Have You Tried Screaming Your Heart Out And Pretending To Be Cher?

Have You Tried Screaming Your Heart Out and Pretending to Be Cher? is a residency which was commissioned by LADA DIY in 2019, with the support of Lancaster Arts. See the invitation here.

Creating a connection practice based on karaoke and daydreaming and oversharing and shared chips.

Have You Tried Screaming Your Heart Out and Pretending to be Cher? looks at all the things we do which make us feel awe for the world and the people in it – the things which make us have moments of ‘I feel so connected to everything!’ or ‘I know exactly what you mean!!’ or ‘I love you so much my chest hurts!!!’  We look towards making the foundations of a personal connection practice to help us live in the world with empathy and resilience.

Western culture is buzzing its tits off about wellbeing practice at the moment (have you tried morning power poses? Have you tried colouring in?) which is great for individual health but as the world tries to divide us up, where’s the practice which helps us remember that everyone and everything is bound together?  In a culture sceptical of religious doctrine, it feels like we’ve thrown the empathetic baby out with the dogmatic bathwater.

This residency draws upon the everyday things we do to make ourselves feel connected and help us work out how this can be respected as something we require to make ourselves feel okay and present and alive. Instead of following pseudo health gurus (have you tried steam cleaning your vagina?) or appropriating from faith practices we don’t subscribe to, can we say ‘it’s actually quite an important part of my connection practice to scream my heart out and pretend to be Cher in sweaty karaoke hotboxes, while friends throw their arms in the air and scream back because they love me and they feel it too’. Is there spirituality in daydreaming out of bus windows and is there a bonding ritual in sharing chips. Can we consider these things sacred?