Shedding

YEAR

CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of sexual trauma and illness/Disability 

Through a year and a half spent in bed due to acute illness, lifelong disability, and the cumulative effects of structural inequities, Kai Hazelwood was accompanied by her beloved snake Bisoux. Shedding weaves curiosity and play into learning how to survive a personal apocalyptic moment, and illuminates how these ideas are also critical for ongoing healing from the effects of surviving colonization and its offspring: white supremacy, capitalism, cis-heteronomativity and ableism.

Shedding takes three key shapes, so far:

Social Practice: Shedding is an emergent embodied healing practice utilizing body-based and movement strategies for large scale justice. Shedding is based on the idea that in order to change large-scale systemic problems we need to heal the body of the individual and support them with a healing community. Originally developed as an LA County wide embodied healing intervention, Shedding: Playtime is a QTBIPOC gathering space to cultivate toys to support personal and collective embodied healing and liberation. It combines the transformational wisdom of snakes and creatures who shed their skin, with Disabled creativity to navigate moments of personal, societal and global apocalypse. 

Writing: Published poems, essays, and articles along with a Playbook and an online text based video game, currently in progress. Developed from embodied experiments Shedding: A Playbook is full of simple embodied experiences called ‘playdates’ and reflections from a sickbed. It reminds us to lower the stakes and play towards liberation. Imagine the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books beloved by us 80s babies when we were kids, and the text based video games like Zork that took over our imaginations in the 80s and 90s. They allowed us to play and slowed us down to practice decision making, allowing us to test out alternatives. What if  Shedding could help us play with different modes of being in our bodies and the world? Choose your own path, guided by your Snakecestors, through the potential of play as a vital strategy to help us all survive an apocalypse, be it personal, societal, or global. 

Body-based Art: Movement workshops and an emerging methodology for performance creation. I call these movement experiences “playdates” to remind us to lower the stakes, to play rather than try to control. I began this project to support my own intense moment of shedding, and to remind myself that the next time I have to shed, I already know how. I’ve always known how, and so do you.

FUNDING/AWARDS
DAS Graduate School THIRD Research Cycle, The California Creative Corps Fellowship administered by Community Partners

Kai lays on the floor of a bright room with wood floor and white walls. Her legs and feet are up, and her snake Bisoux is wrapped around one ankle and cascading down to touch noses with Kai.