on practice: devynn emory

Joseph M. Pierce (left) and devynn emory (right) with the traveling altar can anyone help me hold this body in Lenapehoking. Photo: Ian Douglas

devynn emory is a mixed Lenape/Blackfoot transgender choreographer, dance artist, bodyworker, ceremonial guide, acute care and hospice nurse currently working as a COVID-19 nurse in NYC. emory's performance company devynnemory/beastproductions draws from their multiple in-between states of being, holding space for liminal bodies bridging multiple planes of transition. their formal dance training pulls on mathematical and mapped scores to support bodies decolonizing and bleeding human truths, opening peep holes and revelations for collective performers and audiences. they are currently working on a trilogy centering medical mannequins processing transitional mediumship. deadbird with it’s touring public altar can anyone help me hold this body will be first. Cindy Sessions and boiling-rain are to follow which are interactive storytelling projects with an elder mannequin holding a collection of grandmother wisdom. As a healer they have dual licenses in "western" and "eastern" bodywork and run a private practice sage-massage that offers end of life consultation, channeled counseling and hands on care modalities in conversation with thresholds. you can find their work at devynnemory.com, and deadbird.land 

We met with devynn emory (devynnemory/beastproductions) over Zoom for a discussion around their recent works deadbird, can anybody help me hold this body, and their forthcoming works Cindy Sessions and boiling-rain. A transcription, edited for length, is below. deadbird is now able to be viewed remotely through the artists website.

Chloe Alexandra Thompson

So often, in performance and dance, we talk about the body or the mover, but there's not always a conversation around how or who, or why the body is moving; those modalities speak a lot to reciprocity, or reciprocal relations within a process. I feel that you speak to reciprocal relations a lot in your works. In this time of Covid, has this been something that's expanded for you or perhaps become even more necessary? 

devynn emory

Absolutely, I was trained as a classical dancer in pretty white lineages of formalism and abstraction. It's been a lifelong process of understanding where that resides in my body and how to deconstruct and release it over time. I also question what is productive around those containers, around boundaries within a body, what is just actually oppressive that I can let go of, and what resides as the essence and tools that I can offer other people and offer myself that are still sustaining. 

I think my work (even when it was in the more formal realm) has always wanted to invite audiences in to an experience of communing - I was always working to remove the barrier of audience and performer. I want to invite people into the process or into relation with one another that is a little bit more challenging, creating an environment to gather. A practice space of humanity. With my recent work deadbird and it’s touring altar, can anybody help me hold this body, I invited other people into the choreography of the process of grief. Grief is not something that is unique to humans, yet as a nurse and healer, I witness the way it resides differently in the individual and how we all process and embody it differently. I think all of us unfortunately absorb a capitalist and white lens of the body, and we all have so much more space to detangle and decolonize that to understand exactly how we want to relate to our own body, how our body relates to all relations, the natural world, and to one another. 

In placing my work digitally where people can enter and exit on their own timeline- it allows the respect of people's unique understanding of grief, and death. They can enter it at a time that makes sense for them, versus when I or a curator asks.  

deadbird and can anybody help me hold this body has now become a life project, an always project, that will forever be available online. One can make an altar with instructions, no matter who you are and what your practice is, an invitation to come to that practice on your own terms and archive it as you wish. When the altar was touring it really was a way for me to bridge the community of the insular space of the art and dance world to the general public, the medical world to the healers, a goal of mine that is within me as i walk the path of the dancer, healer and nurse. 

I am often walking multiple lives where I am asked to shut myself off to go care for a public who are very ill inside the hospital. In COVID it’s been unbearable. I think the touring altar had me open my arms to all parts of myself, while welcoming all communities and the common thread within us all- the grief of these years with the virus. It allowed me to witness how hungry we all are to expand our relations with one another across mediums and experience. The art world arrived, as did folks stumbling upon the altar in the parks, greeted by generous altar tenders. The altar traveled with predominantly Black and Indigenous queer folk across the lands of Turtle Island, East to West. This was a practice that I offered to the altar tenders as a way for them to have a durational experience with the land in which they are residing. So in that way, reciprocity is at the core. Reciprocity amongst individuals and tenders with the land. All of us, with the land.

The tenders are one kind of being that can hold the grief of other beings, although to be mindful of these limitations, the land holds us while we hold them. The water and trees became performers, collaborators. After each day of the altar, we offered medicine to the land as a way to say “thank you, for doing this work together”. Opening this practice to the public in a welcoming way was an invitation into gentle witnessing and participation, allowed for all of us to sit with the earth/the work for a really long time in our own ways. I think it allowed us to all be together safely and to build more respect for all relations. Typically, indoor performances inside of an architectural space does not allow for this connection. 

devynn emory (left) and manny the mannequin (right), from the work deadbird photo by Reilly Horan

C.T.

Thank you. That was there's so many layers to everything you just said. There's something so beautiful about being able to use the space of making a work in a public, accessible space as a means of inherently operating outside of a thread of supposed subject-hood and object-hood. Oftentimes, as artists operating within institutions, there is this sort of notion or a more formal goal of being one who holds all of the energy in a space and to be viewed. It's important to, to break down those barriers, as you were saying, which has me considering your modes of operating within the digital space. 

I was looking through the deadbird site again today and came across the photographic representations of the grief altar can anyone help me hold this body, which I haven't really visited since April, and it instantly brought some tears to my eyes. There's something to be able to look at this past, but not back in time as it's grown since the last time I visited it. I was thinking of how having more permanent or long-term online installations can have a great window of potentiality. 

d.e.

Thank you. First, I want to comment on what you mentioned earlier around the kind of barrier that society places on the artist, and I'll take it further for myself as the healer archetype or as the nurse. One of the reasons I want to weave those practices together is because I want to debunk the myth that there is a hierarchy. Without dishonoring all of my teachers and all of the training and certifications I have, which I'm very grateful for... I want my performance, healing practices and nursing work to offer spaces where people can learn, re-learn and remember how to be with their inherent and innate skills in how to care for their body and another's body. We all have the ability to tap into knowledge and to offer back to the people instead of focusing on the hierarchy of the professional. How do we all de-center the expert while also honoring our callings and teachings, while re-centering our connections within our own vessels? 

The digital space has opened up a weave across lands and seas, cities and countries, via the common connection of having a body that decomposes, of loving other beings that decompose. 

My goal with all of my practices is to be able to talk about death before the moment that it arrives. Working in a digital way, has allowed me to continue to have those conversations outside of what we're calling “the work.” The performance work extends to many mycelium practices that I want to be offering and experiencing with others.

In this way, I feel really humbled by how deadbird, can anybody help me hold this body and the upcoming two shows of the trilogy (Cindy Sessions and boiling-rain) can continue without me always being present. 

I’m currently continuing to have my work tour without me because I both haven’t feel safe enough to travel, and I am also working full time on the front lines as a COVID nurse. Because the work is available online, people reach out to me often to show the work to universities, museums, and medical colleagues. 

The concept that my physical body laboring doesn't have to always be present has been very healing and restorative. That is what we're calling reparations, right? It's like, “Oh, I don't have to labor my body again and again! I've put so much labor into that, already. Thank you for valuing it, for understanding that I cannot be physically a nurse on the frontlines while I offer my work elsewhere…”. Becoming a COVID nurse in this time has changed my body's capacity dramatically.  I know if someone really wants to engage with the work, I literally no longer have the physical hours to be there. I want white lead institutions to consider my body’s exhaustion, and to support models of the work continuing without my constant physical labor. 

What I've learned out of all three of these practices of body is that I need to make sure that my body is also restored and recovered from all the giving and caretaking. 

The first work happened over five years, and I'm starting to soften into understanding that this trilogy is a teacher. It takes as long as it takes to build. It’s like letting your babies grow up, while practicing not being the owner or author all the time. 

C.T.

Would you like to share anything about boundary setting or different findings that we were mentioning including the solutions to artistic scarcity in your experience?

d.e.

It helps that this project, more than any before, has been resourced well, which has been a huge gift in my hxtory of scarcity, and within this time of scarcity for most. I’ve been full time since I was 11, and currently work a 60-80 hour work week to support my nursing school debt, my collaborators, and as a self imposed model to divest in depending on institutional funding in the case it may not arrive. I can’t have my creative practices be dependent on someone else. The recent supportive funding was also restorative and reparative however, and I was able to offer sliding scale tickets to each of the shows as it traveled, as well as a donation area to local Indigenous communities and organizations as it moved across Turtle Island. It feels good to ask, “What do you feel like you would like to offer?”  For this last project- If visiting the site, and watching this film is what you need to receive, and what you give back to me is gratitude and reflection, then that's exactly what is needed for the practice of exchange. 

This feels outside of anything that I've been taught within financial budgeting for a project, and how to move with an institution. I worked more intimately with the institutions, and we all broke down familiar production barriers for the work to thrive. I’m focusing on reparative ways to honor my work, while respecting models in place, and pushing open how to connect with folks who may not have the means to be with it. It’s for everyone.

I think that we're in a moment where folks are starting to wake up or starting to think about Indigenous peoples in the arts, and I have the rainbow feelings around it, ranging from joy to protection of my energy and my spirit. My work is very vulnerable as it mostly reflects my personal life experiences. Indigenous work is already hard to critique, given the critics that are out there, and the lenses that they may not have on how to comment on the work. To make an offering I want to be in relation with those who are a part of it. 

When I’m invited to lecture or offer workshops about the expansions/branches of the work I’m grateful to hear, “We value the work outside of just the actual product,” and we value all of the practices you are bringing outside of performance. I’m questioning however, what it means to be in constant iterations of something? I have a lot of questions about how to put a price tag on that. I have conflict around the balance of self value and releasing value as we all work in capitalism. I feel both stuck in it and alive in the edges of it.  

This opens a tension around letting go of control, and also it opens generative conversations of building trust, so that the work can be held with or without me. It insists on conversations of my work being respected in the right way, valued in the right way. I don't have any concrete answers, I'm kind of finding this as I go, fumbling through obstacles, pushing against barriers and letting go when I must. I never intended this work to be so ongoing, but it's clear that it's a teacher to me, because it’s steady by my side. So I’m listening and learning with it.

C.T.

I don't know that there are answers ultimately, but what I hear is consideration, or a request for consideration. Ultimately, a lot of people have a lot of good ideas, including myself, and we don't always have the best ways to create a reciprocal language in sharing those; for lack of a better word, holistic frameworks, or as you mentioned, looking at death before it happens; a circular way of living. These modes are very outside of settler artist ‘contracts’.

This also seems to relate to what you're talking about with your own classical training and seeing what serves and what fits and what can be shared. That kind of conversational tension in shedding layers and going through your own processes of being taught, from the work that you're making. What do you feel this is bringing to you in terms of agency or freedom? Or what is sort of the weight you're finding off to the sides, and what's growing from that? 

d.e.

I’m learning how long something actually takes, when I let it. The second part of the trilogy I’m working on is around grandmother wisdom, so I'm moving through conversations of my two grandmothers who have passed in COVID, as well as collecting stories from grandmothers that have come across my path, and grandmothers…they are on their own timeline! 

I’m learning my work can’t always be framed. Yet, I have these deadlines, yet I have these shows, and so like you said, I have to find the weight on the sides. The weight is allowing the process to be where it’s at. This part is scary… I just have to completely surrender, letting go of the pressure of the product that we are trained to feel in contemporary training. I’m with three grandmother stories, and will be sharing them where they are, because when I listen… the stories will continue outside of the shows, I already feel it. 

I want to move away from the sensation of resistance, and move within the sensation of respect of what the work is asking of me. I'll practice surrender with whatever stage it needs to be in. 

May we all unlearn frameworks that don’t suit in a moment so that we may be in the gift of listening. Sometimes things are clear, direct, formulaic and fast and sometimes they are raw and vibrating, uncontainable, alive with unfurling story.

C.T.

That is really beautiful. I love this process space as well, often it's the most most fruitful part of the work, where the actual conversation happens. 

d.e.

I want to be with it instead of the decision maker of it, you know? I must be with my practices in an honest and respectful way because this is often a reflection of my own lifeways. In staying vibrational and curious, it respects everybody who chooses to be with the work with me in the lessons it offers.

devynn emory (left) and mannequin (right), from the work Cindy Sessions