LINDSAY EALES
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Research-Creation

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photo from mad home
Tactile Twisted Cripster (2019)
with Bojana Coklyat and Danielle Peers
Crip Mad interactive performance installation
Part of Crip Imponderabilia - Exhibition - New York University

http://cripimponderabilia.com/tactile-twisted-cripster/
“Tactile Twisted Cripster” is a collaborative endeavor to think disability and Mad barriers, access, and play together in the form of an interactive movement-based version of the classic game Twister. This interactive installation brings together a tactile Twister mat developed by Bojana Coklyat, with Lindsay Eales and Danielle Peers’ concept of “Twisted Cripster,” which mobilizes Twister as metaphor for the contortions that disabled and Mad artists are often forced to undertake when trying to develop a career in the arts. Through this collaborative melding of these works, the three artists amplified their versions of the game to include a three-dimensional playing space, as well as a tactile spinner board. Our intention is create a fun, accessible and interactive way to think and move through some of the barriers that disabled and Mad Artists face while pursuing a career in the arts. We also hope the game shows how interdependence and collaboration are two strategies that make the journey more survivable and playful!
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Inclinations (2018)
with Danielle Peers, Alice Sheppard, and Lisa Neidermeyer
Dance-on-video. Canada: Disability Dance Works. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and distributed by VTape. Festivals screenings in Edmonton, AB; Vancouver, BC; Toronto, ON; Halifax, NS; Austin, TX; Chicago, IL: San Fransisco, CA; Washington, DC.
​Festival Honors (Official Selections): Superfest International Disability Film Festival; Northwestfest; Experimental, Dance & Music Film Festival; F-O-R-M Festival of Recorded Movement.
​Featured on Alaskan Airlines
Role: process doula, production assistant, choreographic support, research-creationist
In this project we asked how a ramp wide enough for multiple wheelchair users—at the entrance of a university’s “Social Street”—can enable novel movement aesthetics, methodologies, and pleasures: new ways of embodying and enacting accessible architecture. It mobilizes the embodied presence and capacities of four disabled dancers of diverse racial and gendered identities who use wheelchairs, researching what becomes possible when this existence and co-existence is choreographed into movement spaces. A key research question was methodological: how can we fully embed intersectional disability justice (Berne, 2015) not only as a theoretical lens, but also as a methodological imperative? As iterative, co-constructed research-creation projects often do, the resulting dance on (ramp-on-wheels-on) film evolved to engage a broad range of themes, including intersectionality, eugenics, ableism, racism, queer desire, crip community, disability aesthetics, and the beauty and generativity of the disabled moving body.
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Mad Home (2017)
with dales laing, Alexis, Sarah Hamill, and Nathan Fawaz
Mad Interactive Performance Art and Installation
Edmonton, AB
Online artifact - www.madhomeproject.weebly.com
Text-based artifact - PhD dissertation chapter 4 - https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-hk8v-9m36
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This cycle is one of making Mad homes, in our bodies and our worlds.
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It is one of holding our trauma and darkness and sharp edges gently, preciously, because it is the sand and layers upon layers of nacre that make the pearl. It is one of calling us in, to new relations with madness, trauma, anti-pathologization, multiplicity, artful living, participatory connection, and invitatory engagement. It is one of shaping spaces, of making space.

My dear friend Nathan, a collaborator on one of these episodes and one of the guardians of this cycle, asked me this: “Did you know that those physics people have found evidence of life in the vacuum of black holes in outer space? Of course you did.” This work is made of this same stardust. It is the flickering life in the vacuum of a star’s death,
the ‘you belong here, even when you don’t feel you belong elsewhere,’
making spaces for survival and flourishing (which includes spaces for dying, or wanting to die, knowing death and life are not so far apart). 
This cycle is also, above all, a love story. A love story to myself, and to my communities, and to all of the thinkers and makers and doers that have come before, are here now, and will join in the future.

Perhaps you will find a home or two here as well. Welcome.
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STAY MAD is finger painted on the wall with hundreds of finger strokes encircling it. This invitation hangs above dark blue/black wings and hand prints, swirls, clouds, squiggles in six different shades of deep dark blue. The words
A hand holds a sensory jar, filled with pink liquid. The bottom of the jar is layered with sparkles. A toy dinosaur buries its head in the sparkly sand
three dinosaurs ride on top of one another next to black and white butterflies on top of bell hooks'
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Onions, cinnamon, apples, and garlic lay on a wooden cutting board. Above, Alexis' stump is covered in chocolate sauce that she mixed in Lindsay's upturned hand. Lindsay's wrist tattoo is visible, and it reads
Loose Leaf (2015-present)
Multi-episode multidisciplinary performance art
Choreographed/composed/edited/performed by Lindsay Eales
Performance art episodes - performed in Canmore, AB; Montreal, QC; Bogota, Columbia
Performative writing episode - 
https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v5i3.297
Text-based episode - PhD dissertation chapter 3 - 
​https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-hk8v-9m36

I began my research exploration of madness and performance by creating an autoethnography.
Pause. Let the cursor blink.
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This singular, tidy, chronological sentence doesn’t do it.
The iterative (think: episodes, cycles).
The reflective (think: mirrors, prisms, crystals, shiny things, my face in a handful of marbles).
The multiple (think: personalities, subjectivities, stories, repetitions, perseverations, representations, personas).
The overlapping (think: temporalities, voices, skins).
The interwoven (think: warp and weft weave together a new being, different from each individual string).
The mosaic (think: fragments, shards, collage, the bricoleur, scratchy grout that rubs hands raw).
The contextual (think: who am I calling into this dialogic relationality? reader, listener, witness, accomplice, fellow human, being Mad: who am I to me next to you? What does this space, time, relationship allow?)
The conflicting (think: desires, intentions, effects, the I’s I want and the I’s I don’t, constructing new pasts, dismantling old futures).
The process-product-process-product-process-product-process-and-so-it-goes-until-they-are-the-same-but-not.
Dried glue peeled off my hand that takes my million skin cells with it.
And so, this work is more than one. It is a series of Mad episodes in a cycle.
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photo credit: Laurence Parent
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Swallowed the Fly (2014)
Mad Dance/Performance Art
Choreographed and performed by Lindsay Eales
Performed in Edmonton, AB; Calgary, AB; Montreal, QC.
​Earlier version commissioned by Stage Left Productions
​Funded in part by the Edmonton Art Council
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      There once was a woman who swallowed a fly
   I don’t know why she swallowed the fly
Perhaps she’ll die
from the anti-epileptics
   for the depression
      from cutting the meds
         due to the seizures
            from the anti-psychotics
      which required anti-histamines
                  for the throat swelling
               throughout the hypomania
            from the wrongly prescribed steroids
                                             for the allergic reaction
                                                from the anti-psychotics
                                                   or the hypomania
                                                      and the convulsions
                                                   from the anti-depressants
                                                                              for the depression
                                                      caused by the lack of serotonin
                                                 caused by the childhood trauma
                                            caused by the father complex
                                  caused by the phlegm and liver Qi stagnation
                              caused by the moral turpitude
                         caused by the processed foods
                    caused by the sedentary lifestyle
               caused by the poverty       
​      She swallowed the spider to catch the fly
   
I dunno why she swallowed a fly
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Perhaps she’ll die
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photo credit: Magda Olszanowski
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photo credit: Magda Olszanowski
#IAMCHAIR (2014)
with Encuentro’s Disability and Performance Working Group - convened by Arseli Dokumaci and Kim Sawchuk; and with co-creators Barak adé Soleil, Danielle Peers, Laurence Parent, Ashley McAskill, Kelsie Acton, Carola García López, Heather Vrana, Janet Gibson, Jennifer Jimenez,  Margaret Ames, Maria Schirmer, Stephen Sillett, Véro Leduc, Yvonne Schmidt, Kody Rogers Hall, Tamar Tembeck, Faye Ginsberg
collaborative multidisciplinary disability performance art protest/intervention (including stair crawl protest, elevator fund, manifesto with demands for conference organizers, interactive performance installation)
Performed at Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro Performance and Politics 2014 Conference, Montreal, QC. 
hemisphericinstitute.org/en/enc14-manifestos/item/2597-iamchair.html

hemisphericinstitute.org/en/enc14-manifestos/item/2600-manifestations-performing-disability-work-group-statement.html
https://sw-ke.facebook.com/hashtag/iamchair?source=feed_text&epa=HASHTAG​

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photo credit: Laura Blüer
​Also discussed in Chapman, O., & Sawchuk, K. (2015). Creation-as-research: Critical making in complex environments. Review d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review, 40(1), 49-52. https://doi.org/10.7202/1032753ar
Other-wise (2013) 
with Danielle Peers
Dance-based video poetry on crip/Mad/queer identities, experiences, movement, and relationships.
Audio described by Joshua St. Pierre
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One of four movement-based vignettes collectively named inter-relationcrips, commissioned by Stage Left Productions.
Special thanks to Markus Alexander.

 Arts-Based Research Outputs

Moving To Breathe (2018)
English promo video describing our major learnings from the Moving to Breathe, Breathing to Move dance and choir research project. Funded by Muscular Dystrophy Canada and Mitacs.
Role: Occupational therapy, program design, and arts-based research consultant 
​​(Dis)quiet in the Peanut Gallery (2013)
Video of a performance ethnography about practicing and performing social justice through integrated dance.
In collaboration with Alex Sutherland, Alison Neuman, Anna Schuurman, Claire Casavant, Ian Gordon, Iris Dykes, Kasia Niewinska, Kaylee Gloeckler, Kelsie Acton, Laurel Sublime, Lindsay Eales and Roxanne Ulanicki. Original music by Jermaine Curtis
Videography by Danielle Peers
Editing by Lindsay Eales
Conducted in partial fulfillment of Lindsay Eales' Masters' of Arts degree.
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