Beyond the Safety Net

BEYOND THE SAFETY NET
creative prompts for
“everyday” life

Prologue
This book is a companion to the 2023 No Safety Net
3.0, a three-week festival in Ann Arbor that uses theater
performance and installation art to explore issues that are
relevant to our time, including the environment and climate
change, the rise of fascism, forced migration, and our
unspoken private lives.
Ranging from playful and archly funny to sobering and at
times disorienting, the events in No Safety Net allow us the
opportunity to critically examine the world we live in while
simultaneously looking toward our role in creating a more
hopeful future.
This book is meant to provide a personal space for us to
hold these questions and how they exist within our own
lives. This is done through “invitations’’, which function
as event scores or prompts for experiencing the world in
new ways, reflecting upon our experiences, our griefs and
desires, and making new realities nested within our liveseven
if just for a moment.

NO SAFETY
NET 3.0
performances and installations
The Plastic Bag Store
Robin Frohardt
Salt: dispersed
Selina Thompson
Are we not drawn onward to new erA
Ontroerend Goed
Cultural Exchange Rate
Tania El Khoury
Our Carnal Hearts
Rachel Mars
Your Sexts are Shit: Older, Better Letters
Rachel Mars

introduction to
the language of invitation
Each invitation can be interpreted in various ways:
opened like a portal,
reinterpreted,
Our attention is being commodified and
stolen. The following invitations are offered
in an attempt to help us reclaim the sacred
field of our attention.
Creating a rupture
or resisted
.
slow down
in our ordinary patterns of thought and
providing us with a p a u s e before we
adhere to our well worn behaviors and
tendencies. When we slow down or stop,
what other ways of being and
relating may occur to us?
listen to your gut
you will know what to do.
You are invited to share what you experience or
create, send responses to:
beyondthesafetynet@umich.edu

TRESPASS
AN INVITATION
HAUNTING THE
WILDS IN BETWEEN
go somewhere you
normally wouldn’t
take a desire path, dance
with a fence line or
boundary.
AN INVITATION
Spend some time (30 min +/-) in the wilds nearby.
Collect materials you find there.
Use those materials to create a mask or sculpture.

GEOGRAPHIES OF
REMEMBERING
AN INVITATION
THE HIDDEN HISTORY
OF A THING
AN INVITATION
Write about moves, border crossings or
migrations within your family history.
Write about this by hand for 10 (+/-) minutes.
Remove half the words with sissors or a knife.
Remove half the words with sissors or a knife
arrange and photograph this text in relation to
your body or your home.
Trace the history of a thing within your
environment.
What hands and forces shaped it?
What raw materials is it made of?
Combine research and imaginative speculation.
Trace it back as far as you can go, then go further.
Create a poem, museum label or story told from the
point of view of the object, or another being in this
object’s origin story.

DEAR _________,
AN INVITATION
GRIEVING TREE
AN INVITATION
write a letter to someone who is absent
or don’t
send it
set aside some time to sit beneath a tree
bring your loss and grief
share it with the tree
leave it somewhere where it may be found, or don’t

PRIVATE ANNOUNCEMENT
AN INVITATION
REMEMBER
PLEASURE
AN INVITATION
Look through your text messages,
select a message to make into a banner or sign.
Display your handmade banner in your home or out in
the world, try several locations, taking photos of the text
within the environment.
Make a list of moments you felt pleasure
of any kind recent or distant. Take your
time, allow things to float into your
memory all day.
Let this list become a poem.
Read it aloud to yourself.

The design and invitations within this book were created by
Bridget Quinn (aka AWE Society). She is an artist, activist, and
experimental nature therapy guide living in so-called Warren,
Michigan on Turtle Island.
She is a descendant of Irish and European settlers. Raised without
formal religion, her spirituality is feral. She knows that the world is
alive, and she is here to align her soul, heart, mind and body with
the spirit of the world. She is committed to creating culture that
supports liberatory futures, mutual aid, queer belonging and land
back movements. She crafts experiences and artifacts that help
make ecological attention and collective care inevitable. She invites
you into circular time and creative acts of eco-communitarian
healing through the Therapeutic Edgelands Zine Club.
To join, visit: Awe-society.com
Special thanks to Maddy Wildman and Cayenne Harris of
University Musical Society Learning and Engagement Department
Institutional Land Acknowledgement
UMS acknowledges that our home at the University
of Michigan, named for Michigami, the world’s
largest freshwater system and located in the Huron
River watershed, has its origins in a land grant from
the Anishinaabeg (including Odawa, Ojibwe, and
Bodéwadmi). We further acknowledge that our university
stands, like almost all property in the United States, on
lands obtained, generally in unconscionable ways, from
indigenous peoples. Today, the University of Michigan’s
three campuses are located on lands of the Anishinaabeg
and Wyandot and have grown through the connection
with and stewardship of the land by them and their
neighbors the Seneca, Delaware, and Shawnee nations.
Simply knowing the history of the land where we work
and convene cannot change the past, but acknowledging
it and understanding the ongoing consequences remains
vital for UMS as we welcome audiences to our venues and
support performing artists and creators.