A Speculative Cinema Episode and RPG, produced in collaboration with Jessica Stokes.
Jessica Stokes is a disabled poet/performer/educator/scholar pursuing her PhD at Michigan State University. They analyze contemporary poetry to crip methods for writing and reading. Jessica writes about disability poetics in Jacket2‘s “Discordance” Series. They are co-founder of the HIVES Research Workshop. Their work has appeared in Wordgathering, The Mayo Review, and the book We Are Not Your Metaphor: A Disability Poetry Anthology. Jessica has a purple wheelchair and too much red hair.
Special Thanks to Michael Stokes for his assistance with wing design and game play research and strategy.
Presented at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (Pride Month Programming), June 3, 4-6pm PST
Presented at HIVES, Michigan State University, Feb 12, 2021, 11-1pm PST
Download the PDF Poster for the event here: resurrecting-jatayu-poster-1
An exalted character in the Ramayana epic tradition, the vulture Jatayu is known for his courage and loyalty. When Ravana abducts Sita and whisks her away in his flying chariot, it is the fearless Jatayu who tries to stop him. An aerial battle ensues, but Ravana eventually prevails, chopping off Jatayu’s wing, disabling him from fight and flight, and eventually life itself. In this episode of the speculative cinema project, Forest Tales, Jatayu is resurrected with a prosthetic wing, only to face the extinction of his kind in the present.
Vultures face a dire crisis in India right now, with three species becoming functionally extinct thanks to the use of a bovine painkiller called diclofenac. Our reanimated protagonist sets off in search of Sita and a solution to save his vulture-kin, only to realize that his prosthetic wing – colonized and traumatized by its military memories – has other plans for him. Can we help Jatayu and his wing imagine an alter-future?
In the following documentation of the performance from the Asian Art Museum, audience members are presented with the speculative cinema episode, which is followed by a role-playing game, where we wonder together about the queer utopias that are latent in our impaired landscapes and disabled ecologies:
For the role-playing game, audiences were given the option to re-animate Jatayu’s wing and undo its military entanglements toward more utopian ends, so that Jatayu may eventually find Sita (who has now become place – S.I.T.A. – Sanctuary In Terra Autonoma, an autonomous zone in the forest). They are given the option to modify any three of the following categories: Material, Wing Shape, Wing Size, Design Process, Wing Affixion, Functionality, Production Process, and Type of Labor. Each of these modifications came with a set of intended consequences which audience members could see upfront, and a list of unintended consequences which were revealed only at the end of the game. As audience members discussed modification options, each group was provided with a visual artist who sketched the re-animated wing. Images and descriptions of these illustrations are included below.
The following chart provides access to the different modification categories and their unintended consequences: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lP-5ZUJDAYjh8T8u24B0flTNRezI-90lqnOp070ehgM/edit#gid=0
The following slideshow provides access to the different modification categories and their intended consequences: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ppyS5G_gzAe4_x8icm7_e8f65kK5r5j2xFxME8YCaW4/edit#slide=id.gdc39cbfa5d_0_87
Anuj Vaidya 