Performing Dictionary 2, 2022

Live performance, speech, spoken word

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Performing Dictionary 2 is a live performance of speech and spoken word based on artist Chaney Manshu Diao and her close friend Anastasia Sakoilska’s individual identities.

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As the second piece from the Performing Dictionary Series, Performing Dictionary 2 contextualises the artist's body as a mobilised site for cross-cultural encounters and is informed by locational feminist thinking and feminist geography.

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Simultaneously, performing dictionary 2 draws its distinction from the previous solo performance. Performed by two performers who have, to many extend, contrasting yet alike, identities and life experiences. the work in this way, inevitably imbued an awareness of intersectionality in thinking about any addressed or unaddressed boundaries. The intimacy between two performer-friends is also core to this piece of work, which provokes a sense of belongings through familiarity, closeness and trust between two of them. This micro community formed between the two speaks about the strength, as well as the frailty, of affinity formed within human crowds.