What It Takes To Live

 What It Takes to Live is a visceral meditation on illness, embodiment, and the precarious balance between pain and pleasure that defines chronic survival. Rooted in my lived experience of kidney failure, hospitalization, and the daily negotiations of disability, the work transforms the medicalized body into a choreographic site where tenderness and rage meet, where stillness itself becomes resistance, and where every breath is a declaration of endurance. This is not a story of overcoming but of becoming: through collapse, through care, through refusal. Drawing on disability justice frameworks, diasporic memory, and experimental moving image, the piece resists linear narratives and refuses to frame illness as either a tragedy or an inspiration. Instead, it honours the messiness of survival and the radical softness that can emerge when we stop apologizing for our pain.