REMEMBERING FORWARD

(working title, previously ‘Future Ancestor’)

I’m in a 6+ year collaborative relationship with 4 other queer white clowns as we develop a show (and post show workshop) about our ancestry, the construction and practice of whiteness, and other ways to be inside our skins as we engage in reparations, work at decolonizing, and contribute to destabilizing the ‘white cultural void’. My collaborators are: Chenda Cope, Patrick Costello, Sarah Lowry, and Travis Sehorn.

Our project has been supported thus far by Hewnoaks Artist Colony in Maine where we had a creative residencies in 2018 & 2019. We were slated to return there this summer, along with our project thinking partners- Nicole Brewer, Lily Mengesha, and Ju-Pong Lin, but due to Covid19, our residency is postponed til summer of 2022(?).

The 5 of of us in our clown crew are coming from families of Quaker environmentalists, southern slaveholders, mill workers, Mormons, farmers, industrialists and holocaust survivors. Our families became ‘white’ at different times through a range of class, culture and geographic experiences. Through activism, DIY theater work, and friendship we’ve come together to invent this clown show to disrupt our whiteness, informed by our queerness, in an effort to enact antiracism, and raise funds for indigenous land reclamation projects and reparations for chattle slavery. Most of us have trained in Pochinko style clown work, in addition to being musicians, writers, puppeteers, visual artists, directors and a somatic therapist.

Some source texts include The White Supremacy Cultural Norms, James Baldwin’s Open Letter to Angela Davis, On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem, and Ancestral Medicine by Daniel Foor.

Photo Credit: Travis Sehorn, Patrick Costello, Nat May