[MB] I wonder how this notion of collapsing time extends through your creative process. For you, is a work finished once it leaves the rehearsal room, or does that moment of finalisation occur after its first showing, or after its final showing, or maybe the work is always in a state of unfurling even after it is put to rest?

[LYIN] ‘Collapsing time’ is also thinking about what those moments when I/you/we/one might feel fully present - after sex, dancing, out in the elements/‘nature’, the feel of the steam from a just boiled kettle hitting your chin, when menstrual blood drips from between your legs and runs down your thigh…

I think that about all ‘works’ as part of a cumulative process of my artistic practice. I enter into performances as research spaces, constellations of people-time-place-performance that become crystallised. Some of the performances reach a place of completion where they become themselves, but not all. Most of the work happens outside of a rehearsal room, a continual hum of a thought process - on walks, at night, when I am having a conversation about other things, in dreams... Audience, the people who receive the thing I am making/imagining/imaging, are part of it and its forming, its augmentation, so it’s never finished before this encounter which shifts and transforms whatever I/we might have thought we were doing or planned to do. It’s an interesting kind of surrender, and when you’re lucky, the thing reveals itself.

[MB] I wonder where this leaves you as a creator/performer. As someone who frequently collaborates, particularly with sound artists and composers but also creatives from other disciplines, do you consider yourself the master of your work, or a vessel for the work to speak through, or both?

[LYIN] I am really against the myth of the solo artist and the fantasy of complete independence. I think/feel/move in relation and I guess the constant collaborations speak to this. I don’t think about myself as either, and definitely don’t want to be either! Master nor vessel. We have to shapeshift (or maybe it’s about long term processes of clarification?). The different angles/lights shining make different things visible. I am interested in being wide and collaboration feels expansive, building something as the simultaneous articulation of multiple desires, lines flying out in many directions. I enjoy working on projects with different people who see different things in the ideas I propose and teach me about what I am trying to do or find or unearth. I think my collaborators are some of the most incredible artists - getting to work with them can be humbling and is always an honour.

[MB] Considering this event was curated around the notion of ‘care’, where do you consider that term to be situated within your practice, either in care for others or in moments of self-care?

[LYIN] In the making of this performance, which is part of a trilogy, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is to grow in a hostile context, what care might mean or look like once you’ve been uprooted or displaced, if you are a hybrid creature and there is no developed formula for your survival… I’m also wary of this word right now, as it becomes jargon, something thrown around often, and embodied less so. The whole self-care thing has been totally co-opted by a consumerist agenda and a Wellness industry (conspiracy?) that wants me to go for a mani pedi, pay for expensive yoga classes, go to mindfulness sessions so that I can be a better more subdued worker, a more well-groomed Woman, rather than someone who knows how to direct my rage towards the dismantling of oppressive internalised ideologies. Then Audre Lorde being endlessly quoted out of context saying that self-care is an act of political warfare and this being mobilised to make consumption good and worthy, instead of critical thought around structures, positionality, orientation and relation to self. Or bad art.

In truth, I am trying to understand what those words mean and how to always be living care - for all things and non-things - and love.

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