Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper explores the opportunities, challenges, and ethics of “re-performing” or re-enacting intimate memories through virtual reality (VR) performance, using queer multidisciplinary artist Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close (National Theatre London 2019; Soulpepper Theatre 2020) and my own “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries” (2023) as case studies. Draw Me Close is a 1:1 VR performance in which the artist’s childhood memories, experiences, and interactions with his mother are reconstructed in the wake of her passing. Bringing audiences into the world of the “shifting” (Chen 2012) archive, we inhabit Jordan’s reconstructed virtual world from his early explorations of queer sexuality through to his mother’s cancer diagnosis and passing. Following Chen (2012) and Schneider (2016), this paper will explore how the world of Draw Me Close represents a “touching” and-or “queering” of time within its archive, blurring and transgressing the boundaries between the animate-inanimate. On a theoretical level, considering foundational queer performance and archival scholarship (Phelan 1993; Munoz 1996, Taylor 2003), it will also examine how performance’s ephemerality rewards its artists the dual advantages of visibility and protection, allowing for an ethical exploration of traumatic memory and loss within a transient medium. Finally, this provocation introduces a research-creation project of my own, entitled “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries”, which draws from the aforementioned theory-into-praxis to design a surrealistic VR collage which brings together formative queer spaces, objects, and writings from my adolescence into adulthood. By taking up VR as queer and performative, these projects reveal how reconstructing intimate memory is itself a performative act.