WHoLE
Outburst Queer Arts Festival,
Belfast NI
2016
It's that whole thing about silence.
It's like a mask...
Like the lips are sewn, you know?
A performance installation about the experience of being a woman living with HIV in Northern Ireland today.
Viewed from the street, WHoLE takes the ideas of ‘hole’ and ‘wholeness’ as metaphors for transmission and transformation. What histories, secrets, stigma, information, art or joy might slip through a small hole and be transformed at the other side? What makes us whole, if the whole of who we are isn’t acceptable?
This project aims at challenging our thinking around HIV and AIDS, and tackle the stigma still faced by women living with HIV.
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Led by Director Alyson Campbell, text by Lachlan Philpott. Produced by wreckedAllprods and TheatreofplucK for Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2016.
http://www.theatreofpluck.com/whole
WHoLE was part of GL RY, a performance-installation project that took place in Belfast in 2016
Research
GL RY – A (w)hole Lot of Woman Trouble: HIV Dramaturgies and Feral Pedagogies (2018)
In Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century, A Campbell & D Gindt (eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 49-67.
This essay stems from a Practice as Research performance installation, GL RY, led by the author in a public square throughout the 2014 International AIDS Conference in Melbourne. The essay argues that there is a gaping hole in representation of women living with HIV in contemporary performance in countries like Australia. The essay proposes two main concepts: conversation 'in form as well as process' is a key part of a contemporary dramaturgy of HIV; and, building on that, this dramaturgy of conversation might be productively merged with queer ideas of kinship and family to form what I am calling ‘feral pedagogies': a queerly de-domesticated idea of how we teach and learn, in this case about HIV.