Tag: resistance

Crooked Fool: I’m bad at resting

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

I’m an artist and I’m bad at resting. I am absolutely raging terrible at taking a break. I know rest is resistance…and I’m still bad at it.

As I write this, my brain is totally blitzed out and I can feel the blood vessels in my forehead slowly squeezing into migraine mode because I’ve been on Zoom more or less constantly since early this afternoon hosting meetings for everything from Ypsi Pride’s entertainment committee to a new theatre group I’m trying to get off the ground. I’m cranky and I’m sure I’ve gone a bit nuts and I still have to write this damn blog post. I also still haven’t done the reading for tomorrow’s classes, sent out the notes for either of the meetings I’ve hosted today, or responded to my cat’s ever more mournful meows for food (side note: he’s had like two dinners already; he’s fine).

I’ve written before about how deeply embedded grind culture has become in the arts. Students are also not known for their work-life balance, so I’m arguably twice screwed over in that regard, especially as a nontraditional undergrad trying to balance an existing life, career, and the need to support myself with an elite university built for younger, wealthier students who didn’t have to commute to campus or work their way through school.

But here’s the truth: grind culture has also embedded itself in me. Even as I scream into the abyss about how the expectations placed on people by their jobs and passions alike are unhealthy, ableist, and oppressive consequences of late-stage capitalism, I still can’t even personally practice what I preach.

The sad truth about artists is that we care deeply about what we do, and that makes us all too willing to give in to unreasonable and unhealthy demands on our time and capacity. Taking a break becomes a lot harder when you genuinely want to be doing everything on your to do list. There’s a level of guilt woven into it when you can feel in your bones the importance of what you’re doing.

I know that I do not owe any project or entity institution energy beyond my capacity or the exhaustion of my body. But all too often, I still give it. And there are surely power dynamics at play, especially when we’re talking about massive, powerful institutions that hold sway over my future. But then there are the passion projects and the volunteer-run community orgs…and sometimes, taking those projects on also feels like a form of rebellion in the face of so many power structures demanding my time. Resistance itself takes up energy. And rationally, I know this is by design. My exhaustion and the struggle to keep up with the things that are important to me in addition to those that are required of me is a byproduct of some incredibly unjust and unnecessary power structures.

But still, if I’m being honest, I find it hard to let go and do nothing. Grind culture has worked its way thoroughly into my thinking, and even though I know it’s not right, I still often give into it.

So yeah, I know it’s hard, and I get why we do it. Even so, I’m still going to keep trying to get myself to leave things be and not operate at 110% all the time. If I can channel my innate stubbornness toward an extra project I frankly don’t have the time for, maybe I can also channel it to doing nothing.

In other words: I’m going to bed after I post this.  

Crooked Fool: *How* the arts create change

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

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?

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

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: Embracing the 10

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

“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: Haunted

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

I went to an audition the day I turned 21. The callback involved a series of writing prompts for ultra-short plays lasting around 2 minutes. They could be many things, but they had to be true.

I ended up turning in a couple of plays about how I’d grown up in a strange old house that I’d always thought was haunted. Those callback pieces ended up turning into a series of close to 100 ultra-short plays, mixed and matched in various combinations during performance, where I tried to understand what ghosts were and whether they were real.

From Ghosts: Vol. 8 –

Do you hear the sighs, the groans

The songs

The cries

The footsteps

You can imagine them if you need to

It shouldn’t make a difference

I never did come up with any kind of concrete answer. Instead, I came to a place where I was more comfortable living in the gray. Odds are, no one will ever be able to definitively prove that ghosts exist, but what difference does that really make when we’re experiencing their effects? When something is haunting us, does it really matter whether we can prove to the world that it fits some kind of socially constructed definition of what counts as real, or does it matter that, for one reason or another, something is crying out for us to hear?

Vol. 8 –

You can try ignoring them

Good luck

You can close your ears and your mind

But the voices will shine through

In your empathy

Your convictions

Your hesitations

Looking ahead at what may be a dark, heavy time in my life and in our collective story, I’ve been thinking a lot about what ghosts may be haunting us right now. What unfinished business and half-learned lessons are we being forced to pay attention to? What stories from the past are looping back around with renewed urgency and vitality?

I don’t know the answer yet. We’ll have to wait and see. But whether we’re talking about spirits, stories, or something else difficult to grasp, we’re staring down a very charged, very haunted time. And even more so than listening to the haunting voices already there, I think we need to start figuring out what makes it worth it for us to cry out in the night. I feel this especially keenly as an artist.

From Ghosts: Vol. 4 –

What if the inspiration gnawing at us is really ghosts trying to get us to use their stories—now our stories—to try and fix things.  The only problem is, if we fail, their unfinished business becomes ours.

We are entirely made up of stories. Everything up to this point has collided, combined, grown, and evolved to make us, and this is true of everything from our DNA to the life stories that ensured our existence. The ghosts screaming at us in the night are reminding us not to forget that their stories have become our stories, and that these stories are not over. They continue with us. And sometimes we have to change them.

Stories hold immense power. They are not some frivolous thing that we use to entertain kids. They govern our lives. The stories we tell ourselves determine how we live our lives – what roles do I fill? What kind of person am I? Where am I going? Where did I begin? Where do I think I’ll end?

From Ghosts: Vol. 9 –

I am truly starting to wonder if I don’t exist and I’m just a bunch of ghosts trying to coexist in one broken body.

And the thing is, no one person owns these stories. We are all keepers, and there’s a constant push and pull of narratives happening. Stories are shared. The collective narratives a society has exerts more control over it than any government or police state. And because we are born into stories that have lived much longer than we have, there are plot points present that may not serve us. So how can we harness the power of the stories that govern our lives?

How will the story change with us?

Vol. 8 –

The odds are high

That your job will also be unfinished

It is likely that you will be

The creak, the groan, the hum, the sigh, the cry, the singer

The maker of footsteps in the night

You will be the noise

That jolts children out of their bed saying

“Something is not right”

If the story we tell ourselves is that everything is fine, everything will stay exactly as it is. For better or worse. Nothing will be rectified. But if we tell ourselves that the current story is an injustice, that it’s harmful, that it’s wrong, there’s at least a chance that it will change. Changing the story is step one for justice.

And this is the reason they’re so afraid of artists. We challenge stories. We take them, embody them, make things beautiful that were not meant to be so that they can’t look away. We can look on a stage, or in a book, or see a movie, or take in a painting, and we see ourselves. We see what we do and don’t want to be and the kind of life we want to have. And divinity is having the power to change your path. That’s the power we have.

From Ghosts: Vol. 9 –

The purpose of light is not to banish and conquer demons, to burn them with holy water, to send them to a place of eternal torture… Light walks face first into literal hell holes and tears open portals to the other side so that no one is silenced. Light sets fires in the middle of the night to make absolutely fucking sure that nobody misses the dangerous, spectacular burning flames…Light is fucking pissed right now. 

So as we step into what may well be a dark, heavy, and uncertain time, how do we honor the ghosts that keep us up at night? How do we hear the beauty in their howls and take on their unfinished business as our own? There is power here. How do we claim it?

Vol. 9 –

We are creatures of light. But that doesn’t mean we live in the light.

If we are headed for a revolution, it will start and end with us. No one will fight a war they don’t believe in, but they’ll risk it all if they think it’s worth it. People are powerful like that. And wars start and end with stories.

Artists were not put on this Earth as a fun addendum to the important stuff. We were put here to ensure that everyone stands a chance. It is our job to make sure that every screaming ghost is heard.

From Ghosts: The Final Volume –

I am sending you forth into the darkness. To be witnesses, to be storytellers, be burning flames in the pitch black. Walk in darkness always.

So no matter what happens next, we haunt. And we will not be silenced.

From Vol. 8 and Vol. 9 –

Are you angry yet?