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Event
A Queer Time and Place
A Queer Time and Place will showcase original work by choreographers Maggie Cee, Grant Jacoby, and J Michael Winward. The three artists draw inspiration from sources including pop culture, history, and queer theory. Audiences will be moved, provoked and entertained by the unique blend of contemporary and modern dance, physical theater, and original monologues. On June 2, there will be a guest performance by power//PLAY, the collaborative partnership of Claire Johannes and Jordan Jamil Ahmed. With a variety of perspectives represented, A Queer Time and Place celebrates the theater as a space of inclusion. The Dance Complex will provide a fitting venue: as the mission statement reads from its window at 536 Mass Ave, We welcome you whatever the dance you bring...There are no others here.
About the Dances
"Starting from Femme" by Maggie Cee
"Starting from Femme" is Maggie Cee's (founder and artistic director of The Femme Show) solo dance theatre piece exploring 1940s butch-femme bar culture from a femme point of view. Butch/femme or fem bar culture was an important precursor to the gay liberation movement that followed. By being visibly queer and taking up public space, femmes and butches alike created space for same-sex loving women to find and support one another in the face of virulent homophobia from the outside world. Starting From Femme imagines and explores the queer past and passions between people who loved, fought, and created space to be themselves out of sheer necessity and determination. (Photo by The Femme Show)
"Wyoming" by Grant Jacoby
"Wyoming" is a movement study exploring queer phenomenological theories of orientation and disorientation within a particular designated time and space. Inspired by the writings of queer theorist Sarah Ahmed as well as the death of Matthew Shepard, Wyoming deconstructs ideas of comfort, home, and displacement. Using personal anecdotes, restructuring of environment, and unconventional sound design, "Wyoming" poses questions such as: what exactly characterizes a home? Is it a physical structure, a specific location, a personal connection/relationship, or even just an overarching notion? How does an individual (or individuals) change when they are removed from this safe space? How do we navigate a foreign space while constantly being haunted by the familiar? Might we find solace by actually turning away from sources we know to forge our own path? (Photo by Rourou Ye)
"You Heard the Man" by J Michael Winward
"You Heard the Man" is a solo dance / theater piece, originally created for the New Faces, New Dances festival in Salzburg, 2008. Equal parts contemporary dance and physical theater, You Heard the Man deals with issues of insecurity, stage fright, masculinity, femininity, proverbially spilled milk, authentically spilled water, stage presence, and also stage absence. Inspired by the work (and / or play) of Susan Rethorst, Gertrude Stein, Ed Wood, Bela Lugosi, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Eva Peron, Arthur Miller, Willy Loman, Chuck Jones, and Daffy Duck, You Heard the Man was performed one night and one night only back in 2008, and for no singular reason it has not been performed since. Its like a time capsule, to be unearthed this June 2nd, and then again on 3rd. (Photo of work by Peter DiMuro/Public Displays of Motion, taken by Kayana Szymczak)
Guest Artists
"Closet Champions" by power//PLAY
Closet Champions is a collaborative dance theater performance exploring societal expectations of gender in the framework of a wrestling match. The title, Closet Champions, comes from WWE terminology, and refers to a titleholder who cheats to win, and when forced to wrestle good opponents, deliberately causes his or herself to be disqualified to retain the title. Claire and Jordan pair this theme with the coming out of the closet rite of passage in queer culture and ask if, as queer people, they need to cheat to win in a political climate where they are immediately at a disadvantage. The iconography of the wrestling ring serves the work by providing a traditionally heteronormative and testosterone-fueled environment--an environment in direct contrast to the expression of Claire and Jordan's identities.The work invites audiences into a satirical world founded on the most extreme of their sexual and gender-related insecurities and in doing so poses important questions about how societal expectations warp their self-perception as queer-identified individuals. Through this performance they want to draw attention to the way we navigate, celebrate, and denigrate identity in contemporary society.
Performers: Claire Johannes, Jordan Jamil Ahmed, Jessica Smith
Pampi is founder of In Divine Company, a Contemporary Temple Dance collective dedicated to liberation work. www.indivinecompany.org + instagram @thirdeyefell. They are on a mission to conquer lust myths. They embody how racialized and Caste-d adolescent sexual fantasies, when conflated with childhood bullying, can blur the lines between fantasy and reality when negotiating consent in adult bodies. How the body is church and that church has a hot box that is underestimated as a ruse of patriarchy's egregious violent policing and silencing of othered bodies.
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LocationJulie Ince Theatre at The Dance Complex (View)
536 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
United States
Categories
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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