Songs for the Crossing

Songs for The Crossing is a series of transgender campfire stories, uncanny tales and incantations to entertain us while we explore lawless genders, speculative fantasies, and the virtual outback between fixed bodily states. In each manifestation of this performance, I collaborate with musicians and DJs to co-develop storytelling soundscapes.

At the release show of Slowfoam’s album Transcorporeal Portal on 12.04.2024, Pablo Diserens and I crafted the most recent incarnation of Songs for the Crossing, a dialogue between my live reading of both original and selected works and Pablo’s field recording and musical stylings on the daxophone.

Photography by Lizzie Urquhart, 12.04.2024 at 90mil

Excerpt (Introduction):

“When I started microdosing testosterone eighteen months ago, I began to see an intangible terrain stretching before me, superimposed onto every moment of my daily routine. This alternate space, I learned, is the wilderness that lies beyond lawful genders; its climate is jungle, tundra, and deep sea trench. Its surface shifts between soft and silty bog and volcanic rock.

Pablo gave me a book, An Apartment on Uranus, by Paul B. Preciado, who writes on transgender experience. In the introduction, Paul shares his ‘chronicles of the crossing,’ the retrospective of his time in gender liminality. 

Tonight, we offer you not chronicles of the crossing, but rather ‘songs for the crossing,’ words to be shared around a campfire at night, in this outback between fixed bodily states. These are tales and incantations to entertain us while we trek the unknowable. The crossing has no destination. The crossing is both evolutionary and degenerate. As permanent residents of the gender wilderness, we lead you on an expedition tonight that winds from the inside outwards, and back inwards again. This dive into the crossing is dedicated to those who know: you can’t unring a bell.”

Borrowed works (in order of utterance):

Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Basalt” in Buffalo Gals, 1987.

Orion J. Facey, “The Bog and Its Rigs,” 2022.

Derek Jarman, Blue: Text of a Film, 1994.

Wikipedia page, “Close Encounters,” accessed 06.04.2024.

Christian Bök, “Ubu Hubbub” in The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, 1998.

Jadzia Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, S2.E17: Playing God, 1994.