Tocka
I have struggled with the symptoms and diagnosis of hypothyroidism and Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. The struggles to find a diagnosis and for my pain to be recognized as real has driven me to seek catharsis through creative expression. I aim to represent the frustrating, tense cycle of illness and pain for myself and other women who experience this.
Tocka (toe-shka) is a multidisciplinary piece of performance art comprised of video projection, guided meditation, dance improvisation, and choreography. I generated the piece through improvisation, experimental noise music, and text written by myself and fellow women who suffer with chronic illnesses. The piece uses cycles of repeating choreography, breathwork, and video to slowly build tension that mirrors the stress and discomfort that comes with the cyclical nature of chronic illness.
Tocka is currently a work in progress, with each showing throughout the process being open and free for audiences and live-streamed and posted our social media channels. The process of creation for this project is still in progress and may always be, beginning with its conception in August of 2019.
With this piece, myself and my collaborators hope to answer questions for ourselves and raise questions for the audience regarding how we view women's pain, how women's pain is treated in the medical world, and how we as creators and performers create and hold experiencers of the project in the visceral feelings of tension and uncomfortability of being in the emotional space of the women who are in this situation.
Updates on the project:
2024: This project is not in the forefront for me currently, but I have hopes to return to it in a big, multi-platform, multi-media reshaping.
2020: In our current iteration of the project, I have restructured the entire performance and story to be more personal to me. It was become a duo performance — myself (Kenwyn) as the speaker and mover, with Aidan Hadley playing the role of a silent watcher, musician and technology wrangler. Once the world is safe (enough), we will be presenting a workshop series in conjunction with the performance.
Dec 2019: Presented at Rowan University. We have decided to cut most of the spoken text. We used this text to influence and create our movement, but feel as though the work has a more powerful voice without our physical voices in most of the scenes.
We are currently looking for more collaborators and artists who are passionate about the subject matter to join us for our next phase of workshops and research.
Check out the videos below for more information and the Upcoming Projects page to find our upcoming work-in-progress showings as well as performance dates as they are announced.
Tocka second working draft performed as Kenwyn’s Senior Thesis at Rowan University 12.14.19 at 7pm (HD video coming soon)
Tocka first draft presented as a part of Free Fringe Philly at pilot+projects Gallery September 22 at 4pm
Current collaborators:
Past collaborators:
Aidan Hadley (pilot+projects gallery; Rowan University)
Gina Williams (pilot+projects gallery; Rowan University)
Faith Lynn Diccion (Rowan University)
Dana Capanna (pilot+projects gallery)
Explorations of a Clown…
Quarantine sucks. Clowns could make it fun?
“Explorations of a Clown in Quarantine” is an IGTV series conceived by Aidan Hadley through a film photography project.
As a clown experiences cycles of death and rebirth, we face our own fears and uncertainties about death and what comes next. This pandemic and social justice crisis have ended countless lives a day, and for many, this has been a source of outrage and heartbreak or has desensitized them to death. The truth is, we will all die, but with that inevitable truth comes the uncertainty of what lies ahead…
With this piece, myself and my collaborators hope to answer questions for ourselves and raise questions for the audience regarding how we view death and the afterlife and attempt to reconcile with our un-knowing.
Check out the IG below for more information.
VISIBILITYtalks
As an artist and media maker with chronic illnesses and chronic pain, I want to center the stories of my community who experience chronic pain and disabilities while actively working across the live arts in dance and performance. I produced, in collaboration with the showcased artists, a monthly video piece highlighting an artist working across disability and performance in the Philadelphia area. These videos were shot, produced, edited, and fully controlled by myself and the artists at varying degrees, with thINKingDANCE, an online journal dedicated to Philadelphia-based performing arts with whom I have a working relationship, allowing me to use their social media and website to host the project, an online equivalent to a theatre or performance space an artist uses for showings or productions.
This project has received a Leeway Foundation Art & Change Grant for $2,500.