performing mfa
content/trigger warnings: discussions of capitalism, pandemics (COVID-19, mpox), and surveillance, references to war, climate change, displacement, psychosis, self-harm, and genocide
introduction
The pandemic, as we refer to it, is a misnomer, just as the great war was a misnomer even before we referred to it as World War I.
The pandemic is one pandemic of many that preceded it. It is one pandemic of many that it precedes.
As pandemics increase—have increased—in quantity and magnitude, so have and will other so-called global events: world wars, climate catastrophes, mass displacements, genocides. These are all, of course, interrelated and inextricable from one another, because every event is a global event, even if the atomization of academic disciplines keep the people who are supposed to make those determinations from drawing this conclusion so confidently.
Another form of atomization will accelerate simultaneously—the kind we euphemize with phrases like remote work, work from home, live-work space, low-residency program, hybrid participation, telehealth, teleconference, group chat, chat room, forum, Zoom call, FaceTime, metaverse, and virtual reality.
The next iteration we might refer to as no-residency. Maybe we'll take an old word and transform it: homework or lurk might indicate the labor of a future in which the office building is obsolete.
Your apartment or house will be owned piecemeal: by a landlord with dominion over kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms, and a separate stakeholder who owns the room(s) in which labor is performed. New arrangements of power and resources will ensure you're in the space when expected, that you perform the labor as expected (doorframes as presence sensors, windows with cameras built into the glass, a desk that auto-logs keystrokes and mouse activity—who knows).
You might be connected to coworkers virtually, but with telecommunications infrastructures strained, most likely you'll work alone. More likely you'll replace your coworkers altogether, each individual required to function as a team: your employer will want proof you can adopt the perspectives of a diverse group of people, and demand that the interchange of ideas between them be made concrete, and so each day your Slack or Teams chat will just be you, talking to yourself, using six or ten or twelve personas, each of which will need to have a distinct personality and thus unique point of view on the work at hand.
It sounds lonely, or maybe disorienting, but voice changers and virtual avatars will help you keep track of who you are at any given moment. If you're really good at your job, you'll be a company of hundreds or thousands, all operating out of the same room, from within the same body.
Eventually, these norms will expand outwardly from the corporate sphere into the arts. I might argue it already has—that corporations will cop this schismatic self from a realm in which containing multitudes and improvising psychosis is already relatively commonplace.
Whether the chicken or egg came first is irrelevant.
All roads lead here.
performing mfa is an experiment, but above all else, a performance. For the next twelve months—on this piece of virtual land called "riveraerica.com," tied to a piece of physical space in a city called "Los Angeles"—I will perform the work of an MFA in Creative Writing. I select a Hybrid concentration, which means I will study, write, and workshop pieces of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, along with maybe some works that straddle genres, in the spirit of the experiment as a whole.
Winter is application season, so in November and December, I will perform the process of applying to these programs, as well as that of applying for the scholarships and aid that would allow me to pay my way through, though technically I will determine the program's cost and can tell you now that I will receive full funding to attend.
In January, I'll accept myself into this program of my own design. I'll skip the part where I'd wait seven months for it to start, so soon after, I will settle into a virtual classroom of about ten or twenty students, each one played by me.
Over the months that follow, I'll perform the act of reading books and poems and short stories and essays; I'll perform the work of the workshop, reading and critiquing the writing of "others," as well as my own; I'll perform the act of attending office hours to discuss my progress, asking faculty for advice on pre- and post-graduate life; I'll even perform the labor of building community with people in my program and institution, which are comprised wholly and solely of me. We'll build organizations, host readings, found literary journals, form cliques and private writing groups, protest complicities, go on spring and summer breaks, and have our hearts bent and broken by the weight of institutional demands.
By our and we'll, I mean my and I'll.
I am uncertain about the efficacy of performance-as-prefiguration, whether the process of embodying a speculative fiction can help prepare someone for its realization, or even allow the performer(s) to actively manifest it. Whether it can provide helpful tools for use when the future comes to town. This may be because to anticipate something is to miss that it's already happening, already happened. That the performer is actively absent from reality because they have been consumed by the performance. If, prior to the pandemic, someone had considered something like depression or anxiety a communicable disease and acted accordingly, they would have been more prepared for the pandemic than if they had simply play-acted what they would do once the pandemic did occur. They and their fellow performers would have established real care networks for real conditions already affecting them, rather than scheduling the care for a later date. This is probably the difference between networks of mutual aid and so-called theater of the oppressed.
Then again, even the work people undertook after the pandemic unfolded didn't necessarily prepare, for example, LGBTQ+ communities for the spread of mpox (except for maybe the increased ubiquity of Personal Protective Equipment, and the marginal destigmatization of terms like incubation period, viral load, and quarantine).
If this project is worthy of undertaking, it's because performing something offers the performer a small bit of emotional distance that experiencing something can't. That slight distance, lived under the guise of a performance, may somehow turn out to be useful.
Maybe if I subject myself to a trauma I design, and make that subjection public, someone—maybe me—will come to know something.
Maybe this is just a roundabout route to self-harm.
Maybe this is the heart of performance/art itself.
—Erica Rivera, November 10, 2023
inspirations
improvisation scares some musicians, i think, because how can they possibly know what to play next if they don't have the sheet music dictating, sitting right in front of them? improvisation isn't about knowing what to play next. it's about being so in sync with the people and world and music around, there's only one note you can possibly play next. it's not about making it up as you go, it's about being so clairvoyant the next note comes to you as though a vision.
when a musician makes a mistake in the process of improvisation, who can really tell? well, the musician, of course, and their fellow musicians, and if you listen closely, you can tell too, because your body will react before your words do, and if we can love our bodies enough to hear their pains and their pleasures, we can notice the mistakes we inevitably make, and then hear ourselves play different and better notes, bringing the band back together into some kind of harmony.
Embedded YouTube player for Folding Ideas's video essay titled "I Can't Stop Watching Contagion," in which the creator, an older white man with glasses, lies dead-eyed on a plaid couch while projected onto him are clips from the film Contagion and news footage about the pandemic; his voiceover explains that, since the dawn of the pandemic, he has been unable to do much other than watch and rewatch the film Contagion, as an attempt to emotionally inoculate himself to an uncertain future, particularly the narrativeless or unpoetic aspects of pandemics that deny easy meaning-making or closure, which he argues that the film Contagion captures well through its hyperrealistic presentation of mass death and social deterioration
— "I Can't Stop Watching Contagion," Folding Ideas
Link to main website for Lauren Lee McCarthy's performance piece titled "LAUREN," in which the artist, a younger Asian American woman, replaces the role of a virtual assistant for a collection of strangers, who agree to give her access to large parts of their personal lives in exchange for her being on-call to remotely perform a variety of sensitive, household tasks; on the website, a fisheye lens portrays the artist as overseer and depicts a montage of participants moving around their homes, conducting a variety of personal tasks; an array of small clickable spheres at the bottom lets you pan around three-dimensional photographs of participants in their homes
— "LAUREN," Lauren Lee McCarthy
@philipglassmusic 1.26.24 Philip Glass Solo Philip Glass performs beloved works for piano, from his home studio and personal piano, on an intimate new record coming January 26, 2024. Pre-order link in bio
♬ original sound - Philip Glass
Embedded TikTok player for a video of Philip Glass, an older white man with glasses, playing the song "Opening" from his album titled Glassworks on an aged black piano in his home, in front of a wall covered in photographs and other pieces of art, as well as a stool with a pump bottle of hand sanitizer, next to a desk on top of which are a stack of sheet music, a cup of writing instruments, and a box of tissues; the caption reads, "1.26.24 Philip Glass Solo Philip Glass performs beloved works for piano, from his home studio and personal piano, on an intimate new record coming January 26, 2024. Pre-order link in bio"
— "1.26.24 Philip Glass performs beloved works for piano...," Philip Glass
— the déjà vu: black dreams and black time, Gabrielle Civil
The early history of prefigurative politics, extending back to at least the Russian soviets of the early twentieth century or even the Paris Commune of 1871, was firmly grounded in counter-institutions that sought to bring existing social and economic institutions under popular control or create new institutions to supplant existing undemocratic institutions. This meant democratically managed factories, schools, health clinics, and living spaces. Later, with the New Left, prefigurative politics came to incorporate an emphasis on developing a “beloved community” among movement participants. This was based on the idea that transforming social relations was a necessary precondition for broader structural transformation. Wini Breines argues that the novelty of the New Left was precisely its attempt to accomplish both of these goals simultaneously. But as she describes it, tensions emerged between these two elements and it became a primary fault line that ultimately undid organizations like Students for a Democratic Society. Since then, much contemporary prefigurative politics has focused on perfecting democratic processes within movements, moving even further away from counter-institution. In part because of this shift, advocates of prefigurative politics from the New Left to Occupy have been subject to the critique that such a politics is incapable of achieving larger structural transformation. It is seen as excessively focused on internal relationships among participants, and as such ineffective at both outward-facing movement-building and executing a broader strategy to transform existing institutions.
So, before BHQFU stops meaning “THE SHIT PILE BEFORE US” and starts meaning “someone else will fix it,” let’s take down the sign. BHQFU is dead. There’s no space, no classes, no faculty, no students, no staff, no president, no plan. All that remains is a problem. It’s my problem, Bruce’s problem, and it’s yours if you want it.
— "Broken Toilet: BHQFU is Dead," Seth Cameron
performances
I'll keep a running list of links to the performances on this page below, and later, duplicated at the top.
performing mfa
Creative nonfiction, essay
Introduction to performing mfa
Performed November 10, 2023
Available to read on my website
statement of plans
Creative nonfiction, essay
Application supplement
Performed November 14, 2023
Available to read at Osmosis Press
critical analysis
Series of 16 poems
Application supplement
Performed December 28, 2023
Available to read on my website
optional scholarship application
Mixed media, series of three images with image descriptions
Financial aid request
Performed December 31, 2023
congratulations!
Creative nonfiction, essay
Acceptance letter
To be performed