Staying cool at the Hot!

While Mayor Bloomberg implements his plans to set up dumpster pools on Park Avenue--yes, really--I'll stay cool in the lavishly air-conditioned Dixon Place performance space, thank you. What's currently hot at DP is the HOT! Festival, celebrating its 19th year and said to be the world's longest-running queer fest. It wraps up in early August. So you have plenty of time to take a little dip in and be a cool New Yorker, too.

In fact--and amazingly--you have time to catch Jibz Cameron (aka Dynasty Handbag) in her one-goofball performance piece, VERTititGO. You have precisely three more times--tonight, next Friday and next Saturday, all at 7:30pm, and I suggest that you attend all three nights so that once your laugh-tortured body recovers from laughing the first time, you can torture it some more and then some more. Also, every time you go, you can look ever more closely at Ms. Handbag with your big magnifying glass and, perhaps, even snap some photos of her--although that might be frowned upon--and try to discover exactly how she does what she does. Climbing in and out of tacky-cute costumes by Hayden Dunham, she is a sly master of narrative, movement, mimicry, faces and voices--although possibly too often like the nails-on-chalkboard thing.

In VERTititGO, a Dixon Place Mondo Cane commission, Cameron/Handbag plays a variety of characters (including the voice-overs) in a cartoonish noir that starts in familiar territory before spinning way out of control. I'll leave you to figure out how this story--opening with a detective meeting a strangely alluring but demanding new client, winding up with the detective meeting a bear in the forest--manages to get from Alpha to Omega.

Tonight and July 23 and 24 at 7:30pm

Tickets

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
212-219-0736
contact@dixonplace.org

Directions