Hazel Meyer

Hazel Meyer’s Muscle Panic is an iterative world-making installation and performance project that uses various athletics tropes to enliven and re-centre the importance of desire, queerness, movement and sweat. Muscle Panic engages non-professional LGBTQ+ performers within a scaffold installation containing objects that function across the spectrum of prop, tool, costume, equipment, and sculpture. Located between choreography and improvisation, Muscle Panic celebrates the idiosyncratic physicality of each performer, valuing spirit over virtuosity.

Named after the sociological term ‘moral panic’ that describes an often irrational fear or threat to the dominant order, Muscle Panic creates a time and place beholden to a sweaty self-governance. It values and celebrates forms of gendered embodiment that threaten norms, and provides tools and physical prompts to highlight the situations in which we make and flex this power. Muscle Panic asks how we can use the tools in already existing structures to make a world that can hold us in ways it hasn’t before.

Coproduction Ferme du Buisson / Blackwood Gallery - Toronto

With the backing of Centre Culturel Canadien and the Canadian Council for the Arts