Beyond Composition and Collapse with Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish

Hosted by ds4si and Project South

About the Series:

Neo-liberalism or fascism? Us or them? Poetic or practical? Throughout history, it has been the trickster figures who messed with the line dividing this from that, who troubled the certainty of categories. In this moment when so many of us are stiff with fear, rigid with rage, and locked into our positions, we at DS4SI suggest considering something counterintuitive. When it feels like we can’t think and we can’t move, we suggest that “can’t think” and “can’t move” are in fact deeply connected. In this moment, instead of the binaries offered to us, we believe we need a range of motion. That range of motion—that movement that breaks a binary—can also help us rethink it. Instead of going harder, locking in, ramping up our righteousness, we need to explore the uncertainty, the not-knowing. The thirdness. The weird, the poetic, the perverse, the liminal.

About this Event:

Throughout history, it has been the trickster figures who messed with the line dividing this from that, who troubled the certainty of sequence. Since 2005, ds4si has worked to build tools and a community of practice around rearranging the given. Now, in 2025, we find ourselves called to reach even wider for the practices that will keep us from falling into or for the binaries. Impossibility and failure are usually thought of as barriers to creative work. What orientation of body, mind, pen allow these instead to be the force driving new inquiry? For the second panel in our Beyond the Binary speaker series we bring choreographic thinkers Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish to take us into their work on impossibility and its destabilization.

About the Speakers:

Lin Hixson co-founded Every house has a door in 2008, the Chicago-based performance company that she directs. She also was the director of the performance group Goat Island (1987 – 2009). Every house has a door has presented both nationally and internationally including Prague, Helsinki, Glasgow, London, New York, Austin, and Chicago. She has received awards from the United States Artists, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Driehaus Foundation, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Residencies have included The Bellagio Center, MANCC, and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Her writing has been published in the journals Poetry, Performance Research, and Parallax, as well as the anthologies The Creative Critic – Writing as/about Practice and The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader. She is Professor Emerita of Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts.

Matthew Goulish co-founded Every house has a door in 2008 with director Lin Hixson. He is dramaturg and performer for the company. His books include 39 microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001), The Brightest Thing in the World – 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), Pitch and Revelation—Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, co-authored with Will Daddario (Punctum Books, 2022), and Kingfisher (both are worse, 2024). His essays have appeared in Richard Rezac Address (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Propositions in the Making – Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the Writing Program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About ds4si:

Situated at the intersections of design thinking and practice, social justice and activism, public art and social practice, and civic/popular engagement, the Design Studio for Social Intervention (ds4si) designs and tests social interventions with and on behalf of marginalized populations, controversies, and ways of life. ds4si partners with communities, artists, and social justice practitioners to imagine, demonstrate, and collectively rebuild places to be more just and vibrant. The people behind the Design Studio for Social Intervention make up a constellation of activists, artists, academics, designers, dreamers, tricksters, organizations, and foundations.