Stacey Sacks' public defence

Title of doctoral project
This Untethered Buffoon or The Trickster in Everything

Title of perfomance
SQUIRM (Live at the Museum, 2020): a simplosium of complicities

Title of Publication
SQUIRM (the book): performing essays compiled by a post-traumatic clown in the academy

Participants during the Public Defence 11 May 2020

Opponent: Karmenlara Ely

Evaluating Committee Members: Jennifer Miller, Jyoti Mistry, Joachim Robbrecht

Principal supervisor: Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

Second Supervisor: Rebecca Hilton

Moderator: Josette Bushell-Mingo

The Documented artistic research project by Stacey Sacks This Untethered Buffoon or The Trickster in Everything is published in DiVA and Research Catalogue.

Abstract – This Untethered Buffoon or The Trickster in Everything

This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything is an Documented Artistic Research Project (Doctoral Thesis) project comprising a series of excavations and vivisections of W(w)hiteness through clowning, making and thinging.
 
This eclectic mash-up of history, memory and trauma unfolds from my original question: as an actor, which bodies is it appropriate for me to inhabit? Via hyper-disciplinary experiments of the impulse and what it means to be ‘on’ the moment, the research fabricates a series of clowters, performed entanglements of clown and character passing between various continents, temporalities and situated histories.
 
As experimentations with auto-ethnography and productive discomfort, the performing essays in SQUIRM animate and satirise questions of W(w)hiteness, privilege and colonial logic. At the intersections of histories, they dig through remnants of collective memory, personal genealogy and shame, in the hope of reassembling new, sharper ways of giving and receiving attention.
 
This work/play exists at the intersections of critical Whiteness studies, performing and clowning, visual and cultural anthropology and decolonial critique.
 
From inside the body of this performer SQUIRM is about TONGUE-ING, about soft licking the future, about reinvigorating ancient clown practices to poke at Whiteness in the current age. It’s about squirming and laughing through the discomfort of privilege in what feels like a crumbling time. But mostly it’s about feeling great in a beard.

Read about Stacey Sacks Documented Artistic Research Project (Doctoral Thesis): This Untethered Buffoon or The Trickster in Everything