GAPE, is a radical spectacle and performative intervention created in collaboration by Susannah Haight and Alberta artist, Tia Ashley Kushniruk (亚 女弟).
Blending butoh, dance theater and virgorous repetative movement, GAPE collapses the camp theatricality of Catholic ritual into corporeal transformation of body horror. Marian imagery is driven toward distortion purity and abjection, reverence and refusal existing simultaneously. Through tableau-based image making and heightened physical states, the body becomes icon, relic, and rupture, no longer readable as singular or whole.
Lighting designer Darren Shaen activates the space using live, manual overhead projectors as the sole light source. Operated in real time, these analog devices function as both illumination and distortion, producing shifting magnifications, shadows, and deformation that further destabilize the body and its image.
Through excess, satire, and corporeal instability, GAPE treats monstrosity as a generative condition rather than a deviation. The work fractures inherited images not to replace them, but to let them fail, opening a space where femininity exceeds legibility, sanctity becomes porous, and new mythologies emerge.
a rising tide of choir voices. They start softly and build into something larger. There are no instruments, every sound is a human voice singing in an Orthodox language. There’s a sense of solemn ceremony, like walking through a hall of tall stone columns. A feeling of reverence. There is no pulse to tap your foot to, instead, it has the slow, expanding quality of breathing in cold morning air and feeling it fill your chest, it almost chokes you. A sense of the sublime.
The voices lift, all hitting the same high note, like the sky has cracked open and a blinding light has pierced the space. The voices rumble together, humming. They begin to quiet. The voices dissipate into a bizarre, broken frequency, taking something once beautiful and souring it.
The hymns seep into the body. The holy machine. Oscillating motor-oil DNA. Something is happening.
A machine is heard whispering through the car radio: “Why m-m-must we p-p-pray s-s-screaming.” Scratchy and glottal. over and over turning over. It’s clearer now: “Why must we pray screaming?” Again and again. From many directions, from many times. Sliding all over one another.
The subwoofers pound. Slow and steady. The holy heart reanimating. The engine warming. A steady slow drip. A bead of sweat hitting a vibration. The whispering still heard, unconsciously morphing into a water screw. “Hey Google, can you please define perpetual motion?”
Wet skin stretched. Pulled taut, drummed out in a loop. The sweat and the skin create a beat that makes your hips buck. Only one window down on the highway. The vibration in your ears slowed down and tuned up. There is a machine being spanked in the backseat.
It’s working! Chug chug chug. We are moving forward! Everyone’s joined in! A well-oiled, very good machine.
A synth — or Is it a rubber band? or Is it a tendon? or Is it a wire? Bowed to a deep rhythm.
We are back on the highway. But tightening. Faster. Faster. Faster! FASTER!!! FASTER!!!!!!!
You climax through the radio. SCREAM!! SCREAM!! SCREAM!!!!! SUCK BACK AIR!!! SCREAM!! SCREAM!! SCREAM!!!!! SUCK BACK AIR!!!
The machines are making love in a cantering throb. You get on the ride. The synth tendon. The water screw. The ride.
We sink inside an organ made of computer chips made of crystal. Wait, where did our horse go? You catch your breath on the swell pedals. The organ evaporates.
Quiet, except for that damn stutter through the radio! “why m-m- must we p-p-pray s-s-screaming?” Over and over. “why m-m- must we p-p-pray s-s-screaming?” “why m-m- must we p-p-pray s-s-screaming?” “why m-m- must we p-p-pray s-s-screaming?” Will we ever get off?
The machine gulps down it’s silver throat. We are in an organ now. the other kind. Echoing like Sof Omar. Digested. We’ve been eaten, fucked and digested. There is nothing but silence filling the space now. The chaos has come to an end.
A broken voice recorder begins repeating small clipped fragments of dialogue. The fractured vocals creep through the space, casting unease. Something is in the room but cannot be seen. The broken vocals repeat again and again.
More choir voices creep back into the space. They overlap with the broken vocals. Beneath them a pulsing beat emerges, like being in a dimly lit club. The hymnal voices feel like a distant memory, a call back to the opening. As the piece progresses, layers accumulate: a low bass pulse underpins the melody, light percussive touches flicker at the edges, and the harmonic field opens. Chords swelling and receding. A synth rises. Things begin to feel alien.
A singular voice breaks through the synth. A woman’s voice, reversed. choir music sung backwards. Silence behind her, then a herd of voices appear to support her. The voices begin to sound like broken violins or soft, elongated screams. They hum together with rigorous tension, until finally one last voice remains, and eventually quiets into silence.