I give thanks to my blood family who taught me everything there is to know about the guiding principles at the heart of my practice – listening to intuition, trusting inner knowing, fearlessly following heart whispers and dancing especially when everything is falling apart. To my nanna Imelda Bason who always offered a peaceful haven with a drop of vermouth and a space for twiddling our thumbs. “We took them to the edge and bade them fly. They held on. “Fly!” we said. They held on. We pushed them over the edge. And they flew.” And fly into the pink-orange sky, I must. As Gregory Bateson puts it: “you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events”.
Turn on video audio to listen to the rest of the narrative.
A special thanks to dear friends and allies for bearing witness and for their active participation. To activist Bells Davidson for the photography, dance artist and researcher Irene Fiordilino for their active presence, visual anthropologist Eleonora Cristin for producing the video, activist and educator Robert Behan for the kindling and fire stoking.
Somatic resistance and social justice:
bitten bitten
In southern Italy “pizzica pizzica” or “bitten bitten” is a traditional dance called the dance of the Tarantula. “Pizzica” is a Salentine version of the nationwide dance called Tarantella. The traditional dance form grew out of a myth where women were believed to become possessed after being bitten by a Tarantula, hence its commonly known name “The Dance of the Spider Women”. The ritual is traditionally associated with oppressed women who upon being bitten by the tarantula would start writhing on the ground and become increasingly delirious as they become infected with the poison. Accompanied by frenetic folk music, the afflicted women would eventually rise to stomp on the ground, convulse, dance wildly, chaotically and in circles for days, until the experience peaks and fades away.
This video is a solo outcome from engaging with one of six movement scores I composed for collective practice research of ecological entanglements, within the cauldron of polycrisis. This is one example of how I approach somatic resistance as inquiry, and the body as a political archive of our times. The concept for this piece threads the symbolism of the bitten women convulsing, with the guided imagery of a spider weaving a web, and the myth of hysteria in the history of women’s madness. The work builds on histories of collective action in critical mental health, marked by a resistance toward oppressive norms.
Thanks to the formative more-than-human encounters with a tickling spider on Hampstead Heath, and the moist damp body of Queens Wood, in the creation of this work.
Key texts:
“The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience” and “Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness” by psychologist and Foucauldian Jane Ussher, and her historical analysis of how power shapes knowledge about subjectivities, tracing the different ways feminised knowledges have been delegitimised across the ages - to the persecution of women as witches in Medieval Times; “Staying with the Trouble” by Donna Haraway, her String Figure theory and what she calls “sympoietic”, interdependent, and multispecies storytelling of “response-ability”, as a “collective knowing and doing”.
Music: Nine Inch Nails 3 Ghosts I
Where is home for you?
This spoken word piece engages themes of migration, displacement and belonging. When embodying multiplicity means that one can never rest in one category or another, like a chameleon that shape-shifts according to its environment, they forever sit at the threshold of the both/and. This is an example of how I use the material entanglements in experience to inform embodied storytelling that is polyvocal, to articulate complexity and nuance, that is often overlooked by dominant narratives.
Becoming Creaturely: Act I, Queer Femmes
Shots from a micropolitical performance in production.
This piece engages embodied storytelling of oppressive norms, the invisible violence of cisheteropatriarchy, and the ways in which gendered hierarchies of being fetishise non-normative, queer femmes. The material and situated storytelling draws from lived experiences in shared housing environments in London. This site-responsive performance speaks to the hidden history of Queens Wood as once a marginal site due to the folkx (and the creatures) known to inhabit it.
In this piece, we seek to create a liminal environment with the embodied actions and slow somatic movement of walking and crawling - to trouble power relations between human-environment, human-human, and human-animal. Using the plural body as medium, we toy with dominant ways of being in everyday spaces and invite you - our audience - to re-imagine with us other ways of becoming through the creaturely form of the hybrid ram.
Concept & creative direction: Fabienne Formosa
Devised by: Fabienne Formosa, with performer contributions by Lizzy Tan
Performed by: Fabienne Formosa and Lizzy Tan
Filmed by: Michael Forton
Co-produced by: Becoming Creaturely Collective
a gold iron hanger:
Health Inequities on the Maltese Islands
Filmed by Michael Forton
In this piece, I engage health inequities, and the structural violence toward women and girls, that persists on the Maltese Islands, where abortion continues to be illegal. I do this through the physical act of meditative walking, holding out an iron hanger, historically one of the ways women have used everyday objects to terminate unwanted pregnancies. The iron hanger also symbolically speaks to the ways women, on the islands and also globally, continue to be forced to have to find their own ways of accessing abortion illegally, often risking their lives or criminalisation in the process.
I came to work with Highgate wood and Queens wood, partners and collaborators in my creative and ecosomatic practice - as a fugitive. I first sought refuge in the wood while navigating the complex terrain of displacement and belonging, and then again when experiencing sexism and misogyny in everyday spaces. I investigated these experiences through movement, ritual and taboo cultural practices.
Through these alchemical and transmutational ritual practices, I sought to forge intimacy with the more-than-human world, as I explored the material body of the wood as an extension of my own physical body. I did this by gathering and pouring menstrual blood, as part of chord cutting spell casting, and materially entangled root planting rituals. In this way, the embodied gestures become micropolitical acts, and potent sites for healing and justice.
This is an example of how I seek to create performances that are also anti-oppressive by engaging systemic injustices, through embodied storytelling, that are also entangled with the epistemic and the ecological.