SHORT FOR PYROMANIA, LONG FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
(Work in progress)
This performance piece begins from the artist’s lived experience of so-called mental illness (OCD) within systems designed to run hot. Facilitated as part social choreography and part listening practice, the work approaches obsessive doubt as a site of epistemic labour—where the violence of certainty becomes acutely perceptible.
Drawing on Octavia Butler’s fictional drug Pyro*—also referred to as Blaze, Sunfire, Flash, or Fuego—the work frames addiction to fire as a political and affective condition: a systemic compulsion toward acceleration, illumination, and rationality. Against this drive, the performance proposes doubt as an ethical posture. Hesitation, repetition, obsessive attention, and magical thinking are not treated as disruptions, but as devotional practices: ways of staying intimate with consequence, risk, and social implication—a refusal of detached and disembodied knowledge.
Practically, the work unfolds as a material and social score of doubt and delay. The central gesture is a deliberate misemployment of matchsticks; they are broken, mishandled, and wasted. The labour of kindling is displaced and preparation thus becomes a primary action. These material manipulations are continuously interrupted by, and co-hesitating with, textual and gestural fragments. Readings and minor movements repeat, flare up, and fall apart. As such, fire is constantly anticipated—imagined onto body parts or smouldering within vocalised ruminations—but always deferred or impeded. Ignition is thus posed as a question rather than an act, while doubt and repetition negotiate the implications of heat.
“Short for Pyromania, Long for Everything Else” proposes a collective practice of tending heat, doubt, and delay. By foregrounding obsessive labour, hesitation, and deferred ignition, the work reframes fire not as spectacle but as a shared condition. It invites the audience to remain close to what flares, to sense their own thresholds for intensity, and to consider how knowledge, responsibility, and relation might operate when certainty itself is the substance being burned.
*In Octavia Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower” (1993), “Pyro” is a drug that gives users a euphoric high when they light and watch fires.
Credits
Text/Choreography/Performance: Camilla Brogaard
Dates
22/04/ 2026, Work in progress sharing, Tender Prospects, Lisbon (PT).
CAMILLA BROGAARD 