Stacey Sacks is a PhD candidate in Performing Arts at Stockholm’s University of the Arts. Her Doctoral Project *This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything* takes form as a suite of hyper-disciplinary experiments with mask, clown, stop-motion animation, film, photography, sculpture, text, drawing and performance.
Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘critical intimacy’ the performance-essay 'luxurious migrant' reflects on whiteness and privilege and the performance of it. As an intra-cultural, auto-ethnographic excavation it attempts and possibly fails to critically engage with notions of access, authority and power from within the cultural canon. As such it is a creative experimentation with theory and performance, an exploration of the improvisatory impulse and what it means to be ‘on’ the moment.
Since clown naturally contains transgressive elements, the project explores how the genre can be used in a neo-colonial context to subvert or interrupt the dominant discourse, whether satire and parody function as activism and if it is in fact possible to push back white supremacy through critical engagement and play, starting with a robust self-critique.
