Zahava Griss: the sacred work of transforming white culture

A list of the skills Zahava Griss has amassed and roles they have played might fill this entire blog post--gender-transcendent dance artist, erotic ritualist, bodyworker, educator, coach, anti-racist activist and so much more. Recently, Griss contributed a chapter of perceptive writing to a new anthology of essays, Sacred Body Wisdom: Igniting the Flame of Our Divine Humanity, out soon from Flower of Life Press.

Their chapter, “Transforming the Culture of Whiteness in Dance and Sexuality Communities,” outlines ways in which white artists and activists like themselves can approach creative and social justice work--as well as the relationship with their own and others' bodies--with greater openness, awareness, respect and joy.

Sections of the essay deal with issues of white culture within ballet (where authoritarian traditions predispose dancers to follow rules and not speak up for themselves), within sexuality and within the complex challenges of community building across differences. Griss notes, "so many of the body-centered events and communities I have explored are mostly white people, white leadership and white culture." And, by that, Griss means “certain ways of communicating, an aesthetic of what is valued and acceptable, an unspoken way of framing what being a body is, what ‘safety’ is, what spirit is, what having a body means, what success or beauty means that is familiar to a dominant white culture...an often unconscious culture that has been created by those who came before us that does not acknowledge or reflect awareness and respect for people of color, who make up the majority of people on this beautiful earth.”

Griss continues, “I wrote this so we could better observe white culture, vision what we want to replace it with, clarify what diversity means to us personally, and take action to create the society we want to live in.”

Sacred Body Wisdom: Igniting the Flame of Our Divine Humanity will become available on Amazon.com on January 21. Learn more about it here. For more on Zahava Griss and their projects, visit www.EmbodyMoreLove.com.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Get ready for '(W/HOLE)" at Invisible Dog

AORTA Films and the A.O. Movement Collective proudly present (W/HOLE), an artful work of queer-feminist--if otherwise uncharacterizable--porn commissioned by The Invisible Dog and sure to be a highlight of its season.

Directed by Mahx Capacity, this evening-length film is handsome in choreography, performance and camera work, sometimes sunlight bright, sometimes dungeon dark, with robust poetry and wit. From a symphony of f-bombing in all its expressive permutations to an extended sex scene where watchful attendants--as elusive as black-clad kuroko--hold glass spray bottles at the ready, keeping the lovers moist and dewy. The way the cast affirms that every body, and everything about the body, is erotic can be both amusing and profound. Leave it to dancers to come up with something like this.

(W/HOLE) runs at The Invisible Dog on Friday, January 4 (9pm), Saturday, January 5 (7pm) and Sunday, January 6 (2pm and 7pm). Hurry for tickets, though. They're selling fast. Click here.

The Invisible Dog
51 Bergen Street (between Smith Street and Boerum Place), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Inside the mask: Narcissister releases documentary self-portrait

Performer Narcissister opens the world theatrical premiere and two-week run of her documentary, Narcissister Organ Player, at Film Forum next Wednesday, November 7. A former dancer, she's best known in the performance art world for the contradiction of concealing her identity with doll-like masks while revealing her flesh and wildly creative preoccupation with body organs, orifices and functions. Narcissister regularly propels audiences into forbidden dimensions of the familiar. With this new self-portrait, though, she guides us to the hidden source of that extreme courage--the familial.

Just over 90 minutes, this stunning, poignant film--expansive and mythic in imagery--centers the influence of the artist's relationship with her Morocco-born Jewish mother (and, to a far lesser extent, her Black American father) on the ideas that drive her work. Q&As with Narcissister will follow the 7pm screenings on these dates:

Wednesday, November 7, moderated by Jeffrey Deitch, Gallerist, Deitch Projects

Thursday, November 8, moderated by Lia Gangitano, Director, Participant Inc.

Saturday, November 10, moderated by writer Ren Weschler

Narcissister Organ Player will also be screened at Northwest Film Forum (Seattle, Washington), November 15-18.

Film Forum

209 West Houston Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Where do we fit? 92Y Harkness Dance explores identity

Dancer-choreographer Aimee Rials
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Dance artist Aimee Rials curated Where do we fit? for 92Y Harkness Dance Center's Fridays at Noon, choosing five choreographers to question "identity and sexuality, personhood and power, inclusion and exclusion and the universal desire to belong." With the exception of an ethereal Jasmine Hearn duet from shook-- performed with care by Dominica Greene and Angie Pittman--the hour-long showcase focused on solos danced by their creators. It explored everything from dexterous physicality, quirky and rash in its expression (Chuck Wilt's Cadet) to the mystery and spirituality of gender fluidity (Trebien Pollard's She Gives Birth to Stone). Through a dream-like relationship to costuming, Pamela Pietro worked clear contrasts between a woman's determined self-protection and her vulnerability in everything I thought I Knew but....

Rials's solo--"The Quiet We Keep," a compelling excerpt from Modifi(her)--had dramatic impact, drawn from her experience as an androgynous white lesbian with roots in the rural south. In a post-show Q&A, she noted her caution and self-vigilance on visits home, her need to protect her kin from scrutiny and danger by altering her appearance and behavior. Rials did not discuss the formal qualities of her solo, but I had taken note of intriguing similarities to ritual--the formation and interactions with a circle of empty folding chairs possibly representing absent and recalled family members; tremulous movement that could signal "catching the spirit" or resolutely engaging old pain and trauma. The Quiet We Keep, without being obvious, powerfully evokes place, people and psyche.

Closed. For information on future 92Y Harkness Dance Center Friday at Noon events, click here.

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Kyoung's Pacific Beat presents "PILLOWTALK"

JP Moraga and Basit Shittu,
the stars of Kyoung H. Park's PILLOWTALK
(photo: andytoad)

If PILLOWTALK were a streamable series, I would so binge-watch it. This short two-hander written and directed by Kyoung Park (Kyoung’s Pacific Beat) has that all-essential factor that gets me every time--people I can give a damn about. That would be Buck (JP Moraga), an Asian-American journalist just fired from the job he hates anyway and who avoids telling this news to his super-practical husband Sam (Basit Shittu), a Black man and former competitive swimmer now working for a bunch of Republicans, the only job he says he was able to find. From beginning to end, and even through the inevitable tension and dissension, Moraga and Shittu subtly radiate the genuine, consistent humanity and appeal in their characters. The romance of Buck and Sam, two contemporary Brooklynites, reflects true complexity and sweet affection in equal measures. I believe in them and root for them.

Co-presented by Park's company and The Tank for The Exponential Festival, the show delves into issues of racism--even inside relationships between people of color--as well as economics, gentrification and political strategy. Most notably, Park probes the issue of how the fight for marriage equality might have robbed queer marginality of its unique, revolutionary bite. His tight, energized writing, deftly linking political and personal issues, contains no waste material. It's all hard at work all the time, and keeps both the actors and us viewers on our toes.

Setting up in the smaller of The Tank's two spaces contributes to our sense of the couple's vulnerability. The tiny black box space and its ingenious, minimalist decor (by Marie Yokoyama) suggest the cramped existence of real-life New Yorkers similar to Sam and Buck. When challenges emerge in this marriage, the men retreat to an even narrower slot of territory on opposite sides of the space, or one might flee the space entirely. Their apartment's un-cozy spatial constraints are as real a worry as the external, invading pressures from community and society. But we also feel the spirit of love in the air. And that's underscored by the final sequence, a pas de deux choreographed by Katy Pyle (of Ballez fame).

Moraga, whose character longs for a new career as a ballet dancer, more clearly resembles someone with ballet training (those feet, that line). I don't know about Shittu, and neither man's bio reveals a history with dance. But Pyle's work as the creator of the inclusive, queer-friendly ballez approach to classical dance upends what we expect, re-purposing and opening up all of ballet's strengths, beauty and fun to people of all genders. Her sequence for Sam and Buck strips away all the external and internal static and reveals what matters and what endures at the heart of this relationship.

Live music: Helen Yee
Sound design: Lawrence Schober
Scenic and lighting design: Marie Yokoyama
Costume design: Andrew Jordan

PILLOWTALK’s Long Table Series is curated by Shannon Matesky and Kyoung H. Park and each event will follow 15 minutes after each listed performance date. Last Long Table:
LOVE’S POWER/MICROINVISIBILITY (Thursday, January 25, 8pm) sheds light on the aggressions and invisibility of QPOC love. What are the spiritual and material dimensions of QPOC love? What are our acts of radical love? Facilitated by Stephanie Hsu with Guest Speakers Nic Kay, Kirya Trabor and more to be announced.

PILLOWTALK continues through Saturday, January 27. For information and tickets, click here.

The Tank
312 West 36th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

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Invisible made visible: Okpokwasili, Rossi present "Bronx Gothic"

"Bronx Gothic is about inhabiting the body of a brown girl
in a world that privileges whiteness."

"I am asking you to see the brown body."

"Maybe Bronx Gothic creates visibility for the invisible."

--Okwui Okpokwasili,
from the film Bronx Gothic, directed by Andrew Rossi

Photos courtesy of Grasshopper Film

Now ask yourself: Are you awake?

--Okwui Okpokwasili, Bronx Gothic

Christians have a gospel story about Jesus, aware of his fate, praying in the garden of Gethsemane on the night before his crucifixion. All around him, his disciples--whom he had asked to merely keep watch with him--sleep deeply, leaving him alone with his agony.

I thought of this scene as I watched Okwui Okpokwasili in the documentary Bronx Gothic (2017, 91 min.), a film with superb direction by Andrew Rossi and killer editing by Andrew Coffman of Bryan Sarkinen and Rossi's daring cinematography. Launching its world premiere theatrical engagement on July 12 at Film Forum, the film provides deep insight into the motivation and process that guided Okpokwasili's magnificent solo performance piece of the same name. It delves into her experiences, thoughts and feelings as she takes the show on its final tour and holds discussions with members of her audience.

As the film opens, Okpokwasili is in mid-performance, dressed in the color of congealed blood, tears pooling and dripping from her luminous eyes as the persona she inhabits recalls life-changing incidents from a Bronx childhood. I was reminded of the frequent, insistent sobbing in Kyle Abraham's ensemble dance, Dearest Home, and also how, like disciples at Gethsemane, not every viewer will necessarily have the will to stay awake--available, vulnerable, connected, "woke"--when Black artists ask for empathetic witness.

Both Dearest Home and Bronx Gothic--denying any demand for performance to stay within narrow, acceptable confines--make messy vulnerability and intense pain visible, in particular Black pain. Both works reach into as well as beyond their makers' personal history of being Black in America to suggest characters and narrative that should move anyone of heart and conscience.

Okpokwasili was raised within a large, middle-class Nigerian-immigrant family in the comfortable Parkchester section of the Bronx in the 1980s. (Her charming parents, whom we meet late in the film, make an indelible impression.) Describing her solo as "semi-autobiographical" allows it to partake of her extraordinary imagination and her empathy for the pre-teen girls she observed in her youth. She remembers them, remembers their pleasures and their struggles, channels them and serves them with intensely committed soul and physicality. The film's audience is spared little of how violently this haunted performance has wrenched its performer's psyche and body.

Having seen two iterations of Bronx Gothic live (Danspace Project, 2012 and 2014), I can tell you that the film, generously sampling the live performance, only slightly misses the electrifying force of Okpokwasili live. There's nothing quite like being in a close, tent-like enclosure with her as she quakes head to toe, shares sexual secrets, scrapes her bare feet and smacks her bones against a punishing floor.

"Black flesh has deep meaning in this culture," Okpokwasili remarks at one point as she discusses her intentions for Bronx Gothic. All the vivid imagery--the dark and the light, the glistening sweat, the luxurious undulations and seizure-like trembling--serves to underscore this uncomfortable, complicated truth.

As she thinks about how her performance confronts and nearly overwhelms her audience, the artist is also both overwhelmed and intrigued. Recalling her experiences in the role, she asks an imaginary watcher, "Is my Blackness getting on you? Am I getting on you? Can you take on the pain?"

Not for nothing is the genre-spanning Okpokwasili one of our most respected artists, a Bessie-winner to boot. I hope Rossi's portrait of her will be seen widely. I rank Bronx Gothic up there with Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro as another urgent, earthshaking documentary that must be seen and must be discussed.

Showings at 12:30, 2:30, 4:40, 7:00 and 9:10
Wednesday, July 12 through Tuesday, July 25

Q&As with Okpokwasili and Rossi at the 7pm shows
Wednesday, July 12, Friday, July 14 and Saturday, July 15

For information and tickets, click here.

Film Forum
209 West Houston Street (west of Sixth Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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William M. Hoffman, 78

William M. Hoffman, Who Wrote the Pioneering AIDS Play ‘As Is,’ Dies at 78
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, May 2, 2017

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Gloria Naylor, 66

Gloria Naylor, Author Of ‘Women Of Brewster Place,’ Dead At 66
by Claire Fallon, The Huffington Post, October 3, 2016

Ballez: La MaMa Moves presents ballet on the wild side

Khadija Griffith (left) and Deborah Lohse in
Sleeping Beauty & The Beast,
a Ballez world premiere
(photo: Theo Coté)

Ballez is performance, company, class and community, that invites everyone to witness and celebrate the history and performances of lesbian, queer, and transgender people.

Ballez dancers claim our inherent nobility and belonging within, around, and on top of a form that has historically excluded us. 

Ballez celebrates the virtuosity of complexly gendered embodiment, energetic eloquence, queer coding, and the magical adaptability of expression that Ballez dancers have cultivated through their lives as a way to survive and thrive.

--some statements from www.ballez.org

Sleeping Beauty & the Beast--the latest project of Katy Pyle (with Jules Skloot and members of Pyle's Ballez troupe) is big.

How big, you ask?

So big, it requires more than two hours and two--not one--theater at La MaMa to tell its story.

So big, it's really telling multiple stories, mashing up classical ballets and fairy tale archetypes with Lower East Side labor organizing history and with L.E.S. queer culture--resulting in a hot mess that is and isn't.

So big, Pyle needs two dozen versatile, well-trained and coached dancers (most playing multiple roles) and eighteen classical musicians (New York's Queer Urban Orchestra playing straight-up Tchaikovsky for Act 1) plus a DJ JD Samson's house music (Act 2) and even that's not enough.

So big, it Occupies the Ballet Canon; big enough for a look-in from Graham and Loie Fuller; too big for the gender binary; too big to behave.

So big, it can embrace sweetness, humor, revolutionary fervor, sexual heat of diverse and ever-shifting varieties, and the pain of loss.

So big that--well, you know those old timers who regale you with stories about being there when so-and-so made her stunning debut or first danced with Nureyev and knocked their socks off in that difficult role? One day, if you're lucky, you will be that old timer, unable to shut up about how you saw Ballez premiere Sleeping Beauty & The Beast at La MaMa Moves.

That big. Historic. Meaningful. Moving.

Pyle and company get so much joyfully right, starting with the complex precision work of Act 1's opening yarn weaving dance. But I'm going to let you discover the best of Sleeping Beauty & The Beast for yourself, because you're going, right?  You're going.

Sleeping Beauty & the Beast continues tonight and through May 8--Wednesday to Saturday at 7pm; Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa
at Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between Bowery and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Malcolm Low premieres "Speakeasy" at Gibney Dance

Mei Yamanaka (above)
Malcolm Low with Yamanaka (below)
 in Low's Speakeasy
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Malcolm Low’s new work draws upon his experience of growing up gay in a religious black family, imagining a utopian environment where the challenges of confronting race, homophobia, shame, and loss give way to clarity and candor.

--from promotion for Speakeasy, a world premiere by Malcolm Low

...you begin to discover that you are moving and you can’t stop this movement to what looks like the edge of the world. Now what is crucial, and one begins to understand it much, much later, is that if you were this hypothetical artist, if you were in fact the dreamer that everybody says you are, if in fact you were wrong not to settle for the things that you cannot for some mysterious reason settle for, if this were so, the testimony in the eyes of other people would not exist. The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not…

--from James Baldwin's The Artist's Struggle for Integrity

Malcolm Low (of Malcolm Low/Formal Structure) takes on the famously odd theater space at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center in his strange, sprawling Speakeasy.  Clocking in at less than an hour, the piece looks and sounds like one of those vivid, epic dreams splicing radically different environments and plot points that make you wake up and go, Whoa! What??

The dreaminess begins in the way Low shifts the audience's gaze from the conventional front and, for a long stretch, rigidly angles that gaze far to the right into the dimly-lit, mirror-lined area recessed beyond a stand of columns. Dancer Simone Sobers, dressed in glitter short-shorts, grooves to spooky atmosphere and click-clack beats DJ'ed by composer Ben Coleman on his laptop.  She's pumping hips, softly flinging arms to the repetitions. After a while, Low joins her in her private dancehall, throwing out similar moves, giving off a timeless feeling.

The words "nothing special" came to mind, but I don't mean it as an insult. Rather it felt like a familiar, common response to dance music, just ordinary people doing a most-basic social dance and not really caring that they were being watched--one of three ways of movement you'll find in Speakeasy. Likely, it tells one story about Low. And so does the second way of movement, developing a little later in the central part of the theater. This involves Low's spongey, rubbery response to space and other beings in space with notable lack of affectation or arrogance or aggression.

The third, exemplified in Mei Yamanaka and Erick Montes-Chavero's breathtaking duet, brought to mind another unexpected phrase--"anti-togetherness togetherness." I have no idea if these words fit the intent, or who these two people might be to each other. However, individually and as partners, they pack tons of surprise and dynamism. Here's the hotspot of the dream, the place you yearn to revisit, if you can, and mine for meaning.

A speakeasy is where you are when you're not supposed to be there. A place of self-indulgence and pleasure and risk. Do and say what you will while under threat of discovery. Low's establishment at Gibney creates space(s) for everything from voiceover porn narratives to Voice-of-God declarations from James Baldwin. (Baldwin. Now there's some "clarity and candor" for ya). Resounding with Coleman's bold textures, Low's speakeasy affords compartmentalized spaces and elements that don't stay compartmentalized; they collide, wash over, overlap even as you think, Is this supposed to be happening? His artist's head roils with imagery, characters, forbidden, inflammatory words, ideas, preoccupations, histories, mysteries and selves.

Text: James Salter
Video: Onome Ekeh
Lighting: Asami Morita

Speakeasy continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Decolonizing mind, language, history

Clockwise from left:
Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi (photo: Ben Carver),
Tommy Pico (photo: Tommy Pico),
Mette LouLou von Kohl (photo: Laura Bluher)

Hosted by artist-activist Dan Fishback, DECOLONIALLY QUEER drew quite a crowd to a small studio--legal capacity: 78, and things were kept legal, more or less--at NYU's Performance Studies department. The program--a collaboration of The Helix Queer Performance Network, Queer Union-NYU and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics--featured three queer artists of indigenous heritage and offered a bracing corrective to the week's traditional Columbus Day commemoration. In fact, if performers Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Tommy Pico and Mette LouLou von Kohl could agree on an anthem for Decolonially Queer, it might well be Fuck Columbus and The Ship He Rode Over In, a sentiment the evening made abundantly clear.

Each artist rallied the strength of resistance and self-definition. Kumeyaay poet Pico, self-described "weirdo Indian faggot" living in Brooklyn--opened with wry defiance of typical expectations that he'd deliver a poem about nature--like "anemones and shit," "fodder for the Noble Savage narrative" before dazzling us with cracked wit and torrential delivery. Nature emerged in Pico's own time, on his own terms, giving us images of hills with "backs that love being stroked by our eyes" and the sky as the sole "stellar inheritance" shared by himself and his ancestors.

Lady Dane--accomplished singer, dancer, writer and ritualist--declared herself "the mother of a verbal revolution" powered by the complex experience of being a trans woman at the intersection of African, Cuban and indigenous American cultures. "Growing up, I was told by my elders, 'You have to read people who look like you.'" Stripping off her high-heeled sandals--"I'm decolonizing my feet, bitches!"--she wove a partly-sung incantation designed to shake listeners awake. Later, in the talkback moderated by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio of the Hemispheric Institute, Lady Dane spoke of her influences--outspoken singers like Nina Simone and Abby Lincoln, formal gestures recorded in Egypt's ancient hieroglyphs, rich ancestral practices disrupted by colonization and now reclaimed. In her work, she confronts English, crafting ways to turn that language into a protective and healing force.

Von Kohl's performance incorporated dance, photography, video, audio and voice in a poetic and moving evocation of her Palestine at a time before Israeli occupation. With Lebanese/Palestinian (mother) and Danish (father) ancestry, she speaks only English and French; we hear speaking French as she portrays her cigarette-smoking grandmother. Unlike her grandmother, though, von Kohl speaks no Arabic, and that disconnection pains her.

In silence, she crushes an orange she had carefully, tenaciously grasped between her jaws--juice, pulp and seeds falling at her feet. "To remember is to resist," she later tells us. With that precious orange, she calls attention to the richness of the land, the once-earthy wealth of Palestine before Israeli occupation, when her parents were orange farmers. "This is not about nostalgia," she says. "This is about memory as a weapon, as noise for the silenced."

All three artists grapple with the limitations and creative possibilities of language. For queer artists of color, indeed, this struggle has high stakes, meaning the difference between erasure and empowered presence. Pico remarks that he had to "flush all the ideas I had about poetry" and, instead, focus on "how do I sound?" Lady Dane studies, she says, "who I was before colonization; that's at the heart of everything I do."

The inspired and inspiring DECOLONIALLY QUEER ran for one night only, but you can keep up on Helix Queer Performance Network's future activities by clicking here.

BIOS:

LADY DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI

“The Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa” is an African, Cuban and Indigenous American performance artist, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, Author (Yemaya’s Daughters, Brew, Baltimore: A Love Letter), playwright, healer, cohost of Inside Out Radio Show, a member of Trans Women of Color Collective Leadership Team, a volunteer at Casa Ruby, and a founding member of interdisciplinary theater company Force/Collision. She began producing her own cabarets at the age of seventeen. In 2013 she became the first trans woman of color published author of a work of fiction in DC. She has also written the book and lyrics to Roaring The Musical.

TOMMY PICO

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is the author of absentMINDR (VERBALVISUAL, 2014)—the first chapbook APP published for iOS mobile/tablet devices—was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and [PANK]. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and with Morgan Parker co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) @heyteebs

METTE LOULOU VON KOHL

Mette Loulou von Kohl was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. Currently based in New York City, Mette Loulou is a mixed-race queer femme, born to a Lebanese/Palestinian mother and Danish father. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco and Denmark. She is fascinated by the intersection between her personal identities as a jumping off point to reveal, dismantle and rebuild realities and dreams. Mette Loulou weaves movement, words, and her love for the unexpected into the exploration of her embodied histories. Mette Loulou is a graduate of EMERGENYC- the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program and participant of EmergeLAB and Needing IT ALL at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She is the co-founder of the performance collective A Beautiful Desperation and has performed both nationally and internationally in Canada and across Europe.

THE HELIX QUEER PERFORMANCE NETWORK

The Helix Queer Performance Network is a collaboration between La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, seeking to nurture emerging queer performers, empower diverse queer communities, and celebrate the legacy and lineage of queer performance in New York City. Through educational initiatives, innovative stage productions and challenging public conversations that prioritize justice across age, race, class and gender, Helix aims to foster an inter-generational, multi-racial, multi-gender performance community where artists can document a broad spectrum of queer experience in the context of a rich artistic history.

Leslie Lohman Museum celebrates what others have censored

Displaying Three Decades of LGBTQ Art Censored by Museums
by Allison Meier, Hyperallergic, January 19, 2015

Thanks so much, Maria Bauman!

Maria Bauman
(photo: Lucilene Barbosa)

Last evening, dancer and community organizer Maria Bauman led a rousing community movement workshop ("Amplification and Scale"), an event of the Community Action Hub at Gibney Dance Center. Alas, the ninety minutes flew by, certainly not time enough to deeply explore Bauman's resourceful tools for engaging diverse communities around racism and other social justice issues. However, a roomful of people, who either did or did not identify as professional dancers, got completely caught up in the joy of our bodies' expressiveness, interacting with one another in an atmosphere of trust, permission and play. Wouldn't it be cool for Bauman to come back and launch an ongoing group that could bond and expand on this promising beginning?

Interested in future Community Action Hub workshops? Keep posted on all events at Gibney Dance Center here.

Lois Weaver's Tammy WhyNot brings fun for all ages

Lois Weaver as Tammy WhyNot with three of her
"sexy senior divas," the WhyNets, singing backup
(photo: Jonathan Slaff)

Lois Weaver brings fun for all ages in What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and Having Sex: The Concert Tour, (November 6-23 at La MaMa). The veteran, beloved performance artist from Split Britches becomes twangy alter-ego Tammy WhyNot--part-time country-western singer, part-time researcher in senior centers from Zagreb to Chelsea. (Tammy even landed in the place where I take my yoga and Zumba classes, recruiting a few of her cast members, but I missed my chance!) Her topic of deep study (aka, "intense porch-sitting")? Sex in the golden years.

The marvelous WhyNets
dance choreography by Stormy Brandenberger.
Foreground, left to right: Carmen Estrada, Jorge Escalera and Dora Chu
(photo: Jonathan Slaff)

Weaver with Peggy Shaw
(photo: Jonathan Slaff)

The hour-long variety show is a charmer--a little sugar, a little spice. Weaver doesn't so much break the theatrical fourth wall as completely ignore it, with her disarmed audience, spanning many decades in age, contributing nearly as much fresh hilarity to the content as she and co-writer/Head of Security Peggy Shaw has.

Of Tammy's songs, The Time I've Wasted, a sad tale of KMart shopping "to fill the shopping cart I call my heart" might be my favorite, but it's hard to choose. But the greatest thing about Tammy is her generous heart and her welcome to a stageful of colorful seniors--like dancers Jorge Escalera and Carmen Estrada who will wow you with their spirit and talent.

There's no resisting Tammy. Let yourself go! You have until November 23 to get your tickets--and your sexy on--right here.

La MaMa
First Floor Theatre
74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

No shame in their game: Mosley troupe readies premiere of "CAKE"

Autumn Scoggan, Candace Thompson and Kimberly Mhoon in
The Window Sex Project film, choreographed by Sydnie L. Mosley
(photo: Keevan Girdharry)
This month, Mosley's troupe will premiere CAKE.

Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, a Harlem-based troupe noted for its focus on women's activism through the arts, presents the world premiere of CAKE as guests of The Victory Dance Project on Sunday, November 9, 2pm, at Actors Fund Art Center. In Mosley's words,

CAKE questions the definition of respectability, and considers how doing away with shame around the female body can enliven those bodies to create new, free realities.

Get tickets here.

Actors Fund Art Center
160 Schermerhorn, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

for Jaamil/Jeremiah....

Reflecting on

Perspectives on Black Male Revisited:

Black Masculinity, Illegibility, Materiality, Constructs, Creative Space

& Imaginative Experience

curated by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

last evening at 

Gibney Dance Center's

Sorry I Missed Your Show

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
producer, curator, poet and performance artist
(bottom photo courtesy of Kelly Strayhorn Theater)

Brother of Names and Spirits, I am
not sorry.
I did not miss your show.
I saw your show.
And I see your show.

And I see their show.
Black flesh pressed against concrete.
Holes, from arm to eye, inked black
on this white chart, entry points and exits.

They see animals, their dumb property, commodities.
Let us merge with earth, strong and vulnerable, and
with animals, raising sacred animal powers in images
of magickal readjustment.

And, yes: your Geranium Essential.
What place does healing oil have
in a National Conversation On Race?
It has the place of pleasure.

Pleasure exists in truth, banner flowing
over neighborhoods and continents.
Hold it not tightly.

Please
let it take breeze, currents, sun.
It is pleasure, after all. Or...what is it?
It is Trickster, indefinable
Trickster
of Names Shapes Faces
with amplitude, yes, even enough
for "wading, wading."

You ask us to prophesy
"an infinite space
of limitless creativity,
empowerment,
safety,
and
evolution."

This needs safe space for a sister's tears
--and yours. Let our bodies cry.

Let this conversation open when
and where we enter:

Where do we find pleasure? And where,
a shout for joy?

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

*****

Here, for your consideration, are three questions offered by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko during last evening's Sorry I Missed Your Show:

How do we redirect/reimagine sources of trauma as sources of pleasure, healing, freedom and modes of creative thought and/or experience?

What is your relationship to Blackness in terms of identity, representation, and gender politics, and in what ways are you considering this position into the future?

How do we institute new pathways of thinking where illegible and/or complex queer and black bodies do not become continual platforms of colonized rage.

Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality?

Are The Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality?

Religion and the Burdens of Black Sexual Politics

A Conference

co-sponsored by

Barnard Center for Research on Women

and 

Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University

Thursday-Friday, October 23-24

We are living through a moment of tremendous change at the intersection of race, religion, and sexuality.This conference will bring together scholars, activists, and religious leaders to unearth and engage with the often-unstated claims about the African Diaspora in relation to gender and sexuality, exploring a range of historical and contemporary phenomena in both scholarship and lived experience.

Speakers include Anthea Butler, Kenyon Farrow, Darnell Moore, Alondra Nelson, Emilie Townes and more.

For complete information and registration, click here.

Paul Mazursky, 84

Paul Mazursky, Director Who Captured a Changing America, Dies at 84
by Robert D. McFadden, The New York Times, July 1, 2014

We twerk to resist!

source

Creatively angry: J Dellecave at HERE

Scenes from J Dellacave's Angry Women REvisited
(photos by Benjamin Lundberg)

In Angry Women REvisted, J Dellecave (director/sound designer) and a host of collaborator/performers create a fantasia from an illustrious source text, Angry Women, Andrea Juno's 1991 book of interviews with Diamanda Galás, Holly Hughes, Annie Sprinkle, Lydia Lunch and twelve other radical women performance artists.

The theater piece, now at HERE Arts Center through Sunday evening, seems deliberate and idealistic in its nostalgic, unsophisticated roughness--picking up tools and trying out a palette of styles out of the past. It can feel draggy, longer than its 70-minute running time, but it's a pleasure whenever a coherent, communal energy radiates from it, mainly through an effective and affecting use of music (Röyksopp's catchy, if eerie, "What Else Is There?" animating each performer in increasingly intense, individual ways while uniting them all across a range of cultures and genders) and a poetic imagery of movement (a solemn procession of people, some of whom turn out of line like pages in a volume; a Shiva-like stack of dancers with snaking arms and wine tumblers). If nothing else, I'm motivated to pick up the book. Reason for anger remains; reason for questioning what community is, who it includes or empowers, excludes and silences, and how it does or does not move forward remains, too.

With performers Avi-Rose, Angela Beallor, Joshua Bastian Cole, Kate Conroy, Gaby Cryan, lizxnn disaster, Roo Khan, daniel rosza lang/levitsky, Sloan Lesbowitz, zavé martohardjono, niknaz, Azure D. Osborne-Lee, Jenny Romaine, Zachary Wager Scholl and Alma Sheppard-Matsuo

Performances at 7pm through Sunday with an additional 2pm matinee on Saturday

For ticket information, click here.

HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan
(entrance on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street)
(map/directions)