Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges is a three year project of transnational artistic residencies and workshops. Co-creation, performative exchange and relational aesthetics aim to create transgenerational works as a practical dialogue sharing and contesting knowledges.
Research includes embodied conversations and storytelling as co-creative performance art actions between elder, researcher, students and community. Each method from one elder artist is woven by the researcher into the next, forming a chain between all the participants. Tensions arise between artists' lives and their geographies, questioning performance art methods and futures. The artistic results will include diverse performative elements: podcasts, photo performances, living artifacts or props, costumes, prose, performance actions. The project concludes by curating a pedagogical handbook and a final exhibition of the chain of practices.
These elders have transformed more than one generation of practitioners across national borders. Guillermo Gomez-Peña, a Chicano border theorist and indigenous artist working with the hybridity of language, installation art, video, and the spoken word; Varste Mathæussen, an Inuit actress and master of mask dance; Ron Athey, a queer performance artist associated with extreme body art; Annie M. Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, ecosexual performance artists and radical sex educators; and Geir Tore Holm, a Sami interdisciplinary artist whose projects question land use and ecology. They represent 20th century performance legacies from different geographies: Norwegian Sami, Mexico, USA and Greenland.