Jock Soto and Carmelita Tropicana to host Bessie Awards

Carmelita Tropicana
(photo: Uzi Parnes)

Jock Soto
(photo: Rosalie O'Connor)

The 2015 awards show of the New York Dance and Performance Awards (The Bessies) will be hosted by former New York City Ballet principal Jock Soto and performance artist and playwright Carmelita Tropicana at Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater on Monday, October 19.

Doors open at 6:30pm for red carpet and pre-show celebrations, and the awards show begins at 7:30pm with an illustrious lineup of presenters, including Marcelo Gomes, Rennie Harris, Linda Celeste Sims, Kyle Abraham, Liz Prince and Ivy Baldwin.

Bessie Award-winning artists Camille A. Brown, Lisa Nelson and Storyboard P, recipient of the 2015 Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award, will perform.

The evening will also include special presentations to Steve Paxton, recipient of the 2015 Bessie for Lifetime Achievement in Dance, and Movement Research, for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance.

Get more information and your tickets for the 2015 Bessies celebration here.

The Apollo Theater 
253 West 125th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Have you read Lisa Cohen's "All We Know"?

Read This Book: Lisa Cohen’s “All We Know”
by Hilton Als, The New Yorker, March 12, 2012

"All We Know" by Lisa Cohen
by Courtney Gillette, Lamda Literary, July 10, 2012

***

Well, to answer my own question, no. At least, not yet. But last night, I went to a dramatic reading by its author, Lisa Cohen, two brilliant theater performers--Moe Angelos and Camelita Tropicana--and renowned makeup artist Dick Page.

All We Know: The Passions of Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta and Madge Garland--directed by Sarah Krohn and presented at Dixon Place--has inspired me to seek out Cohen's All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012), the biography of three queer modernists encircled by illustrious friends. Nearly two hours, intermission-less and intricately dense, the reading's effectiveness as theater only came in variously witty fits and starts, and I'm convinced the book will be much more fun. I found Page (the non-actor, reading as British Vogue fashion editor Madge Garland) the most intriguing in that way that happens when a soft manner and British accent force you to lean in to catch half-muffled words and meanings. Not until Angelos (Murphy), Tropicana (de Acosta) and Page, to our surprise, got sprung from their historical roles, free to be themselves, did the evening take off as they launched amusing, if garrulous, monologues dealing with experiences of failure. Just as each of Cohen's subjects could have merited a book of her own, each of these striking personalities are a joy to look at and listen to at length--maybe not all in the same evening, though.

Lisa Cohen on Tumblr

Purchase All We Know: Three Lives

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