(2016)
Photo by: Ray Miao
Performers: кir alshanetsky (ok_r3n), Shemaiah Clarke (SH3-ma1ah), Kai Hirota (m3/mii), Leneil Roderique (@comegetfxxedup), Michelle Rosen (††† DJ HEX GIRL †††)
Music: SH3 (prod. umami goddess™)
Additional Music: Millionaires, A.G. Cook, Cash Cash, Dam Funk, Lady Gaga, Hannah Diamond, Wonder Girls, Azealia Banks, Dirty Vegas, Lykke Li X AutoErotique
Lighting Design: Chelsie McPhilimy
Videography: Brendan Plake
Originally presented at the Patricelli ‘92 Theatre @ Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), November 2016.
••••••••••
UTOPIA01_SH3.wrld is a
multimedia exercise in queer worldbuilding. Heavily influenced by José Esteban
Muñoz’s queer theory writing, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Futurity, Elle collaborates music, experimental film, and live dance
performance in an antidisciplinary work that blurs the divide between the fake
and the real. Engineering a “fake” pop group, whose first show takes place
within a dance thesis concert, UTOPIA01_SH3.wrld mirrors the experience
of navigating QTPOC identity, which often feels simultaneously real and fake—how the social strictures that
enact violence against non-normative individuals are fake in theory, but exert
a very real, pervasive control over our social bodies. Elle creates of a
hyperreality, a simulation of reality indistinguishable from reality itself,
manifesting in audio/video production, choreography for the pop group, and
organizing additional queer nightlife events on the Wesleyan University (Middletown,
CT, USA) campus as DJ-moniker “umami goddess™”—a literal carving of space
for queerness within a small campus community. If the pop group exists in the
dance thesis context, but their music is treated as consumable pop music
because of its accessible web-syndication, then how do we navigate divides
between what is real and what is fake, and perhaps more importantly, how do we move towards an understanding of our worlds that is pragmatically invested in both?
••••••••••