QUEER AS IN CRIP

A video poetry artwork

 

As part of the Queer as in Crip video and spoken word installation, alongside artists Kerri Shying and Robin Eames, curated by Riana Head-Toussaint. ​

 

PERFORMERS ​

Hanna Cormick

 

DURATION

15 minutes

 

PERFORMANCES 

2024

Queer Art After Hours

Art Gallery of New South Wales

(Gadigal Country, Sydney, Australia)

WITH THIS BODY I REMEMBER, WITH THIS BODY I RE-WILD

With this body I remember, with this body I re-wild is a new work developed by Latai Taumoepeau, winner of the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art 2022, commissioned by ANTI Festival for its 2023 edition

 

With this body I remember, with this body I rewild is a slow, live ritual.

 

Artists Latai and Hanna Cormick dissolve notions of individual space, physical borders and time. Leading an exploration of inhabiting their ancestral stories with collaborators Elin Kåven and Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey.

 

Guided by the Peräniemi peninsula to remember beings from the depths of the Mōana/Pacific Ocean and Sápmi/Arctic Forest across digital live stream technology to connect us in Finland to Hanna in Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country Australia. Moving through a small forest surrounded by a lake on the edge of the city of Kuopio, we awaken our sensitivities to embody a place these artists have never walked before. Collectively, we practise a performance of the body that is oceanic, arctic, Disabled and diaspora, belonging to complex ecosystems that require our active attention and participation.

 

WORKING GROUP

 

CO-CREATORS

Latai Taumoepeau

Hanna Cormick

 

COMPOSERS

Madeleine Flynn

Tim Humphrey

 

VOCALIST

Elin Kåven

 

DURATION

1 hour

 

PERFORMANCES 

2023

ANTI Festival

Peräniemi peninsula 

(Kuopio, Finland)

 

Commissioned by ANTI Festival 2023

Produced by Intimate Spectacle with ANTI Festival 

Supported by Creative Australia

THE MERMAID

The Mermaid is:

a Disability activist;

a victim of the climate crisis;

a celebration of difference and diversity;

a fantastical harbinger of a transhumanist future;

an alchemist, transforming struggle and prejudice into art;

...curious and wants to join our world.

​

In the ocean, the Mermaid is free. On the land, she cannot swim or breathe, and is vulnerable to pollutions of chemicals, scents and food from human settlement. It is not the Mermaid that is Disabled, but the environment that makes her so.

  

This work takes the artist's real medical equipment required to venture outside, and recontextualises them by placing them with the image of a "realistic" mermaid. The artist lives with a cluster of rare genetic diseases which necessitate the use of a wheelchair, braces, respirator mask and oxygen. The artist's medical aids are turned into objects of fantasy, become instruments of play, but also draw attention to the environmental plight of the Mermaid and the ecosystems she represents. The Mermaid is at once whimsical and confronting, calling into question our notions of

inclusivity, body, environment and normalcy.

​

The tension between ability and the restrictions of the illness affect the trajectory of the piece. As she comes into contact with different environmental triggers, The Mermaid may suffer from real medical events: convulsive seizures, respiratory reactions, paralysis. She is in constant reaction with the world and people around her, performatively, spatially, cellularly. Her body exists as canvas, stage, for events to pass through.

​

She reminds us of our inherent fragility, the permeability of our bodies and ecosystems.

She is a celebration and a warning; a living memento mori, for both ourselves and the environment.

 

 

PERFORMERS

​Hanna Cormick
Christopher Samuel Carroll
Lloyd Allison-Young
 

DURATION

20 minutes, dependent upon medical events
 

PERFORMANCES

 

2020

Sydney Festival

The Coal Loader Centre for Sustainability

(Cammeraygal Country, Sydney, Australia)

 

2018

I-Day Arts Conference

Gorman Arts Centre

(Ngunnawal & Ngambri Country, Canberra, Australia)

 

Art, Not Apart

The Shine Dome; Nishi Gallery; New Acton surrounds

(Nugunnawal & Ngambri Country, Canberra, Australia)

CANARY

For one or many performers

 

A true story, a fantasy, an allegory.

For all the people, animals, insects and landscapes whose bodies are on the line, voluntarily and involuntarily,

through climate activism, climate displacement, climate disaster, climate illness;

for those who leverage the safety and privilege of their bodies to stand in for those who cannot stand out or speak up due to risk of harm or persecution;

for those who, through their small everyday actions, carry on the messages of those of us injured, disappeared, imprisoned, so that change will come.

 

In CANARY, proxy-performer/s are asked to leverage their immunologic privilege, and become a conduit through which Hanna's body (and the Earth) and its message are made present. Bodies in CANARY are viewed as absences, silences, the spaces where something used to exist, and their not-being-present is so palpable, carries so much significance and weight, that it becomes a presence itself. It draws us to remember who might not be in the room: the disappearing species, collapsing ecosystems, those still stuck in extended isolation, and the countless of those we’ve lost.

 

CANARY asks of those with bodies that can be present:

What role can your body play for these waves of the rapidly disappearing?

How can your privilege of presence anchor to this moment of space-time 

the absence-presence of those who cannot be here, 

until the sensation of them is so heavy in the air that they are made manifest?

When you lend me your body in this way, is it accurate to say that I’m not there?

Or does my body now expand to include your skin, your muscles, your lungs? 

 

 

DURATION

10 minutes
 

PERFORMANCES

2025

Teapot in a Tempest

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

(Edinburgh, Scotland)

 

2022

I-Dance festival

for BOLD Festival

(Online)

 

2021

I-Dance festival

(Online)

 

2020

Eco-Anxiety

Imago Theatre

(Online)

2019

Waste//Land

The Yale Cabaret 

(New Haven, United States)

 

Waterlines

Gulf Park Cultural Arts Series

(Ocean Springs, United States)

 

Regina Theatre Artist Hub Social

(Regina, Canada)

 

Pouring Rain and Porous Bodies

Michigan State University

(East Lansing, United States)

 

Face the Future

PoParts

(Hamilton, New Zealand)

 

Canary

Mostar Youth Theatre 

(Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina; Duino, Italy; Ljublujana, Slovenia)

 

Climate Change Theatre Action: Playreadings

The Blue Room Theatre

(Noongar Country, Perth, Australia)

 

Climate Change Theatre Action Greenfield

Greening Greenfield & Local Access

(Greenfield, United States)

 

Climate Change Theatre Action

Edgehill University

(Ormskirk, United Kingdom)

 

Eco-Anxiety

Imago Theatre

(Montreal, Canada)

 

Take Ten for Climate Change

Carnegie Mellon University

(Pittsburgh, United States)

 

Climate Change Theatre Action

University of New Hampshire

(Durham, United States)

 

MN Climate

Perpich Arts

(Golden Valley, United States)

 

We Draw the Line

East 15

(Southend on Sea, United Kingdom)

 

Lighting the Way

Duck Bunny Theatre

(Nelson, New Zealand)

 

Honoring the Earth

Open Space

(Anchorage, United States)

 

Lighting the Way

Graceland University

(Lamoni, United States)

 

Eco-Design Charrette

Triga Creative & The Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts

(Toronto, Canada)

 

What Can We Do

Towson University

(Towson, United States)

 

Climate Change Theatre Action Readings

NYUAD Theater Program

(Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)

 

Lighting the Way

Metropolitan Community College

(Omaha, United States)

 

Your House is On Fire

ArkansasStaged

(Fayetteville, United States)

 

Palm Beach Climate Change Theatre Action(s)

The Box Gallery

(West Palm Beach, United States)

 

Climate Change Theatre Action in Oahu, Hawaii

(Oahu, United States)

 

Climate Change Artist/Theatre Action

Ithaca College

(Ithaca, United States)

 

Canaries are Flying

Across Oceans Arts

(Online)

 

Hawaii Cold Reads

Sacred Hearts Academy's

Global Issues class & Learning Across Borders (LAB)

(Honolulu, United States)

 

Hurricane in a Handbag

Boston Conservatory at Berklee 

(Boston, United States)

 

Lighting the Way

The Myers House

(St Helena, United States)

 

Commissioned by The Arctic Cycle

for Climate Change Theatre Action 2019

 

Re-issued by the Arts & Climate Initiative

with additional coda 'COAL'

for Climate Change Theatre Action 2025

LITTLE MONSTERS

What does it mean to knowingly pass on Disability to a child? Why are we so afraid of it?

What does it say about how we really feel about Disabled lives?

Little Monsters also conjures the ethical dilemma of procreation in a post-climate-disaster world.

Our mutating genes and changing environment set up our offspring for a more difficult life than we have ever known -

Is it fair to inflict that struggle onto a human? Is it fair to deny it?

The artist sets her real heritable Disability against the make-believe play of her non-blood-related nieces.

By placing her signifiers of Disability onto their bodies, she casts them in a game where we are called upon to question the tangle of emotions and moral judgements we hold around life-creation and the spread of a diverse species.

 

PERFORMERS

Hanna Cormick
Jacie Leven
Jorja Cormick
with the assistance of Jean Cormick
 

SOUND DESIGN

Nick McCorriston
 

COSTUMES

Imogen Keen
 

PROSTHETICS ASSIST

Gillian Schwab
 

DURATION

20 minutes
 

PERFORMANCES
2019

Art, Not Apart

Nishi Gallery

(Ngunnawal & Ngambri Country, Canberra, Australia)

ZEBRACORN

In medical training, doctors are taught "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras", to prevent overdiagnosis of rare conditions when a common one is more likely, but rare disease patients are falling through the cracks.

In her late-20’s, living in Paris, Hanna becomes profoundly ill with a series of mysterious and rare medical conditions. This young adventuress is forced to return to Canberra, confined to living in a sealed room, trapped in a confrontation with her past and the rapid unravelling of her body, and at the mercy of an immune system that has become so alien the outside world could kill her. Intimate personal stories invite us into the hidden and denied realms of Disability, weaving through landscapes of rage, sex, shame, death, beauty and ugliness.

Zebracorn is a physical-theatre video-art fantasia, taking us on kaleidoscopic journeys into the underbelly of chronic illness and rare disease; what it’s like living a life that can often feel closer to science fiction than reality, what it feels like to grieve for yourself, how your relationship changes when your lover becomes your carer. Moving from the personal to the political, reclaiming the right to a body, and the very right to be seen.
 

CO-WRITER

Christopher Samuel Carroll
 

PERFORMERS

Lloyd Allison-Young
Christopher Samuel Carroll
Chloe Martin 
 

PERFORMANCES
2019

First Seen work in progress showing

The Street Theatre

(Ngunnawal & Ngambri Country, Canberra, Australia)

 

Supprted by The Hive and First Seen, The Street Theatre

 

 

Additional creative development without work in progress showing in 2021

with Lloyd Allison-Young, Alicia Gonzalez, Christopher Samuel Carroll and Chloe Martin

Supported by The Street Theatre and artsACT

THEATRE AND PLAGUES

A scratch performance of a new work: a conversation with Mask performance artist (and medical mask-wearer) Hanna Cormick.

 

Hanna Cormick hates masks. And loves them. And has spent the last two decades trying to escape her reliance on them, only for a pandemic to shift them mainstream.

 

In this scratch for a new work, David Finnigan interrogates mistress of masks, Hanna Cormick, in a bid to uncover the mix of theatrical, cultural, psychological and medical knowledge she has accrued over her twenty-year love-hate obsession, and how that translates to this moment in history.

 

An expert in theatrical Mask, as both a Mask maker and Mask performer, Cormick has apprenticed under the world's leading Mask makers in France and Indonesia, and taught Mask performance styles since 2002.

 

Around 2013, Cormick fell out of love with Mask performance, but two years later was struck by a cluster of rare diseases that have left her with breathing complications and immunological dysfunction - Cormick now relies on medical masks to help her breathe, and cannot leave her filtered safe-room without a full-face respirator and oxygen tank.

 

Uniquely placed with her cross-section of cultural/artistic expertise vs medical lived-experience, Cormick will be asked to reflect on these devices that we are letting into our lives, our fashion, our culture, and how they affect how we communicate, express our identity, and relate to ourselves.

 

 

PERFORMANCE LECTURE

2020

on Zoom

RIDE OR DIE

An artistic exploration of the wheelchair-using body.

THE MERMAID

I-DAY VIRTUAL EXHIBITION

Released in the lead up to I-Day 2019

Supported by the ACT Government I-Day Grant program

DREAM/

REMEMBER