Performance artist Stacy Makishi drew this comic strip in response to her conversation with Rhodri Hayward
This is how she got there...
Stacy Makishi is a transplant from Hawaii who found paradise in Dalston, London in 1994. Like a bonsai plant, she is small but old. She has been making art for over 30 years. A cross-fertilization of theatre, comedy, film and visual art, her work is as complex as it is accessible; humorous as it is challenging; visual as it is literate. It ranges across solo performances for stage, large-scale outdoor participatory projects and intimate one-to-ones.
Also a teacher, director and mentor in international demand, Makishi believes in art’s transformative power and strives to share her creative process with others in order to put more aloha into the world.
Her recent solos for theatre include The Comforter, Vesper Time and The Falsettos, all of which have toured extensively in the UK. She also directs participatory works, most recently with Contact Manchester Young Company. Commissioned by Contact as a performance response to the Wellcome Collection’s 2015 exhibition Sexology, Under the Covers examined young people’s attitudes to sex, questioning myths and breaking down taboos.
Stacy Makishi’s work has been presented at Royal Albert Hall, the Wellcome Collection, Southbank Centre for Yoko Ono’s Meltdown, In Between Time Bristol International Festival, the Traverse Edinburgh and BRUT : Vienna. She has been awarded an ICA Attached Artist Award, a Millennium Fellowship Award, a Live Art Development Agency One to One Bursary and most recently, The Arthole Award and the Franklin Furnace Award. Her work is produced by Artsadmin.
Rhodri Hayward is a Reader in the History of Medicine at Queen Mary, University of London and a co-founder of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. He has published on the history of dreams, Pentecostalism, demonology, cybernetics, and the relations between psychiatry, psychiatric epidemiology and primary care. He is currently writing a history of tidying up as part of QMUL/Wellcome Trust Living with Feeling project. He published Resisting History: Popular Religion and the Invention of the Unconscious with Manchester University Press in 2007 and The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care with Bloomsbury in 2014. With Felicity Callard, Chris Millard, Amanda Rees, Sarah Marks and Chris Renwick he edits the journal, History of the Human Sciences.
Why did you study this thing called 'history of emotions'?
Before meeting with Rhodri, Stacy performed a one-to-one ritual with Rhodri called The Promise. Rhodri responds to this and asks, 'Is ritual always a part of your artistic work, or is this a new departure for you?'
What do you think is the relation of the spiritual, or spiritual moments, to creative process?
When you say that in the artistic process it's like someone has cast a spell on you - who, or what, has cast the spell?
what do you think a ritual is?
what does a ritual do?
Stacy's Promise
Rhodri Hayward wrote this piece in response to his conversation with Stacy Makishi