Jump : time travel, resistance, and healing in devised work and performance by queers of color

This dissertation argues that queer people of color (QPOC) performers and theatre artists create ruptures of temporal pockets—jumps—that can only be described as time travel. Through performance analysis, artist interviews, auto-ethnography, and practice-as-research, I delineate how QPOC artists draw on our personal histories of resistance to prophesize the future, commune with ancestors, and embody simultaneous and layered temporalities. The dissertation begins with analysis of two process-oriented solo works by Allison Akootchook “Aku” Warden, a Iñupiaq/Native Alaskan artist, and collaborative works initiated by Anna Luisa Petrisko, a Filipino American artist/director. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the devising process and performances of two full-length shows, The Mikado: Reclaimed and Scheherazade, which I directed for my own theatre troupe, Generic Ensemble Company. QPOC not only learn from the past and imagine a new future, we physically inhabit those pasts and futures defying traditional notions of time via prophetic divination, ancestral communion, and healing trauma through resistive creative acts. Through the direct, honest, and painstaking confrontation with histories of violence through devised theater and performance, QPOC artists employ resistive healing strategies that invite temporal jumps and enact utopic futures.