Flounder: Against the Tide, 2024
The work started off with a simple aim: make whiteness absurd and undermine its neutrality.
The real is always contingent and relative, and we can see this dynamic across theatre aesthetics and in the kinds of movement that emerge in working‑class areas such as care homes, last‑provision schools, and un‑rehearsed bodily practices that resemble shamanic labour. My body will never move with scripted polish; the damage is permanent. None of that dancing could afford a middle‑class aesthetic. Rather than treating this as a “with” or “without” - a deficit - I understood it as a liberation. Words not yet spoken for. And the potential to challenge whiteness, which gains its power from its invisibility -- as Richard Dyer reminds us -- and its neutrality, as Nirmal Puwar argues, its refinery, control, dominance, among other things. Painter shows us how whiteness was historically crafted as the site of purity and bodily discipline, a kind of aesthetic hygiene. I did not move in this way...I could not afford to. My working-classness ruptured the theatrics. I witnessed this most clearly in my latest iteration of Flounder: Against The Tide (2024). It challenged Lacanian theory, particularly the mirror stage, where the mirrored figure is traditionally understood as an ego formation. In my work, the mirrored clown was not an ego but my inner being. Ego, as Lacan describes, is the subject we cling to for coherence. What emerged instead was feral — an alchemy that breaks the theatrical contract. A fugitive formation, an expression that surfaces when whiteness’s aesthetic regime collapses.
I expressed this collapse by superseding the theatrical, letting image and presence fall out of alignment. The sound followed suit. Instead of the expected Tchaikovsky, I spliced Mozart and Chopin abruptly, fracturing the internal logic of classical music. Dr. Liz Swift articulated the dissonance clearly: “I was expecting one thing and got another — I was expecting Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, then received Mozart, then suddenly Chopin. Was that intentional?”
"Absolutely, the edit had been created prior, and it was the one element that was not produced live. I edited it so that between the birth story the classical music weaves in and out of dimension, then once the listener believes that coherence is starting to form, it splinters off into another direction. That slipperiness was intentional.” I created it through the editing, figuring out how an active live body would also simultaneously shift the visual and affective field. I wanted to see if I could destabilise the sonic architecture that props up theatrical appearance, and from feedback it seemed to be effective.
The audience were able to enter and exit at any time, which mattered. It meant there was no fixed beginning, no privileged point of entry. Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome as a structure without hierarchy, without a single root, without a doorway that determines how you should move through it. Flounder: Against the Tide, 2024 operated in that same way. Viewers could encounter the work at any node — the clown, the birth story, the sonic rupture, the misaligned image — and each point functioned as a legitimate starting/exist place. No single anchor in the piece. It moved sideways, diagonally, unpredictably. The clown, the birth story, the sonic fractures, the panting body: none of them behaved like a trunk. They surfaced as shoots, brief intensities that linked, broke apart, and re‑formed in the moment. The audience’s movement through the work wasn’t outside the structure; it evolved it. Their drifting and unpredictable entry and exit became part of the rhizome.
I explained earlier that it's an encounter; you can arrive at any time, but you can also leave at any time. For me, it was not theatre. My body quivered, cried, and panted as I, too, lost grip of the clown.
The performance became rhizomatic because it didn’t ask the audience to follow a path. It asked them to inhabit a field, one where no dictatorial need for understanding existed; understanding was conceived on one's own terms.
Meaning didn’t accumulate through narrative or coherence; it emerged through proximity, collision, spill, drift. Each splice in the music created a new line of flight. Each visual misalignment opened another route. Each shift in presence destabilised the previous one. The work kept multiplying its own logic, refusing to settle.
Reinventing the Rhizome
Instead of a philosophical rhizome that exists on the page, I created a live rhizome that operates through body, sound, and affect. A rhizome that doesn’t just describe multiplicity but enacts it. A rhizome that doesn’t rely on metaphor but on the instability of whiteness’s aesthetic regime. When that regime collapses, what emerges is not chaos but a horizontal spread - a fugitive, feral network of relations that cannot be disciplined back into theatrical coherence.
The audience’s ability to enter and exit at any moment was part of the rhizomatic structure. They weren’t guided; they were implicated. Each person attached themselves to whichever node they encountered first or could encounter. They left with different configurations. The work didn’t offer a single reading because it didn’t have a single root. In that sense, Flounder Against the Tide, 2024 doesn’t just use the rhizome; it practices it decolonially. It shows how a rhizomatic method can be embodied, how it can destabilise whiteness not through critique alone but through structural refusal. It becomes a method of undoing: undoing coherence, undoing hierarchy, undoing the verticality whiteness depends on. What remains is the lateral spread, differing encounters, the fugitive formation, the feral line of flight.
