This forum animates generative multimodal storytelling performance to excavate family cultures, genealogical belongings, and the ties that bind us together. The pieces composing the forum (re)present the kaleidoscopic nature of familial and cultural relations and the ways we perform, make, unmake, and heal those relations. The forum shares performances that have existed in numerous iterations: a panel of solo performances exploring family stories at the 2021 National Communication Association, collaborative, live and digital performances at our various home institutions, and now shared together on a digital platform utilizing expanded modalities. It is our hope that you - the audience - source inspiration from our shape-shifting performances as useful models of scholarly, creative, and familial inquiry.



Introduction: Generative Multimodal Storytelling Performance
Evan Mitchell Schares, Joshua Hamzehee, Deanna Shoemaker, and Heidi M. Rose

Performance offers the tools to excavate the aesthetic, social, cultural, historical, and political dimensions of our richly textured lives. This forum brings together a multivocal approach to auditory, handwritten, remediated, and documentary storytelling performances to examine our genealogical ties, locations, and ways of belonging and not belonging in our various worlds. In thinking through these multimodal storytelling performances, we are inspired by Madison and Hamera, who explain that through performance, we enact both "identity and belonging" (xvii), and Pollock, who reminds us that our stories and our performances are often "frank, aching, and confused" (103). Collectively, the multimodal performances in this forum embrace performance practice and performance inquiry as acts of resistance, intervention, calls to action, sense making, and healing.

The threads we weave between the performances and essays in this forum are at once elastic, loose and tight, and spun in service to the complex genealogical fabric of everyday life. We mobilize a variety of performance methods to critically excavate those memories, discourses, artifacts, relationships, and imageries that lay claim to our genealogical identities in motion. Huell notes that a performance approach to genealogy involves the practice of "tracking the relations between bodies" and mapping the "bodily and discursive transmission of memories across time and space" (112-113). To excavate these memory transmissions, the contributors to this forum embody what Fox terms an "auto-archaeological" exploration, which refers to practices that animate "disciplinary artifacts and storytelling to map the discursive maneuverings, or document-based performances, of people in specific institutions" (232-233). We methodologically deploy re-mediated digital performance (Hamzehee), personal narrative and historical archive/memory performance via video essay (Rose), letter writing performance (Schares and Stanisci), and autoethnographic performance narration (Shoemaker) as we critically question and excavate the volcanic power and potential of generative storytelling performance. Collectively, this forum (re)presents the kaleidoscopic nature of cultural, genealogical, and familial relations, illuminating the ways we continue to perform, make, unmake, and heal those relations.

The four performances are markedly multimodal. Together they may be experienced as generative works that reflect the various stages of the performance process. What unites these performances is their commitment to weaving together live and digital performance and platformed performance art. The bridge between live and digital is generative and we think of it, as Auslander did, as a type of "reactivation" (17). In translating and reactivating our performance inquiry into alternative modalities and platforms, we bring performance "from other times and places into a new present and presence" (17). As we continually shift between live and mediated performance, we ask ourselves not only what is translated but what is gained in digital and collaborative performance inquiry. It is our hope that you - the reader and audience - source inspiration from our performances as useful models of scholarly, creative, and familial inquiry.

Works Cited

Auslander, Philip. Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation. University of Michigan Press, 2018.

Fox, Ragan. "Auto-Archaeology of Homosexuality: A Foucauldian Reading of the Psychiatric-Industrial Complex." Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3, 2014, pp. 230-250., https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2014.903429.

Huell, Jade C. "Toward Critical Nostalgia: Performing African-American Genealogical Memory." Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2, 2020, pp. 109-130., https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2020.1776380.

Madison, D. Soyini, and Judith Hamera. The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies. SAGE, 2006.

Pollock, Della. "Memory, Remembering, and Histories of Change: A Performance Praxis." The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, edited by D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera. SAGE, 2006, 87-105.



Forum: Family Stories

Khok-e Sattar, Shahr-e Sukhte, and Yogurt Drink (video & essay/script)
Joshua Hamzehee

Family Letter Writing as Embodied Performance Praxis (essay)
Evan Mitchell Schares & Julia Stanisci

A Letter to Ava DuVernay? Reflecting on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Selma, and Me (video)
Heidi M. Rose

Kinship Bonds and Breaks: Toxic Masculinity Meets White Evangelicalism (audio & script)
Deanna Shoemaker (with audio design and engineering by Morris H. Jurgensen)

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Joshua Hamzehee is a Communication Studies Professor and Director of Forensics Speech, Debate, and Performance at Santa Rosa Junior College and a performance scholar↔practitioner engaging in critical ethnography, spoken-word roots, and remixed performance techniques. Hamzehee's creative, public, and award-winning scholarship includes Burnt City: A Dystopian Bilingual One-Persian Show, Baton Rouge SLAM!: An Obituary for Summer 2016, The Deported: A Reality Show!, and CONVICT.

Morris Jurgensen, a.k.a. Magic Sound Butcher, is a visual and noise artist in New Jersey with a B.F.A. from Temple University's Tyler School of Art. He repurposes lost, discarded, and found materials in his experimental visual art and creates complex layers of cacophony in his sound art.

Heidi M. Rose is professor of Performance Studies and Chair of the Department of Communication at Villanova University. Her teaching and scholarship focus on auto/ethnographic and poetic methods exploring intersections of performance, culture and identity. Her co-edited book, Signing the Body Poetic: Essays in American Sign Language Literature, is the first-ever bilingual and bicultural book/video on ASL literary theory and criticism. She has performed her solo performance trilogy, Mirror Image, Good Enough, and Twin, across the US, and is past Editor-in-Chief of Text and Performance Quarterly.

Evan Mitchell Schares is an assistant professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Communication at Villanova University. As a scholar/artist, his teaching and staged performance art focuses on narrative storytelling, poetic inquiry, and literary performance.

Deanna Shoemaker is an associate professor of Communication and Performance Studies and director of the Master's program in Communication at Monmouth University. She is a scholar/artist whose research, teaching, and performance focuses on feminist and critical performance pedagogies, auto/ethnographic methods, critical cultural studies, prison studies, and community engaged learning.

Julia Stanisci is a Master's candidate in the Department of Communication at Villanova University. She is a leader in mental health advocacy, and she is currently playwriting an original show on mental health advocacy campaigns in youth and young adult communities.