Camille Intson (alias, Camie) (b. 1997) is a Hamilton-born and Tkaronto-based multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice spans writing, performance, music, new media, and emerging technology. Her critically acclaimed body of work has been honoured with a Playwrights’ Guild of Canada Tom Hendry Award, Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award, NNPF National Playwriting Competition Award, Hamilton Music Award, Best in Fringe/Venue and New Play Contest Award, and a Canadian Folk Music Award nomination. Intson is also currently a PhD Candidate within the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, where her work explores queer and feminist embodiments of emerging technologies. When not creating things, Camille is a proud cat mom to Leopold, a passionate reality TV consumer, bubble bath dweller, and lover of hot melted cheese. She can be found everywhere online at camilleintson.com and/or @thecamiliad.
This interview took place on 18 October 2023 in Toronto. It has been edited for clarity. For Part the First, visit here.
THEORY WITHIN THE BODY | BARBENHEIMER | THE BEAST OF CAPITALISM | WALSH | ON COLLABORATION | HIS EXCELLENCY LEOPOLD WOLFGANG INTSON THE FIRST | ON NARRATIVE VERSUS LYRIC | FREE FOR ALL
Camille Intson: We have a lot of fun. I’m teaching a master’s class next semester. I’ve not taught a master’s class yet, so I’m a little nervous about that, but hopefully they don’t listen to Parasite *laughs*. But it’s a great class. It’s a really cool class. It’s called Queer G.L.A.M. It’s an introduction to queer experiences and queer studies—including intersections of race, gender, and sexuality—within the context of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Hence, G.L.A.M, the acronym. It’s a really interesting class. And I actually took it in the first year of my PhD. My supervisor taught it. I loved it. And I loved it especially because it was such a care-centric class. Mine was a class of mostly queer people (and some very well-meaning allies), but mostly queer people. And every class, my supervisor Patrick [Keilty] took thirty minutes to ask every single student how they were doing as a check-in. You do that in theatre all the time. Get in a circle. Check in. But this was a class over Zoom. And it was actually so beautiful to hear from every single person in a time when we were so isolated from each other. And that’s something that I have brought into all of my classes that I teach to this day. I don’t care how long it takes: ten, fifteen minutes, twenty? I will hear from every single person. I will do my very best to create an environment where we commune around care and not just the empty promise of academic validation.
Kevin Andrew Heslop: Lest you be assigning texts about the importance of acknowledging one’s own subjective experience and self-care at the expense of actually ensuring students’ own well-being during the conversation, like teaching Thoreau in a windowless basement. I feel like that connects to a lot of what you’ve been saying, to WALSH, and to the conversation we had about Barbie and Mattel.
Camille Intson: Well that’s how this interview started—with me ranting, over some really good Greek food, about my longstanding beef with the Barbie movie.
Kevin Andrew Heslop: I don’t know think it was a rant, because it was solicited and eagerly attended to.
Let me contextualize this event for our readers: Kevin and I were at a dinner with our friends, both named Jack, and I asked them what they thought of the Barbie and Oppenheimer films. I’ll admit that I set them up a bit. I was the only woman at the table and I knew that they might feel uncomfortable voicing dislike for the Barbie movie—you know how it is, the film could be said to provoke male guilt. I let the discomfort fester because I thought it was funny, but really I’m one of Barbie’s harsher critics. I’ll admit that I actually preferred Oppenheimer as a film—with a lot of critical nuance. It’s got some glaring issues and omissions. But I did prefer it to Barbie.
I was thinking about how your analysis relates to parasitism.
This thing we’re calling parasitism is provoked by The Play in the System, an academic monograph by Anna Watkins Fisher. For Fisher, the parasite is a subversive figure that creates new avenues for political action under neoliberal capitalism, and specifically within corporate-capitalist-colonial institutions. I reviewed it for TDR: The Drama Review a couple years ago.
*Camille reads Kevin’s prepared questions from a laptop*
I’m thinking about the continually reflexive tone of your dissertation proposal—
THEORY WITHIN THE BODY
Well, I don’t think there’s an ethical alternative.
—and how you’re continually not only locating yourself as a white queer femme hooman but also locating your work as an artist and your experiences at select arts hubs in Toronto as equally worthy of academic consideration.
In some ways, sure.
So: purity, complicity, contemporary art, capitalism, echochambers, algorithms. I think this also brings us to Barbie and Mattel and the institutional co-opting of queerness, and therefore also to WALSH.
I’m also thinking about this question of decolonization and anti-colonialism—
Mhm.
—And the importance of that distinction and hypocrisies implicit in preaching the importance of—I didn’t see Barbie, but—
You don’t need to see Barbie.
I don’t need to see Barbie.
You can put that in. Fuck Barbie. Watch [Jonathan] Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.
But this let’s discuss the disconnect between practice and theory. I want to blame it on Descartes.
*laughing* That’s funny.
Ken Robinson says that university professors are people who look upon their bodies as means of transport for their heads.
Mm. There’s some truth to that. Especially in English departments.
And I’m wondering whether you’ve observed in the academy an almost obliviousness to one’s body.
Yes.
And also how much of this can we pin on Descartes?
Cartesian dualism certainly underpins a lot of work in the academy. It’s woven into the fabric of the institution. Nowadays, with the emergence of fine arts programmes at the post-secondary level, we’re seeing a lot of challenges to the mind-body split through practice-based artistic research, or research-creation, which is a more geographically specific term for artistic research undertaken within so-called Canada. This kind of work privileges subjectivity and embodied experience as research tools, but—and I have lectured and written on this extensively—oftentimes researchers in the arts and humanities will feel the pressure of demonstrating a rigour in these methodologies equivalent to that of the sciences. But this is of course a false and flawed equivalency. Therein lies the problem with experimental pedagogy: possibilities are foreclosed or co-opted or corporatized just as they are expressed. Why force artistic research to be more like science? Why can’t it exist on its own terms? I’ve done a series of lectures interrogating some of these tensions within the artistic/research divide. I have a lot to say about this, but I won’t bore you with methodology talk.
Mhm, mhm.
But do academics fear the body? Absolutely. Even body theorists, even phenomenologists and queer theorists, are constantly figuring out how to write the body. And a lot of my work—I mean, you read my doctoral dissertation proposal; I’m so sorry for that, although I guess I’m at fault for sending it to you—
Nothing to be sorry for.
But I’m interested in queer and feminist phenomenologies because they locate theory within the body. And I don’t think this is a radical position among humanities and-or media scholars, but I feel that all theory can and should be contextualized through the subjectivity of the scholar taking it up. That, I think, is ethical. We’ve long passed the point of buying into the illusion of objectivity in art and research. It’s 2023. But I’m provoked by bodily reactions, by the visceral, by fear and lust and disgust and desire. Which is, you know, traditionally anti-academic. And womanly, and dirty, and queer.
Mm, mm, mm.
But circling back to Fisher—I gravitated towards her monograph because she grapples with questions that I am continually grappling with in my practices: Can systemic—or, let’s say, institutional—change come from within? Can one undertake meaningful political action from within an oppressive system as one is benefitting from, and actively participating in, that system?
As opposed to hypocritically soothing yourself with maxims about the way that you’re changing an institution which is in fact not only changing you but providing for you while it changes you.
Right. And the book speaks to many of neoliberalism’s insidious, subversive tactics. Instead of outright rejecting challenges to oppressive structures, institutions self-present as welcoming to individuals or collectives who are doing the challenging.
Mm.
And what happens to these individuals? They are welcomed—and not only welcomed, but incited by these institutions to participate in the system under the guise that they can enact meaningful change by and through it. I’m thinking specifically about scholars with strong leftist politics who are outspoken (in their research, but also in their public life) about, say, ongoing settler-colonial violence. These scholars are hired under the banner of a diversity mandate for their difference, for their novel approaches to research, and yes, also for their politics, and then they’re strongly surveilled. Or they’re put on contracts with fixed terms. Or they’re forced into dehumanizing administrative positions. This happens a lot with Black and Indigenous scholars. Institutions like to create environments where radical figures are incentivized, and then attemptedly depoliticized, by and through their participation in the system. On a surface level, one could say that it’s good that universities are adopting diverse hiring practices. They’re actively seeking out Black, Indigenous, queer, and trans scholars. Academic faculties aren’t just oceans of old white guys talking about McLuhan and Foucault. But do these institutions have the proper infrastructures in place to support the work of the new folks they’re hiring?
Mm.
And what is the line between representation and tokenization?
It’s a different colour of Barbie doll.
Yeah. But this isn’t something I can speak to on a personal level—because again, I’m a white woman working from within an academic institution. These are just things I’ve witnessed again and again. These are things that have happened to my friends, to people in my immediate circles and communities. And they oftentimes go unspoken about. But for me—the academy doesn’t mark me as different. I present as femme so my queerness can go undetected. I’ve never had to seek out accommodations for anything mental or physical as I’m able to access the proper supports outside of the university. So I seem to be a perfect—I don’t know—
Parasite.
I fit the mold of the institution, yeah.
Is that what you were going to say? That you’re well-disguised?
In a way, but my presence in the university system isn’t threatening or radical. Throughout history, white women have been used as tools of the colonial state in educational contexts and environments. That’s been one of my most recent political projects: really looking into and examining the history of white feminism within education. The “Lady Bountiful” stereotype. The collapse of white feminism and neoliberal capitalism. Calling out and naming “white women” instead of just capital-W “women” when speaking of women’s rights and sufferage and liberation movements—because oftentimes, when we speak of capital-W women, we’re actually talking about white women. We’re just trying to fit into a meta-narrative of societal progress that white women exemplify. So naming that is, I think, important. What am I trying to say here? Well, despite my leftist politics and values, at the end of the day, I’m a white woman in a space that incites white women to participate in the project of whiteness. My work isn’t radical. But this conversation isn’t about white guilt. It’s not about apologizing for being white, but it’s about really understanding the sociohistorical, political, colonial conditions from whence whiteness emerged. We don’t do enough of that work. And we need to.
BARBENHEIMER
All this talk about whiteness, parasitism, and institutional resistance brings me right back to the Barbenheimer phenomenon—which I wrote about in an article with a fellow Digital Humanities scholar and friend, Cate Alexander. By the time this article comes out, will likely be published in the peer-reviewed academic journal “Imaginations.” But the whole Barbenheimer phenomenon is built on the contrast and stark juxtaposition of two quote-completely different films. There’s humour in the fact that both came out on the same day. Barbie is this feminist comedy with pastel pink aesthetics and Oppenheimer is this dark, brooding, quote-serious biopic about the scientist behind the Manhattan Project. It’s funny, right? Nolan creates films about white male existentialism and interiority; Gerwig creates films about white women rebelling against restrictive circumstances. Ha-ha, so different! But. My whole thing was—and this was my core contribution to the article—maybe these films aren’t so different.
Nice.
Why? Because they are both about figures of resistance who are incentivized by an institution or system and then challenge that institution or system. Barbie was created in Mattel’s cisheteropatriarchal image; Oppenheimer created the atomic bomb by and through the colonial-capitalist ideological underpinnings of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Barbie challenges Mattel by escaping Barbieland to venture out into the real word, and—spoiler!—ultimately chooses “real womanhood” over continuing to live her life as a Barbie. And Oppenheimer is about its title figure being incentivized by, and then expelled from, the Manhattan Project when his personal politics, values, and ethics start to differ from those of the project. He creates a technology and then is expelled due to his communist affiliations. I find the dance around communism really fascinating—which is why I think I gravitate more towards Oppenheimer as a film. But Barbie and Oppenheimer are both institutional parasites who transgress.
That was great.
Ha, thanks. I did the whole back-to-back thing. Oppenheimer first, then Barbie for dessert. Oppenheimer’s longer and darker; I thought getting that out of the way first was the way to go. But while I preferred Oppenheimer, there are obvious representational critiques of both films. I’ll start with Nolan’s: it’s ultimately a super white, male, American and Western-centric account of the events portrayed. There have been a lot of articles written about its exclusions—particularly around the depiction of Los Alamos as an empty wasteland when, in fact, the U.S. government was forcibly displacing Hispanic and Indigenous populations that lived on that land. And of course, there’s the fact that a chunk of it focuses on white men deciding whether or not to drop a bomb on Hiroshima. I just came back from Hiroshima, actually, where I visited the Peace Museum and Children’s Memorial—I lack the language to describe how it feels to bear witness to those things. You can understand why the film is barred from a Japanese release.
Really?
Yes, there’s no Japanese release date. But while I think these critiques are obvious, I’m still fascinated by the fact that Christopher Nolan made a big budget Hollywood blockbuster movie about a communist whose ethics were grounded in and by his politics. I’ve heard the screenplay is written in a first-person POV, from Oppenheimer’s perspective. And it makes sense—it was inspired by “American Prometheus,” a 2005 biography that delves into Oppenheimer’s actions, politics, personal life, and psyche. So while there’s artistic and-or structural rationale for why the film excludes certain perspectives, those omissions are glaring.
Mm.
Barbie, on the other hand, is the more interesting film to critique because it sometimes gets the Taylor Swift treatment: if you critique or dislike the film, you’re sexist. Barbie has been celebrated for being a feminist comedy, for its representational diversity, for America Ferrera’s “it’s impossible to be a woman!” monologue, for being the first female-directed film to hit a billion dollars at the domestic box office. It’s got a strong aesthetic palette that capitalizes on vintage Barbie aesthetics. It calls viewers back to their own childhood. And to see Barbie reflected as a quasi-feminist icon that opposes her own creation under a patriarchal system and then surrenders her dollhood to feel as a human being feels—and then, you know, goes to the gynaecologist—there’s catharsis in watching that. I get it. Being a woman is hard. Also, we don’t get big budget blockbusters like white men get Marvel movies, or—I’m going to say it—like film bros get Christopher Nolan movies. Barbie is a very accessible feminist film, and I don’t knock it for that. I see how women and young girls could see it and leave enlightened or in tears. Personally, I wish it was more anti-capitalist and cool, but then it wouldn’t be a Barbie movie.
Let me tell you what I learned from a couple quick Google searches: Mattel’s brand is decreasing in revenue—their sales have plummeted—so their long-term plan is to create a “Mattel Cinematic Universe” of sorts. And Barbie is their prototype project. So what did they do? They incited Greta Gerwig, who’s gained some notoriety as this popular feminist filmmaker that white women love, to come in and write this quirky, subversive Barbie film that critiques the brand—but also repurposes it to the masses as a critique of itself. And Gerwig attempted a sort of parasitism. I believe she did what she could with the IP. There are moments where I’m like, okay, this is kind of cool. People are shocked that Mattel said yes to some of the more scathing critiques of the corporation. But of course they said yes to it. They’re commodifying resistance and profiting off it immensely.
Jesus Christ.
Resistance is commodifiable. Challenging the system is commodifiable. This is what happens to radical politics—whether it be feminist action, queer politics, etcetera. They get institutionalized and commodified and sold back to us (albeit politically diluted) for a large company’s profit. This film is now driving the corporation—and we’re going to see lots more like it in the near future. And I’m not saying the film is all bad, but I can’t see its merits as separate from its capitalist entanglements. And I can’t watch it without kind of being on Ken’s side, which is a problem. Ken is the far more interesting character—a man “oppressed” under the Barbieland regime who learns about patriarchy and reinforces the structures and systems that once oppressed him. I actually think if the movie was just Ken’s journey, it would have been a better movie. Then maybe you could have made a more glaring statement about white feminism. You know what, that’s also it. The film says nothing about white feminism because it wants to say something about all feminism. But in doing that, it really only says something about white feminism which—hand in hand with neoliberalism—privileges individual success within fundamentally flawed economies and systems over the formation of kinship ties and coalitions. A Barbie movie that critiques white feminism would have been super cool, but Greta Gerwig wouldn’t be the auteur to make that kind of a movie.
But then—let’s circle back to Watkins Fisher and the figure of the parasite. If we look at folks like Greta Gerwig who are parasites in their respective institutions and systems, and who are profiting immensely off of creating something that feeds back into major corporations’ hands, even as they are critiquing those systems, can we call that resistance?
Mm.
Is that what resistance is?
Mm.
In this neoliberal late-stage capitalist hellscape?
*chuckling*
I’m telling you, resistance is being sold to us through the politics and poetics of institutional and systemic submission. Is that not fucking scary?
*chuckling*
I think the real work has to happen through grassroots avenues, in spaces not structured by the politics of institutions or platforms. The internet used to be a much more democratic space than it is right now. But look where we’re at. Platforms incentivize to share intimate parts of ourselves and our lives in the name of community and self expression—but really, they’re selling our data to huge conglomerates and mapping our desires. They’re figuring out how to sell our desires back to us. And they’re successful in that pursuit. Look what the Barbie movie is doing.
You’re fantastic.
I’m not sure if I’ve been the most articulate, but I can clean it up—I promise—
You’re fine.
But do you see what I mean? Do you see what I’m getting at?
No, no. That was all of it so clumsily phrased I have no idea what you’re talking about. It seemed to me you just flew into Turkish for a moment there.
*chuckling*
I’m completely oblivious as to what you mean. What was a—white guy in offices? All I was seeing was people in offices at a Super Bowl game—
*laughs*
—Did you even mention football?
THE BEAST OF CAPITALISM
I learned something about football recently. Travis Kelce is dating Taylor Swift.
Were your algorithms primed to—This is all your leftist artist—
Wait, Taylor Swift is another perfect case study—but she’s not a parasite. She’s a masterful businesswoman. I’ve followed her career since the very beginning—with the release of those first few albums, teenage girls flocked to her in droves because she was giving serious voice to teenage girlhood. Taylor Swift first gained critical acclaim and widespread success by poeticizing teenage girls’ desires and taking seriously many universal big formative emotions and experiences: first romances and heartbreaks, first kisses, high school drama, first dates, and so on. These are things adults (and wider society) write off for being silly, juvenile, and unserious. But she gained critical acclaim and widespread notoriety for making them sing. Her fans feel like they grew up with her.
But with critical acclaim came a lot of pushback—a lot of sexist pushback. Her songwriting was continuously called into question, she became a media lightning rod for slut shaming, her press coverage was particularly misogynistic. She’d go on The Ellen Show and Ellen would show slideshows of men she was rumoured to have dated. And she was just dating like a normal 20-something-year-old, but the public narrative was that she was some psychotic serial dater who punished her lovers through song.
Flash forward many years and “Eras”—I swear to God, I could write a book about this shit—but Taylor Swift has become a huge corporate-capitalist enterprise. The Eras Tour made her a billionaire. She’s no longer a sixteen year old girl getting dragged by the media at every turn. She’s essentially untouchable. Even when cancelled after the Kanye and Kim Kardashian phone call fiasco, she commodified her own resistance through the release of the Reputation album. That was a masterful business move. And she became the biggest pop star in the world—and she did so by leveraging feminism as: “you hurt me and I commodified my pain to seek revenge and success.” The Swiftian brand of feminism is glaringly neoliberal and white. Taylor Swift cares about Taylor Swift’s success in this late capitalist hellscape. I know she does good things for fans and employees on an individual level. I know she gives her dancers health benefits. But she’s not interested in taking widespread, direct political action beyond sometimes telling her fans to vote, despite the propaganda sold to us via that dreadful Miss Americana [2019] documentary. That chronicled the “Lover” era, in which she positioned herself as a feminist figure of resistance within an overwhelmingly patriarchal industry. She was like, I’m coming out as a democrat and putting queer people in my videos! But is she a politically engaged artist and public figure, truly? No.
With that said, though, I’d totally go to the Eras Tour if I could get a ticket that didn’t break the bank. I went to the concert movie and I knew almost every word. And I went to Barbenheimer and I dressed up as Western Barbie. See? I’m not exempt from participating in these big cultural things. I just wish we were better at pushing back or being critical when things are sold to us as feminist and go, hmm, but what does that mean?
Do you want another hot chocolate?
No, I’m good.
So, I was listening to a conversation among heavy producers the other day and my sense was that this question of diversifying casts and diversifying those who are behind the camera and what stories are being told has all to do with which demographics are the most resourced.
For sure.
White guys, historically, have all the money and so we just only ever see images of white guys on the screen; and as capital can be accrued by other demographics in a meaningful way, such that huge corporations would be interested in presenting images to them, you see Woman King and—
Mhm.
—And I’m thinking about the organism of capitalism and how it doesn’t care about colour or creed or diversity or—it just wants to maximize profit.
Can I tell you something funny? My friend Erik called the Barbie movie “white feminist Black Panther.”
And Taylor Swift likewise is representative of a sufficiently well-established middle class that teenage daughters can purchase eighty dollar tickets to concerts.
I wish Eras Tour tickets were eighty dollars. People are paying thousands of dollars.
I mean, I’ve heard Chomsky talk about how a political leader is incidental to a movement: somebody will stand up and say that they will represent the interests of the group whether for their own ends or not. They will crop up automatically like a certain constitution of soil will necessarily spawn a mushroom. Taylor Swift is almost an incidental outgrowth of just the fertile soil of the readiness of capital within that age group.
Yes. Absolutely. As were The Beatles, who capitalized on but also somewhat created the post-war turn towards young people as a massive consumer base.
Right, right.
We had Beatlemania then. Now we have Swifties and countless other fan group conglomerates. There were others too, of course, and this certainly isn’t my area of expertise, I think the Beatles were instrumental in being the first kind of big—
And what was that reflective of but a sufficiently prosperous middle class—
Yes.
—Whose parents were willing to give them money to buy LPs.
And these were rebellious figures—The Beatles, Elvis.
Sure.
They were dissenting and challenging to the music industry.
And I’m thinking the same with rap and hip-hop icons of the 80s and 90s.
Absolutely.
So this is another instance of—I don’t know if mushroom is the right analogy, but this almost immediate and incidental outgrowth of a soil that has crossed a kind of threshold of quantity of capital. I don’t know if that’s cynical or realistic.
I think that’s realistic.
Yeah.
Capitalism is a famished beast. It always needs to be fed. And it’s interesting that we’re seeing Taylor Swift at the peak of her fame at thirty-two years of age. That kind of longevity is rare.
Well, she took a generation with her.
But that’s exactly it. She was, and still is, the voice of that generation.
Alright, we’ve gone for two hours and five minutes. I can keep going.
I can keep going too. What time is it?
5:05.
WALSH
I don’t need to be anywhere until 7:30. We’re good. I know that I sent you excerpts of a musical I’m working on—WALSH—with a composer-collaborator friend of mine, Jake Schindler. WALSH is, in so many ways, a commentary of all that we’ve spoken of so far.
It was also written during a residency.
Yes. I was a part of the Musical Stage Company’s Noteworthy program earlier on this year, as was Jake, as was my current partner Wilfred—that’s where we met each-other, which is very sweet.
Right.


Noteworthy is a training program of sorts for composers, playwrights, and lyricists in Toronto. It happens once every two years; they chose eight participants this year: four composers and four playwrights and-or lyricists. Every week, we have artist talks and seminars before they pair us up and give us writing prompts. WALSH came out of one of those prompts. Jake and I knew each other before the program—he also went to Western—and I was really looking forward to working with him.
And you happened to be—
We happened to be paired on a week with a particularly interesting prompt. And Jake and I had recently seen the film Tár. Have you seen Tár? With Cate Blanchett?
She plays a conductor?
—She’s—Yes.
I think you’d have an interesting take on that too.
I love the film.
You did.
So in Tár, Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor accused of sexual misconduct—and I love the film because it takes as its Weinstein-esque figure a white gay woman. When we think of the #MeToo movement, of the faces of the #MeToo movement, we think of powerful heterosexual men abusing their power towards young women. And Blanchett’s character rises to fame, acclaim, and power on the level of her white male contemporaries; she reinscribes oppressive systems, ideologies, and dynamics that one might assume—on a surface level, from a centrist’s perspective—would work against her as a gay woman.
Which resituates agency on the beast of power.
Yes. And I loved seeing that in action. It’s an exceptional character study. There are moments in which her whiteness takes centre stage as the locus of her power, and there are moments in her conversations with older white men where we see her sweat, pander, and cower a bit in the face of patriarchal authority. It’s thrilling.
Anyway, Jake and I had both seen and loved this film; we were fascinated by white women, and specifically white queer women, who leverage their difference for power within an oppressive system only to regurgitate that power against those less marked by privilege. There are a lot of older white women within their respective institutions—whether it be academia, the art world, the corporate world, etcetera—who genuinely faced a lot of hardship when they were entering these spaces for the first time. But through talent, hard work, and ultimately whiteness—let’s be honest—they were able to rise through the ranks. And once they get to a coveted place in that institution, they feel the need to reinscribe those hardships for new folks looking to enter that space because to them, it’s a rite of passage. They went through hell, now it’s someone else’s turn. It’s not about making the institution less hostile. It’s about success within an oppressive system. And that is textbook white feminism.
So our protagonist in WALSH’s name is Vivian Walsh, who’s this queer artist-activist-philanthropist at the helm of a major commission from the Art Gallery of Ontario. The musical begins with a donor event at the gallery, where she’s being honoured for her life’s work—she sings “art is philanthropy and philanthrophy is art” while a Greek chorus of rich liberals sing behind her. This event is soon interrupted by a damning question by a young student activist concerning the politics of its funding, and the show becomes about the relationship between these two queer women of very different generations contending with institutional pressures and expectations. In this first scene, though, there are these long musical diatribes of donor names and sponsors. I mean, how many of those have we sat through?
That’s the reason that it made me vomit a little in my mouth. I was surprised not to see the word satire in its description. Does it feel satirical?
We’ve grappled with the question of satire because it is, in a way, especially in these public moments. But the truth is we’re still playing around with the form. We’re trying to understand the collapse of public and private moments—ultimately, it’s a show about two rival queer women waging ambition against community in pursuit of acceptance.
Is that a coinage of yours, “to wage ambition”? That’s great. I also wanted to discuss poetry and the revolutionary potential of neologism, to resist tendencies in the language. “To wage ambition against community in pursuit of acceptance” is an interesting phrase.
It is. It’s one I conjured up for a grant application, I think. Where all dreams go to die. You’re thinking of the revolutionary potential of neologism, I’m thinking about a pitch that pleases a jury. Ha ha ha. And there we go, it’s like I’m a character in my own show. At least I’m honest.
ON COLLABORATION
Talk to me about the retreat, collaboration, what you look for in collaborations, what’s conducive to your creativity when in dialogue with a co-creator, what you expect of yourself, what you expect of the other.
That’s a great question. I work with so many different people across vastly different mediums with different perspectives, insights, and life experiences—I think it’s impossible to pin down precisely what I look for in a collaborator because every project, every process, is so unique. A lot of the time, I feel that it comes down to reciprocated values—artistic, personal, and political—and establishing a shared language around process. A communal understanding of what is at the core of the thing being created. Jake and I were brought together by chance, but we had similar political sensibilities, values, and interests in tone, structure, and form. It was easy to create a shared language from whence we began. I typically write him scenes of the show as if they were a play, which he then transposes into through-sung music. Once we’ve had our own separate crack at the material, we get into the same room and massage it all together. So that process is both solitary and communal.
When I work with Mike [Tompa], my producer, it’s symbiotic fire and chaos. I’m more protective over my music than my theatre work because it’s a reflection of my interiority. Theatre is like, “come share in some of my ideas and feelings about the world!” Music is like, “come walk around inside of me.” I typically bring Mike fully finished or half-finished songs with specific sonic visions and inspirations, and—because we speak such similar process-oriented languages and share so much in terms of taste and vision—he’s able to take both of our ideas and build a cohesive sonic world around them. I do my thing, he does his thing, we massage it together. I love working closely with collaborators, but I also need solitary time to think and feel through what I’m doing.
Lately, I’ve been working with Steven Hao, a really incredible actor-director-multi-hyphenate artist living and working in Tkaronto. He’s the director and dramaturg onboard for a series of workshops of my newest play, Death to the Prometheans!, in development with Studio180 Theatre. Working with Steven has really taught me the importance of a shared language and asking oneself over and over, what is at the heart of this play? What is the core story we are telling? And all roads lead to Rome. We’re mathematical—I like to say surgical—in our dissection of actions and reciprocal actions that propel scenes forward.


So in terms of what I look for, I guess I can say: an openness, a radical presence to one’s self and to the wider world—
Mm.
—And humility. That’s probably the biggest one. A kind, humble energy with lots of underlying rigour. I need to work with people committed to their craft, but I need to like them as people as much as I like them as collaborators. Like, thank God I love my bandmates so much. Sometimes we spend eight hours locked in a tiny studio together, working out instrumentals. I need bandmates I can go for oysters and sushi with.
That’s what I was going to say. You have to eat at some point.
Yeah, for us, it’s oysters and sushi. And that’s conducive to my creativity. Care, laughter, deep mutual respect, and seafood.
*Reads the next question from Kevin’s laptop*: Tell me about cooking in theory and practice.* Oh, gosh.
*chuckles* It’s important to you, right?
It is.
Yeah.
HIS EXCELLENCY LEOPOLD WOLFGANG INTSON THE FIRST
It’s important to me because, in my world and in all of my work, critical theory does not exist independently of artistic practice and practice is itself theorizing. That shouldn’t be a radical thought, yet still traditional humanities disciplines favour analysis over creation. We conventionally write critical analyses of texts as opposed to creative responses to them. In undergraduate English classrooms, we learn to read Shakespeare through close reading and not through performance. I’m no good at pretending that we don’t learn in and from our bodies. That texts affect us viscerally, not just intellectually. That the core of why we study in the Humanities is to ruminate on what it means and how it feels to live a life. Is it not? We forget that sometimes. That’s what I so badly want to rediscover in university curricula, especially as we move towards an all-administrative business university that eviscerates experimental pedagogy in favour of more STEAM programmes. I’m not interested in high theory and philosophy if it has no embodied instantiation. How can and-or does high theory affect living people? How can theory help us understand ourselves in our fleshy forms?
I’m an artist in the academy. I need to create from theory. My work as an artist will always inform the work I do in the academy, and vice versa. As of right now, in my life and career, I need both of these spaces. Sometimes they want to speak to each other and other times, they absolutely don’t. But when they don’t, I don’t force it. I let things speak to me, affect me, inspire me, challenge me in different ways, when they come. It’s helpful to know when an idea is worth institutionalizing, worth bringing into a sphere of research, and when it needs an alternate space or home. Some ideas refuse institutionalization. Resistance and refusal are central to a lot of queer politics, not to mention Black and Indigenous politics. We need to learn when to resist and refuse calling something research, or indoctrinating it into the academy—or any institution, really.
*Reading: And speaking of homespace, I would be remiss, would indeed only italicize the inferiority *laughing* of our species, if I did not invoke His Excellency. Speak of your baby.*


Yes, I have a cat whose name is Leopold Wolfgang Intson the First. He’s my whole world. I’m currently a bit jealous as he’s favouring my partner over me these days. And I don’t understand. I do everything for him. I feed him, I scoop his poop, I comb his mane. So why does he love Wilfred so much? Anyways, it’s fine. I’ll be serious now. He really grounds me.
That’s it.
What is that—to be grounded? When I think of things that ground me in my own being, things that truly bring me happiness: Leo. Hugs from loved ones. Waking up next to my partner. Really good food. Travel—seeing the world. Afternoon naps on my bright orange couch. My morning smoothies. Simple stuff. In this interview, I’ve talked so much about my academic and artistic pursuits. And that’s the point, I get it. But sometimes I feel like I dehumanize myself by and through interviews like this. People perceive me as a work machine because of how visible this stuff is—and that sometimes bleeds into how they interact with me in real life. It makes me sad.
I was a weird fucking kid. Like, weird. I grew up with a lot of social rejection. I think I was poorly socialized. Among other things—my adolescence was hard. And I didn’t relate to other kids—I found solace and comfort in being loud and strange, in deviating from social norms. And as a result of that, I got most of my validation from teachers and adults because I always did well in school. When my peers rejected me, I sought praise from adults and I never stopped. I internalized that I was different, smart, and creative from a young age—and I let that sense of self eclipse everything else I could be. I never considered that I could be beautiful or sociable or charming or sexy or anything beyond a work horse. My value was in my ideas, in my brain, in my work. I disappeared into my creative pursuits as a kid and as a teenager—and then something happened when I began my professional career as an artist: the thing that I loved most, that thing being “being an artist,” became commodifiable. Became entwined with capitalism.
Mm.
And then, you know, I got older and all of a sudden, me being an artist was kind of cool. I went from someone people generally disliked in high school to someone with a degree of popularity in my undergraduate career. And that brought up a ton of other complexes I’ve had to work through in therapy, but the older I got, I saw that I had to place value in something other than my productivity, my artistry, my work. Art wasn’t my safe space in the same way. I had to develop other resources, other spaces to flourish and just be. I’ve had to set boundaries for myself. Most of my closest friendships are with people I don’t work with. And they don’t give a shit what I do. They love me for other reasons. And I’ve had to let their love for me inform how I see myself.
Mm.
These days, solo travel is my passion—is my escape. I’m constantly romancing new people and places. I take people at face value. They don’t know anything about me or what I do. And even if they did, they wouldn’t care. It’s the most freeing thing ever. When I’m away, I don’t think about my work at all. I feel alive there. The problem is, to travel, you have to make a lot of money. And to make a lot of money, you have to participate in the hellscape. So, you know, you have to participate to have the privilege of opting out. The eternal conundrum.
But back to my cat, my sweet Leo—I feel alive when he purrs on my chest. I feel so much warmth, tenderness, love radiating from his furry little body. I feel so much love for this small and fragile little creature who is himself bursting with affection and need. And he loves me right back. We feel each other’s gentleness. Nothing else matters.
Nice.
So, yeah.
*resumes reading: So, we brought in Michelle, and I’d like to invite other friends to contribute here, too. First, from Gary Barwin*. Gary asked you to ask me this!? Okay—
I asked Gary to ask you and that’s what he—
That’s crazy. I’d like people to know that Gary Barwin was my sixth grade saxophone teacher. We had an inside joke about a boogery pirate. Anyway, hi Gary! I can’t believe he asked me a question. His intelligence is otherworldly.
*resumes reading: I’m interested how she thinks differently about narrative, emotional and character expression in her songwriting versus playwriting.* Sorry, it’s very cool that you asked Gary to ask me a question. I need to come up with something smart. It won’t be very good.
Then let it be for Leo.
ON NARRATIVE VERSUS LYRIC
Ha! I like that. There is a—Okay, well with character creation, my work stems from the belief that characters only exist by and through their actions. From what they want and how they go about getting it. That’s a commonly held belief in playwriting. Plays are a series of actions and reciprocal actions. From my perspective, there’s a science to character creation. I take a long time—lots of writing prompts, exercises—to understand my characters before putting them on the page. I stew deeply on plot and narrative and structure, sometimes for months or years before writing the thing. And I mean, at the heart of every play is—I believe—an unanswerable question. And I typically have that question first, before I even begin with characters.
Can we get some of these questions in the transcript?
I mean yeah—there’s a lot of—like, who does this character think they are at the beginning of the play? What is their shadow—the thing they are most afraid of? What is their climax—the largest escalation of action between their image and shadow? And does the character undergo a spiritual death, which is to say, they’re engulfed in their shadow? Or a spiritual rebirth, where they acknowledge their shadow and are reborn?
There are also lots of questions I like to think about concerning the worlds of each of my plays. Like, what is its internal and external logic? What are its standards of beauty and ugliness? What is its belief system? There are so many questions. Some are silly. But it’s a formulaic process. I’m thinking deeply about set-up and pay-off. I’m thinking about the science of evoking an emotional response from an audience. That sounds emotionally manipulative. It sometimes is. But you understand. It’s a quasi-mathematical process.
Narration in songwriting is so different because, at the risk of sounding trite, it’s autobiographical—it’s imagistic, it’s poetry. It’s less of a medium for me to ask and answer questions about the world and more of a medium to just, you know, dwell in. I write from a place of intuition and impulse before structure. I self mythologize a lot. I also use music to tell myself stories about myself, honestly, in order to attempt to make sense of things. We narrativize because the experience of being is so fundamentally elusive. We are traumatized subjects unable to process loss.
Mm.
So I guess I turn myself into characters by and through my writing, but I’m not thinking of it that way. I’m worried that’s not a good enough answer. I could have sounded smarter. But that’s what I’ve got. So thanks Gary.
*resumes reading* Jack Copland!? Jack is so generous and talented. And respectful. He’s a good man. *reads: I’d want to ask about Camille’s process as she works in so many different fields – how does she organize her time? What is interesting her right now? Is there anything she hasn’t done that she’d want to try? How does being a multi hyphenate strengthen her practice in a specific field? Anything that interests her that is completely outside of her work?* That’s really nice of him to say. I think I organize my time based on vibes.
Vibes.
I’m drawn to different mediums and projects in different weeks. I create from impulse and necessity. And then, like, there are things I absolutely must get done for certain deadlines. Like my work at the University [of Toronto]. Some days, I find that my brain is more suited for academic than creative work. I don’t think there’s a rhyme or reason or logic to any of that. I just listen to my body and what it needs from me. When it wants to be a vessel for an idea, it’ll tell me.
One thing I am really rigorous about is eating well. I love cooking big brunches and dinners. I set firm boundaries in terms of being off the clock. I take every single Sunday off all work to nap and watch re-runs of Survivor. That’s very important to me.
Sacred.
Honestly, yes. What is interesting me right now? Big Brother. I actually love competition, social-strategy reality games. They’re fascinating to me. Watching people process and deceive and pivot and perceive in real time. I believe I could win any reality show, including Survivor. I’m completely delusional. I have no physical strength. But I think I could win any reality show ever.
“Is there anything she hasn’t done that she’d like to try?” Perhaps writing and directing for film, or writing for TV. I watch everything. I have many favourite directors that I’ve learned so much from. I’d like to try someday. “How does being a multi-hyphenate strengthen her practice in a specific field?” Everything bleeds into everything. I feel like I’ve already answered that. I’m a bit chaotic. “Anything that interests her that’s completely outside of her work?” Yeah, reality television.
Wait—Stephen Ingram!? “I would have asked her to break down her favourite song lyric that she’s written.” That’s a horrible question. Stephen, I’m so sorry. I’m not going to break down one of my own lyrics. Ha ha ha! I don’t know! I like a lot of them! I think my strength as a songwriter is in my lyricism. Right now, I like a song called “GENESIS 3” off my new album. Maybe it’ll be out by the time this interview is released. So go listen!
Oh—is this next question something you’ve taken from a Jordan Tannahill interview?
*chuckles*
FREE FOR ALL
“If you could pick anyone in space or time to collaborate with on a project, who would you pick and what project would you collaborate on? I would collaborate with Adam and Eve on a biodegradable, plant-based lingerie line.” That’s an incredible answer. Anyone in space or time to collaborate with on a project. Anyone in space or time … myself, at the moment of death. Or right before.
How far before?
Like, when my mind is intact. But that’s my answer. It would be something conversational between my current self and myself at the moment of death. Or right before.
So here’s a question for you. I’ve seen videos of people who are multilingual and who, when the video is muted, actually appear to inhabit different consciousnesses—their posture changes, their mannerisms, their facial expressions. And do you feel like you shift between languages of yourself when you inhabit those spaces differently?
Absolutely. Code-switching to the highest degree. We all do it. We have so many different selves inside of us at all times. There’s no such thing as a fixed self. It’s all socially relative. We’re all performing. The only time I feel that I’m not performing is in solitude—in returning to my apartment at the end of a long day. I’m quite introverted. I need to cocoon.
I feel like it has something to do with … It’s a necessary precursor to innovation. Solitude and innovation—
Mhm.
—Are symbiotic.
Yeah. Because I think you need space to be—
Mhm.
To think. To feel. To sort of sink in yourself. To reckon with yourself, to be radically present to yourself. I find those things in solitude.
Mm.
Because everything is out of control. And I can control what I do in my space when I’m alone. Sometimes that lack of control is fun, sometimes it’s terrifying, sometimes it’s generative, sometimes it just is. Like, how did I get here? How did I get to the point where you’re interviewing me right now? I don’t know.
Server: Hi.
You’re closing?
Server: Just letting you know that we close in ten minutes.
Thank you.
Mm.
Wow. I’m so sorry for giving you so much.
You’re fine; you’re good; this was all voluntarily undertaken.
All good. I just wanted to say how appreciative—this interview series is really spectacular. You’ve listened to me blab for three hours. I can’t believe—you’re so generous. Thank you, Kevin. It’s an honour to have been asked. May this be just a blip in the long, fulfilling, and ongoing conversation between us.
Kevin Andrew Heslop (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist from Canada.
He made his poetry debut in 2021; curatorial, 2022; directorial, 2023; screenwriting, 2024.
In 2025, Heslop's third installation, of and(with Leslie Putnam, Centre [3] for Artistic and Social Practice), and a nonfiction debut, The Writing on the Wind’s Wall: Dialogues about ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ (The Porcupine's Quill), are forthcoming alongside new work with The Fiddlehead, Parrot Art, The Seaboard Review, Astoria Pictures, The Miramichi Reader, and The American Haiku Society.
Dialogues he conducted during artist residencies in Serbia, Finland, France, Brazil, Denmark, and Japan will appear in two volumes as Craft, Consciousness: Dialogues about the Artswith Guernica Editions in 2027 and 2028.
Kevin is currently living in São Paulo to research his first feature film, a biopic about Zé Celso. Social media-shy, for more about Kevin’s practice: kevinandrewheslop.com.