UC San Diego

Endurance is a mode of resistance that also drains and debilitates its actant’s lifeforce. It is a state of survival that trans of color folks are well acquainted with, and to which not all of us are able to endure. At endurance art’s core is an exploration of mortality and death that debilitates its performers. Performers like Datong Dazhang and Qi Li explored death to its extreme by taking their own lives in what can be interpreted as a final performance of death. How can endurance work confront existential questions without valorizing pain and treating bodies as sacrificial material? Does choosing to live mean giving up knowledge about death? As a performer, I am seeking the balance between dying and living to find an endurance practice that endures. To explore this, I apply a trans reading to non-trans identifying Asian performance artists who work from a space of alienation to envision endurance not as athletic resilience but instead as a queer yearning for a futurity worth enduring for. Subsequently, I also explore trans eggs’ qualities of enduring and argue for the need to reach towards trans of color eggs to commit towards a decolonial trans of color practice. Finally, I use these findings to develop my own performance art practice of exploring death through life and usher a way to bring love and care into performances of pain by implicating the audience in a symbiotic exchange of vitality.