Endurance, grief, and collective power drive The Exact Right Amount of Force, a performance finale that runs from 7:10 – 7:40 pm on Friday, Oct. 4 in Ruffin Gallery.
This performance marks the closing of the exhibition The Threat, The, by the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (Conrad Cheung, Assistant Professor of Art). Just as the exhibition seeks to rewrite the possibilities of defensive and repressive architectures, this performance seeks to imagine new afterlives for the apparatus of state violence.
Following Audre Lorde's warning that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," this performance seeks to queer and reconfigure those tools left behind by empire’s abandoned projects. Performers' bodies discover how a riot helmet might become an object of play, a fascist’s bunker might be coopted as a musical instrument, or a serpentine wall designed to conceal and restrain enslaved laborers might be transformed into an agent of respite.
This performance features Strings Applewood, Rachel Austin, Ben Cunningham, Piera Goldstein-Yerkes, Alma Rayen, and Jess Robbins, with a live score by Sugarlift (Adrian Wood).