Vulnerable practice: thinking through discomfort and precarity in Project O’s Voodoo (2017)

This chapter engages with Voodoo, a durational performance-ritual by UK-based independent dance artists Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small, working collaboratively as Project O. In interrogating this work, Perazzo wishes to think through performance practices that foreground vulnerability in their modalities of engagement with normative frameworks and knowledges. Invoking Julietta Singh’s decolonial deconstruction of the notion of mastery, she considers the positions from which and the modalities through which dance may be able to engage with discomfort and intervene in precarity.

In performance theory, precarity is at the centre of compelling theorisations – from Randy Martin’s to Bojana Kunst’s – of the potential of performance and dance to be mobilised to propose a different understanding of the precarious nature of the present. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who acknowledges precarity as ‘the condition of our time’, writes that ‘precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others’. Taking as a starting point the author’s experience of the work of Project O, she asks: what possibilities can be created through vulnerability? How might it be possible to think of fragility and discomfort not as expressions of a failure to transform precarious conditions, but as a way of envisioning alternative modalities of being in the world? In dialogue with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ conceptualisation of the ‘epistemologies of the South’ and their role in envisaging ‘alternatives’, as well as with other decolonial, feminist, posthumanist and critical theorists who advocate for ways of unthinking and unlearning dominant modes of understanding and conceptualising the world, she argues that Project O’s Voodoo invites the audience to an experience of vulnerable acceptance, which has the potential to become a form of resistance and intervention.