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Play, download and edit the free video Deliberate Indifference.

Swans Lakeless, a collaboration between Anastasia Clarke (music, sound), Shannon Lumpkin (poetics and story), and Dawn Felicia Knox (film, video, and video installation) present DELIBERATE INDIFFERENCE - an intermedia composition woven from experience, myth, and narrative poetry told from a disability gaze. It gives voice to Odin, a trans & nonbinary amputee tenant union organizer facing eviction and organizing a rent strike along with their comrades. These narratives are told abstractly from the nonlinear spaces of Odin’s recovery after their traumatic false-arrest, wherein they are assaulted by police and held in custody for over 20 hours. Upon feeling the force of police containment and abuse, Odin expands their understanding of the harsh realities of structural police violence into a somatic one. Odin later convinces the cop to see that he was harming himself by harming Odin, and to start an abolitionist choir.

The work addresses the intersections of gender identity from a disability justice lens on police abuse while offering imaginatives upon the specific interrelationships between shame, violence, masculinity and marginalization. These exist in disjointed harmony with the protagonist’s earnest and necessary explorations of radical empathy, self-healing, and a quest for transformative justice. The story uses an actual false-arrest experienced by Shannon Lumpkin as an initiatory point for creativity, expanding upon real-life events to create a fantasy world where one asks: Do abolitionist police choirs exist yet? How can we inspire a militarized force to give up violence for song?

This Roulette showing uses the empty theater to stage Deliberate Indifference as live interaction with fixed media, which acknowledges the creators’ intentions to further iterate the work. From 2019–2021, Anastasia Clarke, Shannon Lumpkin, and Dawn Felicia Knox worked in parallel processes to develop the sound world, poetry, and visual terrain of the piece by compiling source footage, musical performance footage, and Shannon Lumpkin’s solo performances for camera. Confined to England due to the pandemic, Dawn Felicia Knox projected the video source material onto nontraditional surfaces intercepted by fields of colored light in the Star & Shadow, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The resultant work is an intermedia composition of the evolving installation, mixed with raw source footage and brought to life through Anastasia Clarke’s music and sound, which unfolds Shannon Lumpkin’s poetry.

CONTENT WARNING : This work investigates the violence of policing and trauma as subject matter through lived reality in the wake of a specific false-arrest around which the composition is based. The violent arrest will be described from multiple perspectives throughout the work, and video from a police officer’s body-worn camera will be discernable at times.

This performance was originally presented and live streamed by Roulette Intermedium on April 23rd 2021 roulette.org/event/anastasia-clarke-swans-lakeless/

It was developed during Roulette's 2019-2020 Van Lier Fellowship, made possible with funds by the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust

The process for creating, sharing, and discussing this work is informed by SURJ’s documentation on anti-ableism, access and Disability Justice.

PRODUCED BY
Anastasia Clarke
Shannon Lumpkin
Dawn Felicia Knox
Roulette

VOICES
Shannon Lumpkin, self, Odin, Bohemian Waxwing
Anastasia Clarke, narration, choir

MUSIC
Anastasia Clarke, compositions with voice and electronics
Keiko Uenishi, audio feedback performance with tubes
Jean Carla Rodea, voice
Daniel Carter, horns and flute
Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet
Sandy Gordon, percussion
Noize Choir, performing The Cave, recorded by Sneha Solanki

WORDS
Shannon Lumpkin, script
Jaehyun Oh, legal text (adapted)

PROJECTIONS
Dawn Felicia Knox, filmed installation and installation intervention
Star and Shadow, technical assistance
Camilla Padgitt-Coles, consultant – live projections within Roulette
Roulette, technical assistance

VIDEO
Dawn Felicia Knox, edited film, source footage
Anastasia Clarke, source footage
Shannon Lumpkin, source footage
Chip Chapin, source footage
Jon Burklund, source footage
The New York City Police Department, source footage

SOUND DESIGN
Anastasia Clarke

SOUND RECORDISTS
Anastasia Clarke
Sarah Hennies
Shannon Lumpkin

DRAMATURGY
Chip Chapin, dramaturg
Gayle Fekete, consultant

LIVESTREAM
Woramon Jamjod, technical director
Benjamin Miller, livestream operator
Roulette

THANK YOU
Roulette
Van Lier Fellowship
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
Jacob Fuchsberg Law Firm
Opera House Tenant Union
Crown Heights Tenant Union
Brooklyn Eviction Defense Network
Grayhaven Motel
The Manse
Michael Kozek, Ween & Kozek
Star and Shadow
Arts Council England
ZANNI Video
them. Magazine + Wren Sanders
Lindsay Duncanson and Marek Gabrysch

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