Portfolio

Seattle Dances: “In Tandem”. Published January 17 2026

Excerpt:

In the end it is just them and four empty plastic bags. Holding one bag and each hand, they raise the bags above their heads before forcing their arms downwards, inflating the bags with air with one swift motion. They move across the rubble ridden room like this, catching the air over and over. They settle into a steady audible rhythm – the gasp of the plastic through the air is like a forceful exhale, a required exercise of living. We can trust that there is an inhale as their arms raise silently up, the exhale pushed out immediately as they force the bags down. As the lights fade and the sound continues, they have captured my own state of suspension inside the impending apocalypse. I find myself exhaling at the moment the gasp of plastic occurs, my own balancing breath caught inside the inhale/exhale of theirs.

Atmospheric River Issue 3: “Lucy Liyou’s Labyrinths”. Published November 4 2024

Excerpt:

Weeks after Ground Hum, a wintery experimental festival, I am preoccupied thinking about Lucy Liyou’s performance at Washington Hall. At the same time, I find myself engrossed in Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Season 4—a perfect dramatic binge for the endless rainy days. Initially, the two became related for me simply due to temporal proximity, but when the RHOSLC visited a prominent drag queen’s Palm Springs motel, their relationship became concretized.

Located in a space between pop and experiment, between amateur drag and professional sashay, and perhaps within “the calculus of exploitation and liberation,” Lucy treads on thresholds of genre and gender, refusing to pass fully into a singular sonic medium¹. Instead, she constructs a new language of samples and gestures, one that includes a bashed can of spam, the invocation of ghostly queens, Mariah Carey, and 1950s housewives.

Meanwhile, in Season 4, widely considered one of the biggest upsets in Bravo history, the housewives are embroiled in turmoil unlike ever before. One housewife turns out to be an internet troll, who smoothly navigated past the producers, housewives, and other fruitless checks and balances to infiltrate the group, including a trip to Palm Springs where chaos reigns. She presents an existential threat—who are the housewives, really?—while also pushing herself into an apparently fractured and broken-spirited individual for the sake of the show.

Here, in the in-between space, anything can bubble up—the performer and stage becomes a site of potentiality, a place where anything could happen next. The real housewives seem to present the opposite. In their on-screen actualities they appear captive to the capital contracts they have signed, their real lives and their on-screen lives melding into a perilous synergy. This drama does not linger on a threshold, but rather forcefully exerts the will of capital onto the participants. They are anxiously abandoned, their spirits desertified, while Lucy opens the door for queer and punk potentiality.

Both Lucy and the housewives are subject to compression—to the pressure of boom or bust required by contemporary experience, to the compression of forced participation in gender boundaries, and by simply existing inside of capital. There is no thresholding within platonic capitalism, only success and failure. The very real consequences of this compression take place in the reality of the housewives on TV, while Lucy’s performance allows this compression to result in shifting sands, in an implosion of identity.