“3 Stories from the Chthulucene” attempts to work through some of the theoretical framework outlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). The term “Chthulucene” derives from H. P. Lovecraft’s science-fictional tentacled being, the Cthulhu. Haraway theorizes the Chthulucene as an alternative to dominant notions of our time as the Anthropocene. Rather than seeing humans as separate from the environment and acting on it, Chthulucene theorists see humans as part of an intricate web of relations between human and more-than-human life, where humans act through the environment. The methodology used in this article is research-creation, specifically creation as research. This article begins with three autofictional vignettes that aim to play with research questions such as: How might Haraway’s concept of “tentacular thinking" impact the way narrative is structured? Is there an accessible way to write Haraway’s theories so that they are approachable but still “writerly"? How can writer and reader together (re)imagine utopias, in particular queer utopias, so that they are still situated strongly in the present? A supplementary essay follows these three vignettes and attempts to tease out some of these findings within a more typically academic format.

Flight of the Phoenix, a puppet pageant at Northwestern University, became more than a way to perform despite safety restrictions – the build also became a valuable way to create community during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The shared project of bringing the puppets to life through simple techniques that invited hands-on participation, helped the artistic community to come together again as we emerged from extended isolation. The spark of the project––that began with a simple proposal to fly bird puppets down the lakeshore––brought together a team of designers, makers, directors, puppeteers, and filmmakers, all of whom were excited to excited to contribute their unique ideas and skillsets. As the puppets grew in number, scale, and complexity, the event called for a growing cast of volunteers capable of bringing a bigger version of the final event into being. I interpret the corresponding process of expansion through what artistic director and puppeteer Jim Lasko calls “radical listening” in his essay “The Third Thing” (2014). The finished work of public spectacle reached out to an even wider community as it captured the attention of university students, staff, and faculty and the citizens of Evanston who became surprise witnesses to the birds’ triumphant flight. The performance’s wordless grace made space for everyone involved to find themselves reflecting on the finished performance as they began to release grief, migrate again after a time of stasis, and collectively celebrate re-emergence.

Mixity (Mixité): social diversity (ReversoDictionary)... culturally speaking: of or relating to artistic or social pursuits or events considered to be valuable or enlightened (Collins Dictionary). As the initial brunt of the ongoing pandemic comes to a close, we are left with a world that will have changed drastically. Public spaces, and the ways in which we collectively interact with them and one another alike, will need to be redefined. Harmoniously balancing form, function and value across stakeholders is a necessity in the public environment, and investigating outcomes in the shifting nature of these spaces has always been the quest of both their maker and their user. Montréal-based designers Atelier Daily tous les jours have had widespread success in creating experiential spaces of play offering unique interactions for the individual. Continually striving to learn from every project, these designers of public spaces must have one eye on critical past outcomes, and one eye on how the future can and will force them to unlearn— an even more pressing issue in the context of the pandemic. In the following interview excerpts, Daily tous les jours' director, Mouna Andraos, offers a glimpse into the core tenets of the studio, the realities of dealing with cities as clients and how important it is to identify the parts of our practice that are essential to our making.

This video and article are inspired by Robert Schumann’s use of characterization in his music and writings, and the affinities of these sometimes kaleidoscopic and multiple musical and critical perspectives with theatre, fragmentary scenographies, and costume. Drawing on the traits of Schumann’s own characters Florestan, Euesbius, Master Raro, as well as other personas such as Harlequin and Pierrot, I have aimed, in my audiovisual collage and performance of a hypothetical 4th movement to Schumann’s 1851 Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in A minor (Op. 105), to create a mediation between disparate aspects of the music, envisioned as personality fragments scattered in the landscape of the piece. The video itself is a meditation on, and an outcome of the realities of the pandemic, and the isolation that intruded in such a sustained manner on my personal and professional life. The video is an impromptu assemblage of pre-pandemic footage and photography combined to create a collective virtual chamber music experience representing an internal world haunted by dissonant multiple characters. In some ways, I echo in performance certain suggestive strains of Schumann’s own creative imagination and his personifications, both musically and in his critical writings, of the characters Florestan and Eusebius whom he sought to amalgamate in the figure of Master Raro.

In this article we, both playwright and performer, look at the play Fish at the Bottom of the Sea and its unique exploratory process. We articulate an exchange between circus, sound, and theatre, and examine the larger understanding evoked by an experiential point of view rather than one attached to the identity of any particular discipline. The article alternates between our two voices and includes videos and excerpts from the play to capture the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of our project. Our co-writing approach mirrors our collaborative and interdisciplinary process. As this iteration of the play was generated during the pandemic, the article explores how the play’s themes of isolation and loss are reflected in our collective experience and our need for connection. Further, we explore how both the form and content of this work was impacted by the pandemic. Our paper is organized around three central themes: exploring liminal space and the desire to cross an impossible threshold; embodying states of matter and moving through stages of grief; seeking virtuosity in performance.

This paper interrogates human relationships with the natural environment using the saskatoon berry as a “habitat guide,” a concept borrowed from the Indigenous perspectives of the Blackfoot, Papachase Cree and the Métis. As a settler on Treaty Six and Métis territory no. 4 – the traditional lands of various Indigenous Peoples including the Papaschase Cree, Blackfoot, Nakota Sioux, Ojibwe, Métis and others – my research engages with personal experience and specific Indigenous knowledge systems and worldview(s). This paper is divided into three sections: the first examines engagement with the natural environment and makes a case for stewardship and kinship as eco-conscious ethics. The second section, based on an oral interview with Papaschase Cree educator and scholar Dwayne Donald, builds on traditional ecological knowledge to provoke thoughts on multispecies relationality. In the final section, I offer a close reading of poems by two Métis poets to emphasize kinship and ethical relationality through the saskatoon berry.

The ontology of characters onstage has long been a concern of performance theory, but the stakes of this hauntological question for the characters themselves is rarely addressed. How and why do queer beings both corporeal and ethereal inhabit the stage, and how do they communicate with us (and each other)? In the metatextual context of a general exam, as my writing style wanders between poetry and prose, research and reflection, I diarize my journey through this question and the ways ritual, performativity, and the carnivalesque function to bring forth these spirits onto our plane. I play off of Michel Foucault’s musings on “other Victorians” to demonstrate how plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Zanna, Don’t!; Shakespeare’s R&J, Three Mysterious Women; and Lenin’s Embalmers illustrate the queer politics of memory, performance, and affect. The theatrical memory machine restages queer genealogy in ways that traditional methods of memorialization in Western culture do not. Furthermore, the thin veil between realities during these performances allows queer utopic visions that entice performers, audiences, and characters alike.

As two artist-scholars engaged in research-creation, our goal with this project was to enact a performance/discussion regarding settler-colonialism, sound, performance, and our relationships to land, body and time. During the initial “lockdown phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, we carried out a mediated conversation via WhatsApp voice memos, hiking towards each other along and across the Oldman River, then retracing the other’s path back to our respective points of origin. This collaborative project aims to decolonize the academic paper through a process which combines textual analysis, experiential learning, improvisational performance, and activated writing to ask questions of the relationships between sound, land, and colonial institutions. How does movement through space, and hearing the land, affect our experience of discussing texts? How is discussion informed by, say, the participants being separated (or connected) by a river? What richness exists in oral/aural exchanges that are lost in the textualizing process? What does it mean to move through occupied Blackfoot territory while discussing decolonialism? The structure of this conversational exchange unfolds in loops rather than in the linear standard of academic writing. This “essay” was originally devised as an audiovisual text, but during further revisions, we continued our experimentations with form. The result has taken shape in dual outputs of both sound and text, each form containing affective and sensorial elements not found in the other, creating parallel yet distinct “texts.” While this is an imperfect strategy for those who experience sight/hearing related disabilities, we also recognize that some sensorial experiences are untranslatable into the language of the other senses. We hope that we have encoded each experience of sound and text with enough richness for them to be enjoyed individually, and we invite those who can, to experience how the two forms play off of each other. To this effect, the form of this text focuses on the relationship between the content of our conversation and how it is presented, and between our conversation and the writers, artists and movements we have referenced. We also hope to emphasize our relationality with the land we walked through, the creators of the sounds we listened to, between us, the co-creators of this “text,” as well as the relationship we create with you, the listener/reader experiencing it. As artists/writers/curators, it is a challenge to find alternative textual formats that appropriately reflect artistic research-creation methodologies while also satisfying the demands of academic knowledge dissemination. This collaboration explores the possibility for academic conversations to escape the confines of learning institutions into a space of praxis and embodied experience in motion.

At its core, the practice of creating sound installations as sonic art involves presenting and manipulating audio in a gallery-like setting. In the case of "La Sinfonía de Babel" the usage of pre-existing musical and literary phrases, or "quoting," formulates the substantive basis for a non-interactive quadraphonic piece that challenges preconceptions of appropriation, citation, and plagiarism where it concerns composition. Inspired by the works “Sinfonia” by Italian composer Luiciano Berio, and “La Biblioteca de Babel” by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, "La Sinfonía de Babel" recontextualizes conventional ideas of musical narratives by combining and indeterminately presenting excerpts of six hundred and forty looped musical works from different time periods, thus generating a thick and immersive cluster of audio. Within this milieu, auditors are invited to sit and read Borges’ text whilst simulataneously identifying musical familiarities within the cluster, hence experiencing quoting on a multi-dimensional level. This paper offers a methodological and aesthetic overview of Berio and Borges' works, focusing specifically on how citation is approached from musical and literary perspectives. Furthermore, structural and technical methodologies are analyzed as a means of better understanding the overarching creative process.