R+D Artist Spotlight: Wesleigh Gates

By Gina Young

Performed by three trans artists, The Grafters is, in the words of creator Wesleigh Gates, “a lecture performance slash dance piece slash horror fantasia exploring the dynamic, generative, and occasionally frightening process of gender transition.” Wesleigh (she/they) will be developing this new work—which incorporates text, movement, live video and sound—with LAPP as part of our Research + Development program this fall. Over the course of two weeks, Wesleigh and her collaborators will engage in a process of research, dialogue, improvisation, and embodied exploration, activating an array of source texts and choreographic scores. Wesleigh and I had a fascinating chat about grafting, gender transition, and collaborative performance-making.

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So what is it about grafting, what is it that inspires?

The two most common uses of grafting are in surgery and horticulture—both indicate a kind of transplantation, a taking of a part from one thing and making it part of another. Think skin grafts, taking skin from one area of the body and reattaching it elsewhere. Or with plants, grafting indicates combining the tissues of different plants so that they grow together and a hybrid or altered plant is created.

Yes–I love how your project description talks about the way in which “new growth or life becomes possible through acts of cutting and stitching, recombining and reconfiguring.”

I keep coming back to this idea in thinking about my artistic process and also my gender transition. (Which is itself maybe an artistic process?)

My training is as a theater director—I’ve moved towards creating my own work rather than directing a text by someone else, but I still find it very fruitful to draw from other existing work, whether that’s literary, cinematic, visual art, etc. I used to think of that as collage but I now think of it more as grafting—cutting bits of things out of their original context and attaching them to my own preoccupations and creative impulses and seeing what grows. And then transition for me has been all about recombining and reconfiguring pieces of myself, my life.

I really appreciate how you mentioned wanting to have a messier, more nuanced discussion about transition from a lived experience perspective, with this piece. Can you speak to that?

Totally, perfect segue, because of course literal cutting enters into the picture with transition—I’m on numerous waiting lists for various gender-affirming surgeries. To be clear, I’m not saying you need ANY kind of surgery to be trans, but it’s part of my own journey and that of many other folks. And the cutting—or more broadly, the violence of surgery—is something we don’t necessarily feel comfortable talking about because of the way in which that violence gets weaponized in anti-trans rhetoric, particularly in the image of us “cutting off” parts of ourselves as this kind of abject self-harm. I don’t like reproducing that rhetoric, obviously, BUT at the same time my lived experience has been one of genuine ambivalence and trepidation about what my body is going to go through as I move towards self-actualization. So like, is there space to acknowledge and question the violence—in an ethically neutral, amoral sense—of the journey that trans people go through physically, socially, to become ourselves?

It’s such an important conversation to have, and so frustrating how the right wing will weaponize it to their advantage. There should be room for trans people to reach out to their community with, say, fears, or to get support, and not have it be seized on and weaponized against them.

Exactly, I don’t want to have to be silent about my own uncertainty, or to constantly have to perform “trans joy” or “gender euphoria” or whatever when like, surgery is intense!

And it’s not just surgery–I’m also thinking about the violence of being seen and being known. So with FFS (facial feminization surgery) for instance, it’s based on the social norms that a woman looks a certain way, right? And trans and non-binary people deal with this whether or not we’re pursuing surgical or hormonal change. Like, we have to deal with being looked at by other people and are basically helpless as to what that look decides we are.

Oof. Yes.

All of which is to say… I’m hoping that grafting provides a more nuanced way to look at the cut, at the look, at the change. How is the cut generative? What can grow and flower when we work with “violence,” whether that’s physical (slicing, suturing) or just the fact that we have to live with other people?

I would love to hear more about what draws you to the form of horror fantasia. We have another artist in R+D, Reginald Edmund, also working in horror, so I’m curious what’s in the zeitgeist about that genre.

Other than living in a horror show? Haha.

Hahaha. Quoting that!

I’ve always been a horror movie lover, but the direct impulse to go there with this project, as it happens, was a book–called Life-Destroying Diagrams, by Eugenie Brinkema, a professor at MIT. In the book, she proposes thinking about horror not as affect/feeling/emotion like we usually think of it, but as form. Specifically, she suggests that horror is about the inflexibility of forms (lines, shapes, diagrams, grids, lists and tables, etc.) as they interact with fleshy human bodies. So like, Final Destination is about a list that kills you. And The Human Centipede is about the world’s most awful diagram.

Wild!

Honestly, the Human Centipede chapter is directly responsible for this project! Basically, she got me thinking about gender as form, “trans” as form, “femininity” as form, and how inflexible those things can be socially, and the violence (horror?) that ensues when individual humans get twisted into their form. But Brinkema also writes about how care shows up in horror films. Like how the characters in these awful situations find themselves looking out for one another, trying to help one another, and how a kind of ethics can arise out of horror. So thanks to her, I’m thinking about horror as a site to explore the intersection of violence, bodily form, and relations of care. Which is all very trans, at least for me!

An earlier workshop iteration of the Human Centipede portion of The Grafters: anonymous audience member, Wesleigh Gates, and actor, artist, and filmmaker Lio Mehiel.

You work with groups of queer and trans collaborators, including on this project–what do you feel is important about that? Is care a component of that, in your process?

Yes thank you for asking about this! I’m extremely process-oriented as a maker. Like, the thing that an audience ends up seeing is the thing, yes, but it’s only part of the thing, because the thing is really a relationship. For me, a public performance is bringing a new group of people into an ongoing structure of relation that has already been established between the artists. And for me it has been so important, life-saving really, to be in relation with other queer and trans people. So I’ve moved in my last few projects towards very intentionally making the process a queer/trans space. 

Building a performance, tackling a problem or a question or an idea in community, is hopefully a way of building solidarity. I won’t say it always works out in some beautiful utopian way. But I’m always reaching for that.

How do you plan to use your time with your collaborators at R+D? What are you most excited to explore and what would be your ideal outcome of the time?

Oh gosh, so much to explore! I’ve been workshopping a short solo with these ideas over the past year or so and have learned a lot that way. But I’m not a solo artist ultimately. I thrive in collaboration. I need other brains and bodies (sounds like a horror movie, ha). So I’m really stoked to bring on two other performers as well as a video artist and a sound artist to finally have some other folks that can bring their own questions, interests, and investments, around this set of ideas.

It’s very silly but one thing I am really excited to explore is the choreographic possibilities of the human centipede! Like, what can such a formation of (non-surgically!!) attached humans actually do? How will it require us to listen to and look out for one another? To be clear, I’m adapting the structure so it’s not quite as, um, intimate as in the film. I don’t know how to talk about this publicly! 🙈

That’s something you’ll figure out as you go! That’s the exciting part, haha.

Yes. I guess the broader question branching off from that particular inspiration point is like, how do we move when inconveniently bonded together. So, exploring that choreographically in all kinds of ways. I’m also looking forward to dialoguing with other folks about their experiences with gender and perception. To getting out of my own head on that front particularly, since we all live that differently. And I’m excited to play with some live camera work—how can the aesthetics of horror cinema and the cinematic “cut” make meaning in conversation with our movement and text sources.

What brought you to LAPP for this project; what made you want to R+D it, as it were?

LAPP has been on my radar since I moved to LA three years ago—actually, longer—so I had a sense of the org as a supportive space for artists who were doing the kind of interdisciplinary performance work I’m interested in. And then once I started to get to know the local scene better, to see some LAPP programming and also to see work around town by artists that have gone through LAPP programs, it became a really clear goal for me to work with y’all.

Also in my experience it’s rare for a performance org to provide support/resources this substantial without the expectation of a public showing. That is HUGE. When I’ve gotten support before, it’s been attached to performances—which of course can be helpful itself, and in those cases I had a clearer idea of what the work looked like going in. But with this project, I have a lot of ideas and actually very little idea of what the form of the piece looks like, so it’s a tremendous relief to feel like I have time to explore and get an idea of what that might be without anyone looking over my shoulder like WHAT’S GOING ON IN THERE? And to be able to pay my collaborators to do that with me!

LAPP is passionately committed to providing support at the earliest phases of a project’s development.

On that note, I know this is a delicate and personal area of exploration, so I proposed having some kind of emotional/mental health support for me and my collaborators built into this process. And it was really gratifying that LAPP not only took that seriously but seemed really excited about it and interested in genuinely thinking about how they could support this idea as an organization. So I’m looking forward to seeing what that might look like, what kinds of structures can be built in collaboration between artists and institutions that actually acknowledge how draining it can be to make art about difficult experiences. Artists from minoritized communities are so often making work about our “trauma” (read, being alive under cishetero, ableist white supremacy)—sometimes because we need to, sometimes because that’s what’s asked or expected of us—and more often than not the institutions we collaborate with do not take care of us during that process. Maybe that’s not what they’re for. But like, what if they tried a little? I’m so thrilled LAPP is interested in going there.

Love that. It’s so important. And it goes back to your theme of care.

For sure! And form. Like, can we build the care into the institutional form that we’re trying to contort our bodies into?

I know a lot of the connections this project is making won’t resonate for everyone (though I hope they do for some folks!). My interest is in expanding the kinds of conversations that are on the table around trans life, never to say that trans IS or should be this or any particular way, for anyone, myself included. This particular constellation of thoughts and feelings is definitely messy and a little bit distressing! But that’s how I like my art…

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