Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau
For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock

[En anglais]

Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau used to be: bandmates, musicians, graphic artists, healthy. In their joint practice, they often rely on a balance of capacity. Their new work is built on exploring Lum’s progressive, debilitating chronic illness set against the ever-present pressure of constant attempts to maintain a productive life when living with chronic disease — a pressure always exacerbated by expectation and the unrelenting work of the clock. Lum and Desranleau have taken residues of each previous iteration of self and practice forward into new realms. Their most recent work, For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock, focused on performance, theatre, and a philosophical choreography of self.

The non-linear narrative of chronic illness and choreography that drove the work was resolutely successful in what seemed to be a kind of sculptural performance. Bodies and narrative, along with objects and interaction, formed a moving, continual performance of self. Lum’s personal writing deftly avoided the obsessive virtue-signalling of identitarian cultural overdrive, and the four performers on the stage moved with dance-inspired deference to chronic pain and limited mobility. The characters that they enacted represented aspects of selfhood and produced a laconic, multi-dimensional vision of chronic illness. Playfully dressed in diaphanous garments that belied their frustration and agitation, they pushed against forces both internal and external, cloistered together as moving walls pushed in against their struggle. Lum and Desranleau created bulky, cane-like aids that hung on the otherwise bare walls for use during the performance to emphasize the necessity of physical support. These objects conveyed a continual becoming of the artists’ practice, as many of them were transmutations of leftover materials.