Ram Harness Games is a collaborative project of Ryan Diaz and Hannah Lutz Winkler. Taking the ram harness as a starting point, this project has evolved to investigate how we negotiate physical contact, social distancing, and intimacy in the age of COVID. Performers wear sculptures and compete in three different games, with the goal of using their sculptures to mark other performers with ink. The current iteration of the piece investigates ritualized forms of male-male touch in sports, while defending play and humor as essential to maintaining human connection.
We presented the first iteration Ram Harness Games in May 2021 as part of Art in Odd Places 2021: NORMAL curated by Furusho Von Puttkammer, with curatorial assistants Yasmeen Abdallah, Lorelle Pais, and Natalie Ortiz. We are currently looking for other places to re-perform the piece with a larger cast of performers; please be in touch with any leads/ideas/suspicions/suggestions.
