The Right Thing To Be Doing
Sarah Finn's MFA Defence
Friday, October 31, 2025 | 9:00 AM
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
The Right Thing To Be Doing is a lecture-performance that humorously explores the ethics of ecological speculation across academia, art, and romance amidst global crisis. Set within the mutating frame of an ecology conference, the work uses wearable sculpture, miniatures, sound, light, shadow, institutional critique, and meandering storytelling to move through Anthropocene landscapes of varying scales. Performed by a single unreliable narrator, who shapeshifts into a cargo ship, a fumbling academic, and a keynote-speaker-turned-mushroom, the piece foregrounds themes of transformation, entanglement, and (de)composition. Through its dramaturgy, materiality, and design, it exposes the seams of contradictory selfdom and multiple-becoming. A performative contemplation of the efforts and ethics of reworlding, this work invites the performer and audience into a playful engagement with uncertainty, complicity, and relational reimagining.
Keywords: lecture-performance, landscape dramaturgy, wearable-sculpture, queer ecology, multiple-becoming, ethical relationality, multimedia performance