– Introduction
fugue: exodus major is the working title of a new composed theatre work initiated by Patsy Lassbo. The project follows and extends their interdisciplinary research spanning trans*aesthetics, dissociation, music, technology, and the theatrical machinery, which previously took shape in the master’s project fugue (2024).
Since 2024, Lassbo has continued developing this theoretical framework and gathering new references, collaborations, and sources of inspiration. Production of a new work is planned to begin in 2027. Through music, poetry, and performance, the project critically engages with the dominant modes of world-making in Western culture.
Trans*aesthetics
Trans*aesthetics is an interdisciplinary field situated across aesthetics, gender studies, trans studies, queer theory, and beyond. It produces knowledge about the world, society, art, and the human condition through transsexual and transgender experiences, practices, and modes of perception. Over the past decade, the field has gained increasing influence academically, artistically, and politically. Influential voices include Susan Stryker, Maxi Wallenhorst, McKenzie Wark, and Jack Halberstam. Contemporary discourse surrounding dissociation is strongly associated with this field.
– Background
During their master’s studies at DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam (2022–24), Lassbo conducted extensive research into trans experience, dissociation, and composed theatre. As mentioned above, this research culminated in the work fugue. Through text, music, sound, image, and, crucially, the theatrical machinery as an active performer, the work explored how the relationships between body, self, and world are constantly slipping, shifting, and being renegotiated. The piece became a search for the voids that emerge between self, body, and world. These spaces open possibilities for contemplation, intense rest (from the world, the self, and the body), and new configurations of experience.
A fundamental premise of the work is that the audience’s bodies, cognition, and subjectivity constitute the true stage of this performance. The theatrical event and its machinery function as the means of creating “a drama of experience”, borrowing Heiner Goebbels’s discussion of composed theatre in Aesthetics of Absence (2015).
– Artistic Concept
Unlike fugue, which investigated the relationships between self, body, and world, fugue: exodus major focuses entirely on “the World” itself. It draws on the concept of “Unworlding” introduced in Jack Halberstam’s 2024 essay of the same name.
Halberstam argues that “the World” functions as a totalising and hierarchical framework, historically entangled with colonial, humanist, and exclusionary forms of ordering. The positive connotations that world-building has acquired, particularly within the arts in recent years, may not possess the capacity to liberate us from these structures. Instead, we are encouraged to seek out cracks, contradictions, and gaps: forms of access that minority subjects often possess. “The World” itself might be abolished in favour of making a future possible. The neo-liberal capitalist project of repair as modus operandi is rejected.
By hijacking theatre’s traditional construction of fictional worlds and universes, this project seeks to examine and challenge the mechanisms through which we, as human beings, participate in the continuous production and maintenance of “the World”. As in fugue, this inquiry is made tangible through the audience’s cognitive sensory experience as well as discursively. An illusion theatre about the World as illusion.
Drawing inspiration from the pathology of dissociation, and more specifically from the concept of derealization: the experience of the world as unreal, dreamlike, or indistinct, Lassbo has begun developing a structural aesthetic they call ‘derealism’. Derealism should not be understood as anti-realism, surrealism, or psychological derealization. Rather, it is conceived as a way for theatre to act directly upon the audience’s own processes of world-making. It proposes a reversal of the conventional relationship between theatre and reality.
Together with a multidisciplinary team spanning theatre, music, film, and graphic design, all practitioners whose work engages with these questions in different ways, we are composing a piece that both explores and enacts these concerns discursively and sensorially. With dissociation as a critical aesthetic practice and the World as antagonist, we seek to inhabit the impossibilities we encounter within the World. We share these experiences through a collaborative process with the audience.
We work site-specifically with the black box as a world-machine. By obscuring the contours of the architecture through which theatre is traditionally presented as a “slice of the world”, we move through voids and sensory black holes. Mirrors, plexiglass, veils, and smoke are used to generate visual and acoustic phenomena that render reality enigmatic and loose rather than taken for granted, searching for holistic alienation. Text is spoken, sung, and embodied through video, and acts analogously to how poetry unworlds and alienates language. Music is the works main structure, and its composition carries us and the other performative elements through and beyond time.
*Parts of this text has been translated from Swedish to English with the help of an LLM/A.I