Artist DAWN FELICIA KNOX, composer ANASTASIA CLARKE and writer SHANNON LUMPKIN discuss their work, SWANS LAKELESS,  with political consultant and activist ANNA BLACKSHAW.  The collaborative, intermedia composition was premiered via livestream from Roulette Intermedium, NYC on April 23rd, 2021. 

The work invites discussion around disability justice, systemic police violence, radical empathy, and the transformative nature of making along with conversations about collaborating across the ocean in the time of covid. 

The conversation will draw from questions both formulated by Anna Blackshaw and the wider discussion attendees. 

WATCH THE PERFORMANCE HERE:

Swans Lakeless from Roulette Intermedium on Vimeo. 

LINK TO ARCHIVE and full information:  https://roulette.org/event/anastasia-clarke-swans-lakeless/

SWANS LAKELESS was developed during Roulette's 2019-2020 Van Lier Fellowship, made possible with funds by the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust. Production was supported by Star and Shadow through the Arts Council England funded microprojects. 

ABOUT Swans Lakeless:

SWANS LAKELESS is an intermedia composition woven from lived experience, myth, and narrative poetry. The work addresses the intersections of gender identity from a disability justice lens on police abuse while offering imaginatives upon the interrelationships between shame, violence, masculinity, and marginalization. These exist in disjointed harmony with the protagonist’s earnest and necessary explorations of radical empathy, self-healing, and a quest for transformative justice. The story uses an actual false-arrest experienced by Shannon Lumpkin as an initiatory point for creativity, expanding upon real-life events to create a fantasy world where one asks: 

Could an abolitionist police choir exist? 

How can we inspire a militarized force to give up violence for song?
 
The livestream performance uses the empty Roulette theatre to stage Swans Lakeless as live interaction with fixed media. From 2019–2021, the collaborators worked in parallel processes to develop the sound world, poetry, and visual terrain of the piece by compiling source footage, musical performance footage, and Shannon Lumpkin’s solo performances for camera. Confined to England due to the pandemic, Dawn Felicia Knox projected the video source material onto non-traditional surfaces intercepted by fields of coloured light in the Star & Shadow, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The resultant work is an intermedia composition of the evolving installation, inhabited through Anastasia Clarke’s music and sound, which unfolds Shannon Lumpkin’s poetry.

The process for creating, sharing, and discussing this work is informed by SURJ’s documentation on anti-ableism, access and Disability Justice.