“Yoko Ono and the Art of the Breakdown” | Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster

Screams have always been a component of Yoko Ono’s artistic practice, but rather than received as an act of communication, the dominant reception has been not to listen. Offering a meditation on the queer dynamics of Asian American grief, this talk lingers in and listens to Ono’s shatter and scream as she mobilizes affective expressions that are at times explosive, and at others depressive, to perform various modes of coming undone, shattering, falling apart, and breaking down.

This is a Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster event.

Joshua Chambers-Letson (Performance Studies and Asian American Studies, Northwestern University) is author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America, and co-editor (with Tavia Nyong’o) of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown.

Image by Jasmine Mahmoud, taken of a performance of “Revenge Song” by Qui Nguyen at the 2022 Oregon Shakespeare Festival.