Lightning is my Girl

The complexity of lightning make me think of queerness and its’ power to jolt awareness and challenge norms. Lightning is a discharge of electricity that breaks apart nitrogen molecules and balances the electrical atmosphere. Both lightning and queerness have the capacity to disrupt things and allow for a newness or reimagining. Their power and beauty are explosive and beneficial. 

Music is also important to me as I create and the title, “Lightning Is My Girl”, references a song by female punk alt musician Melissa Auf der Maur. Music has always been a tool for queerness to break through societal norms and conditioning. I grew up going to SoCal punk shows in the early 90’s and have always considered music a large part of my identity. Similar to music, I use gesture as an emotional release but also as a language. Music in a way works like lightning to jolt us out of our normative experiences, to change how we see the world and embolden dreams of new ones.

This show builds upon and further pushes my “Queer Utopia” body of work, thinking about queer futurity.

“...we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds…. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.”

—José Esteban Muñoz