Title Pending 196

”I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” -Joan Didion, Slouching Towards BethlehemRepresentation continues to be one of the most fraught questions facing the theatre and performing arts today: what is the responsibility of artists and the industry to represent minoritised and racialised bodies? How is that representation entangled with oppressive normative narratives surrounding those communities? What is the implication of this representation or lack thereof on the wider discipline and industry, which in the UK context, is still largely white and Eurocentric? Hence, the multiplicity of selves navigated by an artist living in a racialised body is a contested site that goes beyond the individual. My practice-research seeks to investigate how theatre practices can be reconstructed to privilegemarginalised bodies in discovering what Foucault calls practices of freedom—acts of resistance that discover alternative practices of authoring ‘self’. As an artist of color, I am particularly interested in the potency of grotesque-realism, a principle exegesised by Mikhail Bakhtin as resisting the notion of the individual body by reshaping it into a boundless, ever-transforming site for a democratisation and renewal of ideas and viewpoints.My personal essay, ‘Running with the Devil’ uses the above Joan Didion quote as a starting pointand explores the grotesque-realist motifs of demons, food and orifices of the body through apositivist and postcolonial lens,drawing from inspirationoffered by writers of colorincluding Alexander Chee and Trinh Thi Minh Ha.