By: Izzy Cheung, Arts & Culture Editor
SFU’s reputation is made through intensive research programs and rewarding co-ops, but what many may not realize is how comprehensive our arts departments are. From Fringe Festival debuts to magical musical performances, arts students and alumni have spoken fondly of how their creative processes have blossomed at SFU. As alum Alexandra Caprara prepares to bring her violet-hazed performance to the IndieFest stage, she reflected on how her time at SFU inspired her work.
With a master of fine arts in interdisciplinary arts, Caprara’s research in “queer becoming, speculative futurity, and how all that relates back to a study of plant life” drove the creation of her project. The performance, titled Ultra Violets, is a colourful challenge to the discovery of queer identity on an individual level. While the piece will be shown as a part of IndieFest, this won’t be the first time that Caprara has presented this project.
“When I started this piece, I was in the middle of my masters degree at SFU,” Caprara explained in an interview with The Peak. “I wanted to converge my skills as a director, designer, and mover.”
Ultra Violets tells a story “set within a world that is part greenhouse and part dance club,” using pivotal parts of plant life and disco cultures to convey its message. Books such as Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism and Sarah Ahamed’s Queer Phenomenology provided the theoretical basis of Caprara’s project. In the performance, she explores the “intentional process of abstraction as a way to speculate new ways of seeing and existing in the world” pitched by Russell and Ahamed.
“‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it, and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live,” Caprara relayed the quote from bell hooks, emphasizing how these words have “always felt like the essence of what this piece is trying to say, and do.”
The origins of the performance’s visual elements come from a completely different sector of study. Caprara recognizes how “plants have acted similarly throughout history, especially in the contexts of the ways we’ve used them to define movements of queer resistance and love,” and applied it to the basis of the show.
“I was researching plant growth in greenhouses, and different conditions for growth that can help aid this process,” Caprara said. She highlighted how exposing plants to “bright purple light[s]” can be “faster and stronger than using regular grow lights.
“The photos of this felt all too familiar to what I’ve seen in queer club settings — there’s something punchy and a little mysterious about it tonally,” she added. “The colour purple seemed to fit both the aesthetic of what it felt like to be in a club setting, and also a perfect connection between club lighting and plant symbolism.” The use of violets in the title and the piece seemed to weave themselves in fatefully, as these flowers “were also often used as a symbol of sapphic love in poetry.”
While Caprara’s name is the first on this project, just like how plants grow, there were a variety of elements and helping hands that pushed it to bloom. Receiving support from supervisors, mentors, and collaborators is something Caprara said was “especially impactful.
“The support within my cohort, and within my own team of collaborators for this piece showed me the importance of having a community by your side,” she expressed. “It makes the work stronger, it helps keep you sane, and it’s tremendously more fun.
“This piece was created to celebrate queer joy, and to invite audiences to celebrate alongside us. I hope audiences, regardless of their own relationship to the idea of becoming, feel seen within this work — especially to any of our fellow queer audience members, this is for you. We hope you like it.”
Catch Ultra Violets at Signals Studios at the Centre for Digital Media on November 21 and 22. Tickets are $21.68 and are available for purchase on showpass.com.
