speech acts (all-in)

a one-night performance by lydon frank lettuce

Hot August Night

Friday August 2, 2024

Performance: 7:30pm

referring is a collaborative process – a conceptual pact – temporary, fleeting, yes –

we are suspended in saying.

& something always happens – even if it doesn’t.

example:

“ i promise you.”

For our annual Hot August Night, Grizzly Grizzly presents speech acts ( all-in ), a one-night performance by Philadelphia-based artist and writer lydon frank lettuce. In this bizarre spectacle of the limits of language, lettuce takes on the form of a word wrangler – embodying the tensions and possibilities of what it looks like to hold meaning together; a somatic exploration of how words do things, how language acts, just as we do.

speech acts ( all-in ) is a performance in three parts that draws from forms of lecture, corporeal rehearsal, and folkstyle wrestling to carve out the poetics of the enigmatic “laws” of psycholinguistics. Using the body and its traces as a mode of baffling the paradigm of binaries, lettuce invites viewers to imagine queer futures of (be)longing. To wrestle with language, with a hay bale, with a garden hose, with the irreducible unknot of it all, is to try and hold it: we are suspended. This performance, part of a continuing series, imagines a belonging in this suspension.

Artist Bio:

lydon frank lettuce, an artist and writer from rural Pennsylvania, brings a playful and insightful approach to their work, exploring pleasure, play, intimacy, and teaching. They grapple with the complexities of desire and challenge the boundaries of language and meaning. Using performance, play, and writing, lettuce's work critiques social structures and embraces the possibilities of pleasure. Their art practice involves writing, quantum physics, and self- performance, merging these elements to celebrate the multifaceted nature of desire.

lettuce reimagines narratives of belonging through diverse forms of embodiment, performance, and installation. Their work invites audiences to embrace queer exuberance and fearless experimentation, exploring connections and meanings found in the in-between spaces of life. lettuce holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Parsons School of Design. They have performed and exhibited their work nationally, from California to Pennsylvania to New York, and were awarded an international performing arts residency at Performing Arts Forum, Saint-Ermé, France.