Day: **Saturday, August 16
Time: 6 - 9 pm
Location: Less Dead Studio in Poughkeepsie, NY
Address: Provided in vetting approval email (see below)
Ages: 18+
Facilitated by: Empress Wu and Athénaïs Nin
In a world that is profoundly unsafe for many of us, we can no longer collectively afford to keep operating under the illusion of what Lucie Fielding calls the Safety Axiom–the idea that feeling safe is a precondition to engaging in challenging things, whether in a therapy space, on the streets, or in the bedroom or dungeon. We need revolutions of desire!
In specifically kink contexts, unforgettable, emotionally transformative scenes–the kinds that haunt our dreams, ride us like nightmares (pace Jeanette Winterson), become lore we gush to one another about on long, winter evenings, and pull us from past versions of ourselves into spaces of emergence–ask a lot of us. They ask us, in the words of the psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou, “[to dare] to risk the excitement of danger, to tread into places that scare yet thrill us.” They ask us to give ourselves over to experiences, to our scene partners, to the shadowy realms in ourselves. And they ask us to do all of that while yielding control and foregoing the stability and surety safety would promise us.
But how do we actually do all of that? How, and under what (pre-)conditions or frameworks might we turn toward, embrace, and meet each other during, and after, transformative experiences, and in the face of the risk of rupture, discomfort, and uncertainty? In short: how do we fuck (and live) beyond fear?
In this 3 hour experience–through lecture, journaling and reflection, group discussion, and a demo scene–Athénaïs Nin and Empress Wu will offer an immersive and engaging deep dive into these questions.
We will consider:
🔥 Problematizing and re-visioning discourses of safety to move beyond an individualistic, risk-phobic model to one steeped in co-creation and relationality;
🔥 Principles of solidarity and mutual entanglement in kink; and
🔥 How to build and negotiate trusting, intense, and potentially emotionally-transformative scenes and dynamics.
We aim for this event to transcend and push the limits of the traditional workshop format to implicate attendees in the experience, to co-create through co-presence. This is an intensely risky proposition, however, and we are fully open to the possibility that it will fail spectacularly. But we hope and intend that participants will emerge from this workshop conceiving of the way they play–or what is possible through play–more expansively, dynamically, and creatively.