If you've made it here, thank you. You can't imagine how much I've imagined what I want to say to you. Or perhaps you can, because you're an artist or a thinker or an all-around awake human being. Mostly I'm grateful for your curiosity about Wild Conspiracy. I share it, so we have that in common already.
One thing I resent about being a "professional" artist in our current (failing) capitalist system is that self-promotion becomes a fast-track vehicle for relationship-building. Self-promotion is exhausting, and in my case feels so wholly untrue.
I create nothing by myself.
I am a playwright who works with ensembles because it's a praxis that feels viable, not only for performance-making, but for our survival as a species. If we can come together to tell stories, then we can invest in a collective future for ourselves.
In fact, they're the same thing.
And throughout the entire process of worlding a performance: researching, discussing, rehearsing, everyone is taking in nourishment from our plant and animal kin, drinking life itself from the Mississippi River that flows out of our taps, being carried from one place to the next on stolen land, developed with stolen labor.
How do we promote that?
That's where the seed of Wild Conspiracy is planted, a dream inside of a question inside of a pandemic inside of a revolution inside of a world that is still miraculously alive. It's a coming out for me, of sorts. A sharing out of the spiritual driver that exists underneath all my work. I also hope that Wild Conspiracy will feel like a yummy invitation and open play space for fellow makers to join, share praxis, evolve who we are and what we do, move from asking to living the most important questions, and revel in our shared existence.
But wait... what is the "conspiracy" in Wild Conspiracy?
Wow wow... there are so many!
Perhaps the conspiracy is that we are nature.
Perhaps the conspiracy is that the concept of "nature" as other is a white colonial construct that has (and continues) to pave the way for the unchecked domination and destruction of our world.
Perhaps the conspiracy is that it's still possible to thrive inside of collapse. That collapse (and the very real grief that accompanies it) doesn't prohibit us from experiencing beauty, joy, and kinship in our lifetimes. In reality, it may make all of those things possible on a deeper level than we could have imagined before.
All these conspiracies feel so well held by a simple quote from Black futurist geographer Teju Adisa-Farrar: "There is no separate survival." We need each other. That's what performance keeps teaching me, and what I hope the resilience vessel of Wild Conspiracy can continue to uplift.
~ elle