We are always in relation. The performance of self necessarily includes the performance of/with others. Performance—planned or accidental, solitary or collective—was an important element of Being & Feeling (Alone, Together).
 

I had envisioned a pink stage, or a series of stages.

The pink stage would be a dance floor, a meeting place, a way of making the gallery strange… a pink stage would be at each threshold, around each bend, and leak up and out into mental interiorities, to counter increasingly homogenized and controlled institutional spaces. Perhaps the entire floor would be covered in a pink stage. Or wall-to-wall plush pink carpet? That extended to the walls? I was considering a programmable disco ball for the center of the gallery, too.
 

The pandemic curtailed these plans: a modest 4’ x 5’ (1.21 to 1.52 meter) pink stage, made of two low pedestals, were all that could be assembled before gallery access became practically nonexistent. I managed to borrow a microphone from a colleague, even though I knew our chances of opening in the spring would be slim.

Pink is a queer word. Its origin is somewhat obscure. Its etymological pedigree mentions perforations and narrowness, getting fired by a “pink slip,” small eyes, and references to flowers. It is also the color of the pink triangle, a symbol used by the Nazis to designate gay people, a symbol which was subsequently reclaimed as a declaration of resistance during the AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s. Pink has associations with gender, as well as serving as a critique of gender binaries. While perhaps somewhat hackneyed, pink is still powerful.

The roots of the word stage are also important here: it is a raised platform and a stage in life. A sequence. You can stage something, or someone, including yourself, to present it differently. The stage is speculative. No actual stage is ever needed. It is place from which you can take a position.

While our final Pink Stage itself was rather diminutive, this collective platform began to assume much larger proportions. It sparked many conversations during the pandemic. We used the Pink Stage as an aspirational outlet during moments of anguish, disillusionment, and uncertainty. It became a motif. A muse. A series of phases and turns of thinking and action. It became a verb and performance directive: “pink stage it”—shake it, turn it upside down and illuminate it, glimpse it through a crack or crevice, handle it, sing to and from it. It became generous and capacious: a place to dream, and a platform for co-imagination, care, and joy.