful selves will only serve to keep us quiet when it counts the most.

Crooked Fool: Artists, PLEASE REST.

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My favorite memory of physical theatre school is when, during tech week, amid regular 13-hour days, one of the profs wanted us to work through lunch. I rebelled, and of course I was viewed as the difficult one. Guess who probably wouldn’t hire me out in the wild?

In case it wasn’t clear, I’m being sarcastic. This isn’t my favorite memory.

But it is common. The reality of trying to make art in a late-stage capitalist, colonized society is that a lot of artists, even professional ones, are forced to work a fulltime day job while making art on the side. We burn the candle at both ends, and our teachers and directors perpetuate the status quo. This is, in large part, because poor funding and misplaced social values prevent artists from being paid fairly for their work, and while it’s worth advocating to fix that, it’s not going to happen overnight.

Grind culture is deeply embedded in the arts. In contrast to the narrative that doing what we love will ensure we never really work a day in our lives, we often find our passions reduced to nothing BUT work. Joy comes second if it shows up at all.

Many of the arts have ritualistic, spiritual roots. Creative community practices are meant to be owned by everybody and to have innate value outside of their money-making potential. But in 21st century America, that’s not how it works.

When was the last time you turned on some music and moved aimlessly all alone? When did you write something no one would ever see? When did you let yourself create, even if it wasn’t perfect, whatever the hell you wanted, just for yourself?

Sometimes, rest is resistance and stillness is power.

How can we reconnect with our work as a source of personal power? How can we find the ways it can recharge us, rather than just how much work it will take to “make it?” Can we play, explore, and create just for us, without needing someone else to buy it?

Capacity is a real issue here. When we’re constantly grinding to make a living, whether in the arts or otherwise, it can be hard to find time for practices like this.

But here, in the dead of winter while everything sleeps, with potentially some really dark times on the horizon where our creative work may be needed more than ever, can we resist by reclaiming our time?

Crooked Fool: Living by Lamplight

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As the light grows ever more dim, tendrils of gray among warm yellowish rays snake across the floor. The warm light of the lamp bulb grows brighter, drawing attention, declaring its presence, becoming the focus of the room. The titles of the books on the shelf become hazy in the half darkness, the gray, the not quite night, the semi-pitch black. My black cat becomes harder to spot in the shadows. The light is almost uncomfortable in the darkness, lighting the old quilt on the wall from below, highlighting the folds, wrinkles, seams, and age-worn fabric as though it’s telling ghost stories by firelight.

It is in this light that I feel most at home. Present, just a little activated, warm, full of possibility. When I can’t see in the darkness, I lean into the trust I have in my body. I let go of the need to see everything clearly. A familiar room becomes a bit unknown, memory filling in what it can, imagination tearing at the seams of reality for the rest. But I don’t mind it. As my eyes slowly grow tired and less focused in the dim light, my mind stays alive, my skin taking over, constantly, chronically sizzling with little vibrations of energy.  Breath becomes a little freer and also more vibrant, more vital.

This time, between obligation and sleep, is the seeking. This is when the unknown knocks and we make friends with the dark, accepting it into ourselves. Shadow comes out to play, welcomed by light that allows it to show itself freely. The slow creep of the shadows, the tiny burning of light in the bulb, and the slight somatic disequilibrium of the dark and empty but full invite play in a much heavier way than the broad daylight, quietly brimming with vital force.

Sometimes, when I’m leaning into the creative movement of my body, or the give and take of an improvised scene, I crave this. The playful, primal life magick of light, dark, and gray. Sometimes I close my eyes or let my vision go out of focus, leaning into the flying sensation of the unknown in my body, trusting my limbs to catch me, rolling out of every misstep, if not gracefully, at least still alive. And when I cannot see them in the shadows, the darker ones light little fires in my limbs, screaming stories into my the nerves all throughout my body, insisting on shining light where it has been snatched away.

This is where I crave to live and spend my vital energy – in the cracked shadows of warm, stubborn, attention grabbing light that exist in my bones, breath, soul, and story. The unknown soul also shines brightly, and light is seen best in the dark.

Play, dance, and sing with beings of light and dark without caring whether they came from the pitch black of night. Let the unknown give them a chance.

Find life in the half light, the flickering candle, the dim incandescent, breathing into the dark beauty in these spaces even if it feels like flying, like half dying, like losing yourself or letting your soul fly to pieces. Walk in darkness always.