Modeling

Edited photo by Rapha Wilde on Unsplash - view from behind a photographer on floor in a room with a model in highlights and shadows. Photographer is lighter skinned, gender ambiguous with shoulder-length hair, framing camera image of light brown-skinned person with facial hair, out of focus with view of body partly obscured by photographer's back. It shows an intimate time, posing and capturing a model's image.

Two disabled artists grapple with erotics and power during their first photo shoot together.

Modeling is a multi-cast two-hander theatre piece in development to be 60-80 minutes, concerning a model and photographer who both experience differing physical disabilities. The cast rotates, and characters are written without assigned genders. For performances, at least two actors will prepare to perform the photographer’s role, at least two prepare to perform the model’s, with this design advertised so audiences know rotation will highlight different power dynamics in potentially genderqueer, trans, homo or hetero cisgender pairings.

The model character has more subtle disability, including chronically painful injuries which aren't immediately obvious, and photographer something more overt, such as having: short limbs, an atypical number of fingers, a mobility device, stutter, recurring tremor or etc - is someone with fairly typical sensory function, whose signifier of atypical condition is perceptible with clothes on.

Each casting of performers, depending on their physicalities and preferences, will inform whether A and B each play one role and then switch, or whether C and D actors will be included to present different pairings during alternating shows. A target goal with production is exploring the variations of at least three different actors in the roles.

This project will feature actors with lived experience of physical disability, and is ultimately aiming for an all-disabled production team. Contacts with such industry professionals in southern Canada are welcome, and, potentially with disabled individuals with performance-adjacent experience, interested in more training for these roles.

Modeling invites opening to non-conformist relations with gender, erotic desire, kinship, impairment and stigmatized embodiment. Meeting for a first photo shoot session, the characters engage issues of the body, exhibition, sex work, horizontal oppression, and labour dynamic ambiguities regarding employment hierarchies versus art co-creation.

With actors navigating questions of exposure, the project aims for "modeling" concern for consent and respectful relations in the production process as well as highlighting the themes onstage; it will work with Intimacy Coordinators, and final choices in script text and staging will entail input from the artists involved in the collaborating and rehearsal processes.

Models and photographers navigate embodied representation work together, and potentials for attraction, boundary crossing, power contesting and intimate revelations between disabled art makers are yet under-explored in creative works. Taking up agency, hierarchy among people with bodily and gender variance, pursuit of authentic connection, and disabled people being honest and inventive about our experiences, Modeling's experimental design will yield aesthetic, structural and political possibilities for meaningful impact.

Developing slowly, the script draft currently reads to ~ 30+ minutes, with goal 60-80 minutes. Contact me to review the draft or recordings.

select Modeling presentations of draft work to date:

- reading excerpt online with Prince Amponsah and recruited dramaturgs, January 2021 Catalyst Project in Wildside Festival, Centaur Theatre, Montreal https://web.archive.org/web/20210128235804/https://centaurtheatre.com/shows/catalyst-centaur/
- reading excerpt online with Yousef Kadoura, March 2022 NewWorks program in SpringWorks Festival, Stratford https://www.springworksfestival.ca/copy-of-shortworks-tapashta-8
- first reading rotating actors, onstage and online, February 2023 Early Stages Festival, Eastern Front Theatre, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia https://www.easternfronttheatre.com/early-stages-festival-2023

Article reflecting on the project alongside other points of my disability and arts engagements: “Crip, Arts: Community Trajectories and Agendas” in Canadian Theatre Review Vol. 190, Spring 2022 https://www.utpjournals.press/eprint/UG4GQZPUE8ZCNSZ2Q9IK/full