Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain

177 Pages·2022·53.302 MB·English

by  Meghan Moe Beitiks

Performing Resilience for
Systemic Pain
How might performance serve as a means for facing ubiquitous trauma and
pain, in humans and ecologies?
While reflecting on her multidisciplinary work Systems of Pain/Networks of
Resilience, artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers bodies of knowledge in Trauma
Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New
Materialism, Object- Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research,
Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy,
Performance Art, and a series of first-p erson interviews in an attempt to answer
that question. Beitiks brings us through the first-p erson process of making
the work and the real- life, embodied encounters with the theories explored
within it as an expansion of the work itself. Facing down difficult issues like
trauma, discrimination, and the vulnerability of the body, Beitiks looks to
commonalities across species and disciplines as means of developing resilience
and cultivating communities. Rather than paint a picture of glorious potential
utopias, Beitiks takes a hard look at herself as an embodiment of the values
explored in the work and stays with the difficult, sucky, troubling work to be
done.
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain is a vulnerable book about the quiet
presence and hard looking needed to shift systems away from their oppressive,
destructive realities.
Meghan Moe Beitiks is an artist working with associations and dissociations
of culture/nature/structure. Her work has been published in Performance
Philosophy, Performance Research, Journal for Artistic Research, Unlikely Journal
for Creative Arts, and World Futures. The last chapter of her project A Lab
for Apologies and Forgiveness is a book with Candor Arts. She is currently an
Interdisciplinary Studio Art Lecturer at the University of Florida.
Routledge Advances in Theater and Performance Studies
This series is our home for cutting-e dge, upper- level scholarly studies and
edited collections. Considering theater and performance alongside topics,
such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-g arde, titles are
characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative
studies on emerging topics.
Female Aerialists in the 1920s and Early 1930s
Femininity, Celebrity & Glamour
Kate Holmes
D’Oyly Carte
The Decline and Fall of an Opera Company
Paul Seeley
Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850–1950
Making Tracks
Gilli Bush- Bailey and Kate Flaherty
Performance of Absence in Theatre, Performance and Visual Art
Sylwia Dobkowska
Commedia dell’Arte for the 21st Century
Practice and Performance in the Asia- Pacific
Corinna Di Niro and Oliver Crick
Christoph Schlingensief’s Realist Theater
Ilinca Todorut
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain
Meghan Moe Beitiks
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge- Advances- in- Theatre – Performance- Studies/book- series/RATPS.
Performing Resilience for
Systemic Pain
Meghan Moe Beitiks
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Meghan Moe Beitiks
The right of Meghan Moe Beitiks to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-46958-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-17227-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03897-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9780367469580
For my mom, Kathleen Marie O’Donnell Beitiks

Contents
List of contributors ix
Acknowledgments x
1 The necessity and danger of empathy (Moment 1) 1
WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY EMILY BEITIKS AND AN INTERVIEW
WITH SHELBI BRETZ
2 Trauma and theory (Nebraska) 9
WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY EMILY BEITIKS
3 Human/nonhuman/more- than- human relationships
(New York) 36
WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY KATIE MURPHY
4 Categories, stigma, and listening (Installation One) 58
WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY EMILY BEITIKS
5 Failure that lives in the body (Portrait): (AKA:
“Androgynous [gender] queer white wom@x#y!n
looks at her actions, things, feelings.” For your
privileged parts.) 81
6 What I can’t see (New York 2) 101
WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY KATIE MURPHY
7 Surrender, separation, distance (Moment 2) 111
CREATED WITH KATIE MURPHY
viii Contents
8 Water and other obvious connective forces (Santa Fe) 120
WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY ADAM HARVEY
9 Systems of pain/networks of resilience (Exhibition) 135
Index 161
Contributors
Emily Beitiks, San Francisco State University, Menlo College, USA.
Beitiks received a Ph.D. in American Studies with a focus in Disability Stud-
ies at the University of Minnesota. She has taught at the University of Min-
nesota, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis, and is currently adjunct faculty at
Menlo College. She is the Associate Director of the Longmore Institute on
Disability at San Francisco State University, where she continues her work
as a scholar and advocate of disability to showcase how disabled people bring
unique value that can benefit us all. There, she is codirector for Superfest
Disability Film Festival, the longest-r unning film festival of its kind in the
world.
Adam Harvey, actor and James Joyce scholar, Santa Fe, New Mexico,
USA. Harvey is currently working on content for his continuing web
series, “DON’T PANIC: it’s only Finnegans Wake” – interpretive animations
of, and tutorials on, Joyce’s great cryptic masterwork.
Katie Murphy, freelance audio describer, autistic self-a dvocate, and
higher education professional based in the San Francisco Bay Area,
USA. Accountable to her vibrant local disability community, her audio
description explores the social context and power dynamics underlying
visual representations. At the same time, her work emphasizes the aesthetic
possibilities of audio description through lush detail, clever wordplay, and –
pause for effect – timing.
Jane Phillips, photographer, New Mexico, USA. Phillips’s work graced
the Santa Fe New Mexican for 19 years and has garnered awards and acco-
lades year after year. She has exhibited in New York City, Maine, Santa Fe,
and South Africa, and her work has been published in a range of magazines
and books. Phillips earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New
York City. Before moving out west, she worked at New York Newsday,
the New York Times, the New York Post, UPI and both the Maine and
Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. She continues her freelance work with
both national and international clients.