to be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. (avery gordon)
I'm currently working on a solo performance piece about whiteness, masculinity, my relationship to my own (Dutch, English, Irish) ancestry, and the alt right's recruitment of young men. As I started working on this piece, my grandmother, who has also had dementia for the past several years, passed away--so her memory and lack of memory became woven into the piece. I'm really interested in amnesia, forgetting and remembering--and this idea of imagining what was lost that never existed; when we forget what it was we forgot/were trying to remember (as happened to my grandmother); and the possibility of losing something that you never had in the first place. All of these wrapped up in the kinds of losses that settler colonialism and patriarchy inflict on our bodies and hearts.
This is a working description of the piece...
"How much of our sense of us is based on being not like them? What does it mean to 'face history' as a descendant of colonists? Could remembering the truth of my own past help to explain a fragmented present?" This intimate, direct-address solo exploration of memory, forgetting, and untangling the knot of whiteness documents the author's conversations with his grandmother in a dementia care home, figures and ghosts of rural racialized poverty, letters to ancestors, and asks what our responsibility is for the violences we've inherited. It proposes itself as a love letter to places and a ritual for remembering as a refusal to forget, again.
Performer/Creator: Eliot Feenstra
Developmental dramaturgy: Makram Ayache, Gulce Oral
Movement development and studio support: Sophie Traub, Kira Daube, Annie Lukins, Betsey Brown