Mad Clot on a Holy Bone: A Conversation between Asher Hartman and Chiron Armand

As an artist, Asher Hartman has created theatrical performances that are spiritual phantasmagorias of psychic pain and the body’s many pleasures. Based in Los Angeles, his work has been presented adjacent to the art world, in spaces like Machine Project, LACMA, and the Hammer Museum, as well as Yale Union in Portland and The Lab in San Francisco. Both his writing and directing method, the ways he works with actors, rely extensively on his experience as an intuitive, and that practice of reading others. On the occasion of the publication of his first book, Mad Clot on a Holy Bone: Memories of a Psychic Theater (X Artists' Books), which features three of his plays, essays on his work, and an interview, Hartman will be joined in conversation with shamanic practitioner and performance artist Chiron Armand, a graduate of the NYU Performance Studies’s MA program. Together, Hartman and Armand will discuss how their work straddles the material and immaterial worlds, asking about the political dimensions of their practice, embodiment, queer practices, and — specific to the conditions of today — how their ongoing experience with intuitive practice speaks to the possibilities in virtual spaces of engagement, of how we are affected and affect each other from afar.

BIOS:

ASHER HARTMAN is a transgender writer, director and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. His works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts, infused with cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, and set in installations designed to disorient and unnerve.

CHIRON ARMAND is a spirit-initiated shaman, author, and interdisciplinary artist. Currently living in Guatemala and pandemically-based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, his work exists at the crossroads of death, memory, identity, and place. Holding additional initiations in such New World traditions as Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Quimbanda, he received his MA in Performance Studies from New York University and his BA in Ritual Anthropology and Queer Studies from Hampshire College.

This conversation will be moderated and the event was curated by Ph.D. candidate Tim Reid.

This event is cosponsored by NYU’S DRAMA, THEATRE & PERFORMANCE STUDIES WORKING GROUP and X Artists' Books.

You can purchase a copy of Mad Clot on a Holy Bone from X Artists' Books with a special 15% discount with promo code: PSYCHICREADING until 10/31/2020.