Through my one-year commemoration ceremony of my marriage to FISH, I sought to simultaneously OUT and queer the traps of anthropomorphizing and pareidolia (the human tendency to form patterns where they supposedly don’t exist). How do I/we frame and implicate other species in our stories about them? Can I queer this query through form mash-up (confessional, poetry reading, dance performance, rite of passage ceremony, magical realism)?

The performance began with a dance. I danced a (veiled) dance of union with FISH. The movement chapters resourced our courtship, our marriage, and a year of building relationship. In my dance making I sought to shed light on how to share psychic communication with an/other species through my (particular) human body.

After dancing, I sat down for a fireside chat with audience and passers-by. I talked about my big year. I got married! I learned how to swim with sharks! I learned a bit about how young fish in stocked waters live through icy winters. I learned a lot about cephalopods, communication, and compromise. I re-stated my vow to contribute to the evolution of species through love. I passed around wedding photos. I answered some questions.

It takes community to support such a union. I offered a bouquet of thanks and flowers to those around me (audience) and implicated them in my fishy union. I shared twelve haikus pared down from meditation, dancing, drawing, and writing with twelve different species of flowers growing around my Brooklyn neighborhood. I chose the haiku because it is a distilled form. I wanted to get to the flower essence through embodied research. Can I feel the part of my “DNA” that I share with plants? Is it fair to frame plants as celebratory ancestors/plant-cestors?

In offering the celebratory flower haikus to audience, I alternated between moved and verbally shared phrases of five-seven-five. In the creation and transmission of these two forms of haikus, I was puzzling out how to equalize the spaces between words and the spaces between movements. I’ve heard deep rumors of a mind-body separation in the humans. Is the psychic the space between? Is it possible to dig deeper into these anthropocentric questions with a query framed by a supposedly decapitated body?