Quinoa / Chris Kirk is an independent writer, performer, faggot and vagabond.  As a spoken word performer and performance artist he has featured at Poetry Live, Auckland; Poetry Idol, Auckland; Poetry at the Absinthesalon, Melbourne; Metonymy, Auckland; Melbourne Fringe Festival; Newkind Festival, Hobart; Confest, NSW; Luminate Festival, Takaka; and various Rainbow Gatherings and Radical Faerie Gatherings around the world. He has written the book How Australia Made Me an Anarchist about travelling around Australia for two years with no money and he has made a short film for TV2, That Little Difference, about being queer at high school.

In life and in art Quinoa is concerned with the intensity of being human; the emotion, the personal ethics, the pain and beauty of being a conscious entity in a horrifically sensitive body, in an infinitely complex and incomprehensible society and in a spectacularly beautiful and powerful landscape.  Our relationships with our environment, each other and our own bodies is of central importance to his practice. He embodies perspectives, he embodies archetypes, or he simply stands naked, trembling and vulnerable in the safety of shamelessness.  He can meticulously write, edit, memorise, rehearse and perform, or he can simply step unprepared onto the stage and be present.

Overwhelmed with the arbitrary, superficial and repressive codes of behaviour in society, Quinoa often takes the opportunity to perform at festivals where a variety of presentations of self and states of being are met with curiosity, rather than hysteria and censure.  He embodies states of being that are intuitive, ancient, primitive and deeply satisfying, bypassing the traumatised and acculturated conscious mind, to express joy, immediacy, immense curiosity and desire with mindless abandon and radical sobriety; and often not on the official programme.

You can a look at his soundcloud page here; bursting with recordings of spoken word performances.