Writing Workshop: we fly and we are made

Season Butler leads a workshop open to artists of any discipline interested in performative writing.

Through pink dust clouds we—time—fly and are made. Collecting fragment after fragment, atom after atom. Drifting in soft spirals, gathering into gentle storms of dust and magnets. We fly and we are made. Assimilating pre-matter into our present bodies. Bodies of light matter. We—the mess—begin. - Black Holes, 2018 

As part of ongoing, multi-stranded project Black Holes, dance artists Seke Chimutengwende and Alexandrina Hemsley have been chatting, dancing, writing and holding different spaces around embodied, speculative fiction(s). Interested in situating their bodies inside shifting, imaginary and choreographic landscapes, the pair connect their work to afrofuturism as a way to touch on hopeful possibilities as well as confronting the harshness of present dystopias.  

For their stage show, Chimutengwende and Hemsley have been writing the text with support from artist Season Butler. As part of opening up their process, they invite you to a creative writing workshop led by Butler. 

The workshop is a mixture of individual writing exercises and group discussion to explore re-telling origin stories and creating future mythologies. Together we uncover and situate lived experience within science fiction, looping the personal with the mythic.  

Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and activist. Her writing, research and performance practice centre around intersectionality and narratives of otherness, isolation and the end of the world. Along with the core members of the I'm With You collective, she uses performance to interrogate how we gesture toward an unruly future in an age of failed predictions. Her first novel, Cygnet, is published by Little, Brown in November 2018.