Tour Journal 2025 (Pt. 2) Paris & NYC
June 2nd, 2025
First things first!
A very special one-off XOIR session is taking place on June 8th in the gorgeous Grand Palais in Paris, France. It’s a part of the Centre Pompidou’s program Fun Palace, which was born out of anti-architect Cedric Price’s proposal for the Fun Palace, which went on to become a precursor and inspiration for the iconic architecture of the Pompidou itself. I will be joined by my friend and collaborator KUKII (aka Lafawndah) as a co-facilitator. We may or may not also have something cooking for next year (:
If you’re new around here, you can learn more about XOIR here.
And now,
The people have spoken! I am SO EXCITED to finally bring GASP! to New York and the USA. This will be a very special occasion, sharing the stage with Sun Ra Arkestra, Marshall Allan, Young Boy Dance Group, and more.
Tickets are available here. Look at this lineup!
I feel extremely grateful to everyone who has come out to all the shows on this tour so far. Every single interaction and conversation with the audience and ensemble members stays with me. I feel it now as I write. When I am beaten down and tired and exhausted by the world, these connections are like little vials of medicine and rations that keep my heart pumping, giving me energy to keep going.
My friend Tourmaline just released Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson which feels incredibly timely amidst the rapid erasure of queer and trans history across the USA and world. Listen to the full episode, but I specifically want to highlight an integral message at the end of the video:
Tourmaline, in reflection of Marsha’s life and way of being, said, “No more small-time dreaming. We need to dream as big as our problems are”.
In the rawness of everything right now, pithy aphorisms don’t usually hit, but damn that one HITS.
Explaining things lately has felt incredibly trite, and I find myself having the same conversation repeatedly, as though I am memorizing and reciting a monologue this week about my human experience. Is the culprit the exhaustion of the extreme present? Or is it a defense mechanism to turn off a more in-depth, curious expository state of mind? I used to feel like I had so much to offer to the media landscape, and now I feel much more aligned with not making sense. Synthesizing negates something about experiencing. I am still with the experiencing, still downloading.
Maybe it’s because, for some reason, I have been watching and listening to a lot of media analysis over the last few weeks as a trivial attempt to “understand” the moment we are in. And let me tell you, it isn’t working!
Most vivid to me is the gulf between the two forms of political analysis of our current media landscape. On one hand, there is the left that follows the compulsory conservative swing in the face of living in Trump’s America, attempting to weed out and narrativize a scapegoat or culprit that has collapsed the left’s capacity to organize within a failing political system.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, my trans friends, immigrants, and brown friends who are fighting to not die, to not be deported, or not be killed, wonder how to stand up against a failing political system. Taking Tourmaline’s advice of dreaming as big as the problems are, I have to propose that this month we calibrate to Tourmaline’s story of Marsha (and her friend Agosto Machado) and help bolster a timeline of their rage and joy.
How to keep believing. How to stay free and open in a world that is closing, syphoning, and collapsing. How to not calcify and shrink and lose the capacity to have the foresight of something coming that is not more hell. We do not escape the problems of the world in these shows, but I learn a lot from temporary assembly and being “autonomous together.”
The main takeaway is that we are capable of doing A LOT very quickly together, which feels both meaningful and important to remember amidst everything going on. I hope this part echoes forward after the shows are over.
I want to do this show in as many places as possible. Being in process with a local group of performers around this theme of “the dead community” has given me a great deal of hope and taught me how varied interpretations (personal and political) can be from person to person, place to place. No two XOIRs are even remotely similar, even if we engage in the same music and choreography. Some people lost a loved one. Others are dealing with the mortality of a loved one or themselves. Some continue to grieve dead children in Gaza, war, genocide, ecocide. Other people are still acclimating to the reality of COVID, or need to not feel so lost or alone.
Piercing the veil together is no small feat. It takes a lot of courage and bravery on behalf of the ensemble to be with me for two to three days and learn all this music and choreography and show up for each other. Doing this kind of work pushes away despair because I am perpetually being reunited with the reality that people are willing to show up and work together with friends and strangers alike, to move and be moved, to transform each other and the audience.
Wanna book me for more tour or XOIR ? Let a bitch know!
CURRENTLY READING:
DEEP LISTENING:
Love,
Colin Self