Space Crone Prize for Speculative & Science Short Fiction: Shortlist Reading + Winner Announcement
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Bhanu Kapil: Incubation: a space for monsters, with Blue Pieta, Yasmin Rai & Nina Harries
Friday 22 September, 7-10pm
St Peter's Church, De Beauvoir Town
£8, ticket covers both events. Your email confirmation is your ticket.
Join us for two extraordinary events celebrating the power of fabulous feminist fabulation.
7-8pm: readings from shortlisted writers + judges for the inaugural Space Crone Prize awarded by Silver Press in collaboration with the Estate of Ursula K. Le Guin, plus the live announcement of the winner!
8.30-9.30pm: a special performance by Bhanu Kapil with dancer & choreographer Blue Pieta, and musicians Yasmin Rai & Nina Harries, choreographed to mark the UK publication of Kapil's seminal hybrid text Incubation: a space for monsters.
Originally published in America in 2006, and out of print for the last seven years, Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Following protagonist Laloo—Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler—on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. In this document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.
'I read everything Kapil writes and each time am left in awe at her erudite dexterity to see the book, not as a medium of mere knowing, but of questing. Here she casts the dialectical inquiry between continuity and rupture, deploying cyborgs and monsters to overlay and amplify existential questions for the Anthropocene. The result is an ambitious work of complex yet coherent semiotic prowess I can’t wait to teach from.' – Ocean Vuong
‘Incubation: a space for monsters is a transnational love song, an avowal for immigrants, monsters, and girls everywhere.’ – Emgee Dufresne
'a feminist, post-colonial On the Road.' – Douglas A. Martin
Performance Description
by Blue Pieta
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The performance dreams a space of metamorphosis, in which the attendant becomes the attended at any time.
by Blue Pieta
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The performance dreams a space of metamorphosis, in which the attendant becomes the attended at any time.
And there is only one choreographer – the Butcher.
He sharpens his knives before cutting flesh, and when he does, the dancer dances, each limb is choreographed by the cut. And the blade glows with light on its surface. It does not reflect the sun, instead the sun reflects it. As Mummy says,‘maybe the flowers light the sun’. And when the knife hits the lamb, the light infects the flesh, flesh becomes light. And as we gather, we attend to this mating.
Can’t stop you from going if you’ve gone. (Bhanu Kapil)
And our stage becomes a hidden door to an invisible layer of fascia in your body. Its fibrous cells are so sensitive they feel everything and so your membrane opens to receive love. There is nothing more naked and stark than the image of you asking for love, and all parts of this painting teach you, it was always yours to have.
I love you; please don’t die. (Bhanu Kapil)
Performance Credits
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Blue Pieta: director, choreographer, performer, musical direction
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Blue Pieta: director, choreographer, performer, musical direction
Yasmin Rai: performer, dramaturg, musical direction, sound design
Nina Harries: performer
Bhanu Kapil: performer, poet
Bhanu Kapil: performer, poet