Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle Civil—a new experimental memoir with a workbook version coming out this fall—is full of generosity. It opens with a direct address and invitation to the reader, and incorporates letters, text messages, personal essays, performance art scripts, reviews, and other genres between its covers.
For me, performance art is this practice of putting a frame around life and manifesting the self as much as possible [within it], trying to activate one's own presence in space and time. In practical terms, that's been an experience of trying to create art actions where I either encounter an environment or create an environment and then move into it, make something happen with the audience, with other people, sometimes with music, sometimes with projections—but always with my body.
How do you construct your performances? Does the writing come first or the movement? Do they go hand in hand? In my daily life, I'm not a shy person, but I am somewhat private and reserved. I'm a dark-skinned, plump, Black woman, and there is sometimes in society an assumption that what you see is what you get, you know? As if I don't have a passionate, very intense, vital interior life, or am not an intellectual. A lot of people just think, Oh, what a smart, sassy, funny person.
So while I'm doing the work, it's like I've carved out a space where I can be in my own dream sequence, but then afterward, the responses I get are often still bound—not always, but often—to a bunch of ideas that are related to my physicality or to experiences of the people who are speaking. We have the capacity to be more than one thing, and that's also why I wanted there to be so many different modes. I wanted there to be those mini essays or reviews [by other writers] because I didn't want the book to be just me, I wanted to signal these other voices, to try to create something multimodal but still offer a coherent reading experience. That was the hardest thing. I wanted the book to feel like something more than just a compilation.
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