Daviel Shy

Artist Statement

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A kink - an irregularity in an otherwise constricting chain - can save us from drowning or suffocation by offering a way through and out of destructive loops, knotting one to their story while making room for a change of direction. This is taboo’s transformative charge.  My body implores me to advocate harder,  to unbury my desires from under my all my lovers’ desires.



So I dive into histories- ancestral and archival- and collaborate with ghost subjects, coaxing their secrets from the spaces between the words. I listen for what is not written or preserved; opening the path for dreams, voices and images to inhabit the rooms in my imagination and find hosts and new life through the breath and bodies of actors. 



My writing relies on these living as well. The artists, people, faces, and presences that I fall in love with, my contemporaries. Admiring another’s work and choosing to mix our arts together is a sacred intimacy. My writing process opens for the performer to step in long before the script is complete. I study my performers as deeply as I can, rewriting as necessary, constructing the characters as garments for them to wear, made from threads of their own beauty. 



Kneeling at my bloody roots covered over with denial and mistakes, I make an offering to my dead, and a promise to my living: grant me this opportunity to engage their stories as portals; peeling off scabs, letting in air, trying again at healing.