I’ve been many things throughout my performance career: a bassoonist, a fetish performer, and in the last decade, an aerialist. Circus approached me more than the other way around. I was drawn to the possibilities of using movement as voice, as I started as a musician not a mover. But over the decade I’ve been practicing, I started to recognize that my thinking process itself is actually kinesthetic.

 

You may have noticed my current work centers largely on aerial chains! The contact improv-like partnership I employ with looped chains approaches circus as a physical thinking exercise, and allows me to reflect in real time on my queer lived experience and construction of identity. Each performance moment is unique, as a window into its own very specific temporal landscape of being. Some of this is directed by the chains themselves, as their movement, weight, and timing varies with each encounter, and some of it is my own response to their demand of living in the moment. 

 

The imagery of aerial chains allows me to build narratives that disrupt the cisheteronormative understandings of gender-diverse bodies by juxtaposing them with the fantastical spectacle of circus movement. In these queer temporalities, I can relate my own trans body’s experience of outside assumptions and subsequent systems of oppression to the presuppositions that the chains themselves carry. Together, this partnership of object and performer creates an excellent vehicle to examine queer relationships to the corporeal form and the social forms projected onto it. 

 

My current work in progress (QUIET) is a multidisciplinary collaboration investigating the multitudes of the queer body: “the conditioned body, the spiritual body, and the body I am destined to be.” -Jose Richard Aviles