Activation in the moment of pausing or slowing: Queer potentiality in the timeframe of performance/making

What could be activated when habitually enacted, perceived-as-linear timeframes are paused or slowed? What modes of queering become activated at these points and in what ways can these shift perspective within performance events? This article explores moments of pausing or slowing down as containing queer potential, offering opportunities to disrupt existing, and reveal alternative, modes of engagement. In these moments shifts in directionality, focus or time occur, revealing hidden microdetails and creating opportunities for unlearning and undoing. From this perspective performances and practices that invite pausing or slowing down will be considered as moments for queer activation. Queering does not require erasure of the past but approaching it anew, placing things in strange relations, and opening spaces for unknown futures.
The article considers my own experiences as an audience member in performances by Sioned Huws, Goat Island and Ranters Theatre, where pausing or slowing down were used as performative strategies. Considered as being moments of queer pausing, I explore what they actually and potentially activated as inviting other ways of perceiving and inhabiting the (performance) world. These moments are interwoven with dialogic engagements with ideas about crip practices (Kafer 2013 and Mills and Sanchez 2023), queerness and temporality (Freeman 2010) and performativity and time (Bottoms and Ghoulish 2007). The article also considers moments of my own and other’s practices as neurodivergent performance-makers. Queer activation in this context dismantles conventional performance of control, masking and mastery and embraces the potential to be uncovered in moments of forgetting, exhaustion and making mistakes. Pausing or slowing down in these cases is often done from necessity, but when explored as a creative practice as well offers opportunities for queering that practice.