To get to the other side

Debrief on Lessons in Anatomy
In November, I had the pleasure of performing alongside Jess Curtis/Gravity and Rupture in a work-in-progress showing at CounterPulse called dark/lessons/rupture. I shared a working version of a new solo called Lessons in Anatomy. For now, the piece mainly involves me swishing some feather boas around while riffing on cooking shows, sex changes, and chicken. I'm asking the question on everyone's mind: "Why did the chicken cross the road...?"
The excerpt I shared in November looked and sounded great, thanks to sound designer Jules Litman-Cleper and lighting designer gg/grisel torres. For the first half of my performance, the theater was almost entirely dark, except for a spinning red light which pulsed on and off. Perched on top of a go-go box, with my upper body covered entirely in feather boas, I rolled through a Butoh-meets-burlesque choreography of the kitchen: transforming myself into the chicken spinning on the rotisserie, the chef tying her apron, and so on. For the second half of my performance, I slowly walked up the stairs of CounterPulse's risers while delivering a text that took the vague shape of a recipe: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3...

While writing about my own work can be a fun and rewarding challenge, I also hate doing it. And this time around, perhaps for the first time ever, I am lucky enough to have someone else's words to fall back on! My friend and local luminary James Fleming wrote a very thoughtful piece about dark/lessons/rupture for Dancers' Group's Winter 2023 In Dance:
... Silk Worm is there, posing gloriously on the pedestal for the audience. She is covered in a many-hued garnish of boas. One step at a time, she presents to us Lessons in Anatomy.
Step 1: hold onto your ultimate outcome with your mind and your favorite cooking vessel in your hand.
The vessel is prepared delicately, it is patted dry and probably rubbed with salt all over. Inside it, Silk constructs a repository for the semiotics of ‘bodily transformation, namely with changing sex’.
Above her, a sonic drone laps and lays, swaps and enfolds: lips smack, liquids pour down throats, cans pop and fizz as material is pushed by the larynx into an acidic oceanscape of the stomach. Composer Jules Lc fills the vessel with the gestational interior spaces of the body, where silence becomes something of an embodied sine wave.
By Step 7, Silk instructs the audience: Open the oven door wider. Force yourself to confront a raw chicken, a greasy little bird lying in the dark waiting for the sun to come up.
The vessel reveals itself through an intimate congress of ‘psychic garbage’, in a language that congeals and affixes like cold gravy solidifying on your plate.
You can, and should, read the rest of James' beautiful piece on all three works shown at dark/lessons/rupture here.

My handy little summary of the piece for grant applications reads: "Lessons in Anatomy is inspired by the brutality of the bodily transformations that come with gender transition." What that really means is: I am thankful to live in (and I benefit hugely from) a climate that celebrates trans people, but I have also accumulated a whole lot of negative thoughts about being trans.
As much as I understand the importance of cultivating an atmosphere of celebration and positivity, I also feel the urgent need to work through those negative thoughts! Even if it's not polite. These pessimistic feelings tend to collect around my interactions with medicine, doctors, and the healthcare industry. Seeking "gender-affirming" care requires interfacing frequently with doctors—who are often weirdos—and those interactions can be tiring and dehumanizing. I take my body into the clinic the way one might take a car to the mechanic.
Making use of the tools of modern medicine in my gender journey (barf) has alienated me from my body at the same time as it has brought me newly embodied feelings of joy, safety, and belonging. When presenting myself to a doctor, I experience my body as a piece of meat, patiently laying back as it is marinated, probed, measured, weighed, seasoned, cooked, and consumed. This state of meatlikeness is what drives Lessons in Anatomy, which for now I will continue to edit and refine until my next chance to share it with a live audience. My hope is to host a staged reading of it in either SF or the East Bay in the spring, so stay tuned on that – and if you have any ideas on a venue or occasion, please let me know!
Coming up in February
- Monday, February 13 - Precious Metals, a poetry event in Oakland! I'm not reading, but I'll be there to see and be seen. Readings from Sophie Appel, Wren Farrell, Christina Svenson, and more. DM @potentialwife on Instagram with any questions or to get tickets. 7-10 pm; $15 tickets. 1431 Martin Luther King Jr Way Oakland, CA 94612.
- Tuesday, February 14 - an EXTRA SPECIAL edition of the monthly drag show Angels at Aunt Charlie's Lounge! Come celebrate our co-host Myles Cooper's birthday as well as Valentine's Day. Music by DJ Jeremy Castillo from 9 pm till last call; show at 10:30 pm; $5 cash at the door. Aunt Charlie's Lounge, 133 Turk St, San Francisco, CA 94102.
- Thursday, February 16 - the other monthly drag show I co-host, Juicy Fruit at Bar Part Time! No cover, no excuses! Music from 8 pm till midnight; drag show at 9 pm; no cover. Bar Part Time, 496 14th St, San Francisco, CA 94103.
What I'm reading
- "Put Yourself On the Beam," an email exchange between Rowena Richie and Hiroko Tamano, also in the Winter 2023 In Dance. They discuss Butoh, Zen, and life in four (or even five) dimensions... essential reading!!!
- Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, a 1997 anthology on San Francisco history from City Lights. This book is so, so fun to read, and it's full of fascinating and deeply researched essays on the politics of gentrification and redevelopment in San Francisco. So far my favorites are "Weeds: A Talk at the Library" by Nicholson Baker and "The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather, 1962-1997" by Gayle Rubin.
- Nonbinary: A Memoir by Genesis P-Orridge (RIP). Really one-of-a-kind perspective on art, the body, gender, and counterculture from one of my biggest inspirations.
The end. Thanks for reading :)