a body that is land and sea

by Cynthia Ling Lee

^{[Video still by Huy Truong and Susana Ruiz from Oceanic: Queering the Ocean. Giant piles of washed-up kelp at Natural Bridges State Beach, with the Pacific Ocean and a large rock formation shaped like a bridge in the background. In the foreground, a pixelated dancer, Cynthia Ling Lee, sways close to the ground, their body digitally dissolving into wind-blown sand.]}

I wrote “a body that is land and sea” during the creative process for Oceanic, an artistic collaboration with micha cárdenas, Gerald Casel, Huy Truong, Susana Ruiz, Ian Costello, and Anna Friz. Combining performance, film, and augmented reality, Oceanic asks how we collectively move through the loss of beloved people, places, and our own physical capacities in a time of COVID-19 and climate chaos to collectively conjure BIPOC worlds of queer joy, access intimacy, and trans liberation. The project takes inspiration from the work of queer, chronically ill Chicanx feminist, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the site of Natural Bridges State Beach on Amah Mutsun land, colonially known as Santa Cruz, California. My writing, which is simultaneously a poem and a score for movement improvisation, was written in response to Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals. King uses the shoal – a geologic formation that is neither land nor sea — to theorize exchanges between Black and Native studies. Without, I hope, displacing the central importance of King’s original argument, my poem emerged from felt resonances between her description of the shoal’s shifting, unfixed, in-between qualities and the unstable and precarious nature of my crip body, my queer propensities for gender and sexual fluidity, and my diasporic be/longings as the child of Taiwanese immigrants, who are island people. The images that accompany “a body that is land and sea” are video stills from our experimental film, Oceanic: Queering the Ocean, and feature cinematography by Huy Truong and Susana Ruiz.

^{[Video still by Huy Truong and Susana Ruiz from Oceanic: Queering the Ocean. In a black void are three wind-swept figures of pixelated, abstracted dancers whose bodies are disappearing. The clearest figure, Cynthia Ling Lee, is in the midground, being dramatically swept to the side as she kneels with one knee up, while the other two larger figures in the foreground read more as traces of movement energy and are barely discernable as human bodies. On the left, you can faintly make out knees bending as the dancer, Gerald Casel, explodes into sparks, while on the right side, micha cárdenas twists like a tornado or gnarled tree.]}

Cynthia’s bio and photo