Weird Lecture is a hybrid, malleable format for staging thought. It is a lecture-performance open to poetry, audience participation, scores, spells, group exercises, character work, stand-up, and occasional choral formulations of the stories we tell ourselves, cut up as a song on the floor for folks to sing.

The term Weird Lecture surfaced because I was layering material in rehearsal, in organizing curatorial platforms, in workshops, and in presentations that defied genre. The term surfaced because, as artists, we give names to things to form common languages to speak during the process. The term surfaced because there was no other way to explain the mix of formats I was interested in and working with. A Weird Lecture is exactly what it says it is, and I wanted to see what one was. To me, the weird has always been a generative, perverse obscurity—a way to re-see or refresh the banality of being.

Weird Lecture thrives on abrupt shifts between theory and affect, because performance studies demands forms that can hold both analysis and the disorientation of lived experience. Some things can only be articulated in the turbulence of poetry after theory. A moment of shared intimacy—the hush of presence after a loud sound, after an intense litany of unbearable sadness—might be followed by fragility that gets the audience looking around, asking, “How long will this silence last?” until one person laughs, and then we all do.

Weird Lecture is a reflexive aspect of practice: as much about research as about dissemination. It is a place where the studio’s “aha” moments, fragments of scripts, and improvisations are shared in the presence of an intimate gathering. Some gimmicks I’m good at—who’s gonna know?—but mostly it’s new shit, because I live for the “aha” moments. I grew up in a small town, in direct competition with people who went to Harvard, which is why I burned out: because I tried too hard. But their work was shit, because they didn’t try hard enough. Weird Lecture is as much about the pain of making stuff as about the stuff itself.

The format says: “discursive threads, somatic exploration, and cultural critique can be braided together in real time.” The body and the discourse move together, undoing any clear line between choreography and speech act. This format is neither linear nor bound by convention. It functions as a methodology that stages research itself as performance—constantly shifting between modes of address, constantly experimenting with how publics are composed.

Weird Lecture is a tool for problem-solving, for rehearsing impossible repair, and for building counterpublics where humor, ritual, theory, and embodied knowledge equal any means necessary.