Cough Drop Circus

What if, when a performance is described as “nothing short of magical,” it is not just a metaphor? Maija Hirvanen and Eva Neklyaeva wrote a book together exploring the techniques involved in creating and curating contemporary performances through practical magic.

Like feminist magic, performance magic is not inherited or exclusive, but learned and inclusive. Anyone can practice it.

This is a book of recipes and spills, based on lived experience, observations and bewilderments of both writers.

Concept and writing by Maija Hirvanen and Eva Neklyaeva Design: POMO Publisher: Friends of Physical Contemporary Art, in the frame of Performing Portals project Editing: Leah Whitman-Salkin Funded by Art Promotion Centre Finland

A collection of brief descriptions of Toine's movement performances- and installations since 1979. The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which Toine's ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into a writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.

Each of the 120 selected works has been translated in the most concise way into words and sentences.

Because of the possible role that the book could play in the discussion about conserving and documenting volatile works of art, Toine included related texts by other writers who directly or indirectly responded  to my writing: Marcus Bergner  Hannes Böhringer  Florian Cramer  Jan Van Den  Dobbelsteen  Nell Donkers  Tim Etchells  Ger Groot  Geert Koevoets Thomas Körtvelyessy  Dom H. van der Laan  Dick Raaijmakers  Jan Laurens Siesling  Sandra Smets  Hans Stevens  ieke Trinks  Samuel Vriezen  Ciel Werts - Emilie Gallier
Editing and text advice   Kathrin Wolkowicz  Dick van Teylingen

translations:  Simon Benson  Maaike Trimbach  Samuel Vriezen  Helen Adkins  Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

English version

graphic design: Koos Siep
Edition: 2 x 250 copies

Mycoscores / Choreospores is a set of artistic scores for exploring the connections between fungal and human ways of being, particularly through movement and dance. The scores propose starting points for dancing, weaving together social connections, composing and exploring performativity.

The publication consists of 31 cards, each presenting a single score, a booklet with a text entitled Fungi Feel, the introduction, instructions, a glossary and additional short text entries accompanying the scores.


Scores, writing and concept by Maija Hirvanen
Graphic design: Arja Karhumaa
Publisher: Friends of Physical Contemporary Art, in the frame of Performing Portals project. In collaboration with DAS Research/DAS Publishing, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam. Published Jan. 2024

A poetic script, an apocalyptic newspaper, and a syntax of intersected historical narratives. An investigation of an archive of writings previously published in The Lowell Offering, a periodical issued between 1840-1845 by women factory workers in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Design by Daria Kiseleva

Basic Mechanics is a hold-loose collection of words as findlings and carriers, that hold or lose meaning. Consequently, a description of this work will never simply come out of one’s mouth. The narrative will seem tied together with loose threads. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, we know the story of the hero with the spear and the violence and the teleological progression. But isn’t the story that can be told by all, one of carrying and being carried? Isn’t language a wrapping for all those contradictory and wondrous thoughts and feelings? And can they be captured on paper, for a while, and set free again to counterbalance the killer story?

Confessing secrets and desires to each other became a method of sharing. Accompanied by giggles, we somatically connected the stories we carry, which we (dare to) place with another, which move from the inside out. This publication spills, soaks, opens and closes to confessions, poems and drawings in looping motifs. A shell swimming in a sea of words.

The poems in Ran Walker's collection use an African-American poetic form called the Kwansaba, which was created in 1995 by Dr. Eugene Redmond. The poems follow a seven-line, seven-words per line pattern with no word more than seven letters (save proper nouns and foreign terms). All language within the form speaks to aspects of African-American history and culture. With these forty-nine poems, each chapter of forty-nine lines, Walker offers profound commentary on a wide variety of topics ranging from interrogations of celebrity culture to issues that speak directly to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society–this collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.

As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. Deviant Propulsion is dedicated to the elimination of fear. The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. The poems that emerge from this life-long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

CAConrad is the author of nine books of poetry and essays, including their latest book JUPITER ALIGNMENT: (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals and While Standing in Line for Death, which won a Lambda Book Award. A documentary about their work, The Book of Conrad, is viewable online on their website.

05/09/04 Now she is blogging. Now she is sitting on the black couch listening to the sirens wail and the rain fall. Now she is thinking of oysters. Now she is wondering why this is worth sharing. Now she is thinking, how decipher what is worth reading? Who is to say? Sifters. She thinks we have become a nation of sifters. So began a three-year experiment in blogging. An experiment begun for many reasons—a way for an expat to keep in touch with fellow Canadian writers and artists, a way to come to terms with the increasing relevance of the internet in literary lives, and a way to figure out why, after decades of gains, women writers are still grossly underrepresented in critical dialogues.

With an afterword by Vanessa Place.